Agile Learning

By Erica Tesla

I went down to UNO this morning to get what is not the first (nor the last, I'm sure) form I'll have to fill out to get myself and my husband back on the Path of Higher Education. The paperwork required simply to gain permission to learn is astounding.

Now, I've heard it said that college isn't actually about learning at all--it's all about your threshold for dealing with bull and bureacracy. If that's true, so long as your tolerance for those things increases during your time in college, you have learned something.

But an increased tolerance for bureaucracy, though it may be a goal now, will probably not be an advantage in the future.

The heart of the singularity, in my understanding, is the point at which nothing stands still. Memes burn in the fire of change and those who are able move on; that's what it's about. The singularity is the point at which agility surpasses its status as an advantage and becomes a survival skill, a necessity. In a future that moves at the speed of light, who will have time for all of this paperwork?

What scares me about the current higher education process is actually the length of commitment, and the proactive nature of the learning process employed. Deciding to go to college typically means devoting yourself for at least four years to a field that more narrowly defines your knowledge base and skill set, while admittedly (hopefully) deepening both.

But the model in which specialization occurs proactively isn't of much use if you have no idea what you'll need to know to enjoy a productive life, or even to survive, tomorrow.

I think that the solution is a more agile form of learning. The most agile form of learning occurs when a person first attains a broad base of widely applicable knowledge and the skills with which to both attain new knowledge and to make the best use of that which they already have. After that initial learning--largely "learning how to learn"--they can take an adaptive, reactive approach to specialized knowledges and tasks. This is even more agile when paired with hands-on-experience--a person can be productive in the current learning field while learning about it.

I think that college, along with the rest of the current educational model, is neither the most efficient way to learn, nor the best--at best, for now, it may be a good route to a higher paycheck. But is that enough? Can the very slow process of learning through the current educational model survive a world that's speeding up?

Posted by at March 23, 2004 11:56 AM | TrackBack