"Minds on Fire" Critical Thinking Response Assignment - Week Four

Minds on Fire Response

John Seely Brown and Richard P. Adler, in the article, “Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0,” discuss the evolution of education as a result of “massive improvements in transportation and communication” (2008, p. 17).

“Flat World” Implications

According to Brown and Adler, the educational implications of Thomas Friedman’s “flat world” are:

 

 Every place has the potential to become globally connected and competitive 

• The places that are globally connected are the ones with a well-educated workforce with skills that are in demand 
• To remain competitive, that workforce must also be learning and creating new ideas and skills (2008, p. 17-18)

Initiatives

 

There have been efforts introduced to deal with this demand for continuous and evolving education. Three of these efforts are the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement, MIT’s Open Courseware (OCW) initiative, and the Terra Incognita virtual project based in Queensland. A present-day implication of these efforts is, according to Brown and Adler, a new “culture of sharing, one in which content is freely contributed and distributed with few restrictions or costs (2008, p. 18). An impact we will be seeing developed fully in the future is the focus on social learning. Richard J. Light (2001) found that “students who studied in groups, even only once a week, were more engaged in their studies, were better prepared for class and learned significantly more than students who worked on their own” (as cited in Brown & Adler, 2008, p. 18). This demonstrates a change in focus from knowledge transfer (the Cartesian view) to the “learning activities and human interactions around which that content is situated” (Brown & Adler, 2008, p. 18). Three of the benefits of group learning are: 

• Clarifying meaning by asking questions
• Receiving the information by auditory means through discussion
• Learning by teaching others (Brown & Adler, 2008, p. 18)

Professional Learning Communities

 

Brown and Adler state correctly that professional learning communities will be the next major frontier in education. It has already begun. Through the Internet, professionals have begun interacting with students in countless ways from an author’s commenting on a student blog about his/her book (see “Trainer-Expert Collaboration” in Shank, 2007, p, 150) to the “collaborative projects between students and expert astronomers” in the Faulkes Telescope Project (Brown & Adler, 2008, p. 24).

 

Learning 2.0

 

The Internet has changed the way students learn. There is so much course material available online that a student can “find and join niche communities where they can benefit from the opportunities for distributed cognitive apprenticeship” (Brown & Adler, 2008, p. 28). Instead of just learning “deep knowledge,” students can join a learning community and “participate in the practice of a field through productive inquiry and peer-based learning “(Brown & Adler, 2008, p. 28). As Brown & Adler say, when differentiating this “learning to be” from simply “learning about,” these (learning) “communities are harbingers of the emergence of a new form of technology-enhanced learning - Learning 2.0 - which goes beyond providing free access to traditional course materials and educational tools and creates a participatory architecture for supporting communities of learners (2008, p. 28).

 

Equality Issue

 

It is to be hoped that someday the freedoms we cherish in this country will be common to all citizens of the planet. Access to high-speed Internet (and thereby all available knowledge) may very well become one of the essential freedoms assigned to every human being. A student without convenient, free access to a computer and the Internet is at a tremendous disadvantage. Such a student is effectively shut out of Learning 2.0. In the footnotes to the article, “Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0,” Brown and Adler state:

 

R. Natarajan, the former director of the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras, recently noted that “the half-life of knowledge” in many technical areas is now less than four years. If this is true, then 50 percent of what students learn as undergraduates will be obsolete by the time they graduate and begin seeking employment (Adler, 2007, n.p. as cited in Brown & Adler, 2008, p. 32).

 

Not only will that student be left behind in current education, but that adult will also be unprepared for the lifelong learning that will be the model of the future.

 

Conclusion

 

It is not possible to build the major university each week that Sir John Daniel mentioned in 1996 (Brown & Adler, 2008, p. 17). It is, however, quite possible that the 4-year undergraduate institutions that we see today will no longer exist in the future. With knowledge changing constantly, it would be more likely that we will instead see credentials of acquired competence, which will be as fluid as the subject matter itself.

 

References

 

Brown, J.S. & Adler, R.P. (2008). Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0. EDUCAUSE, January/February.

 

Shank, P. (Ed). (2007). The Online Learning Idea Book: 95 Proven Ways to Enhance Technology-Based and Blended Learning. San Francisco: Wiley & Sons.