Digest: Jay Cross' - Natural Learning

Jay Cross' - Natural Learning - Finnish eLearning RoundTable - Informal Learning - December 2005 InternetTime.com

http://internettime.breezecentral.com/kari (accessed: 24/Sept/2006)

Jay Cross starts out his presentation with the example of money losing its unitary value over time. What a dollar would buy yesterday is not what it will buy today. He compares that inversely to the value of time. What a minute could hold years ago is much less than what a minute can hold today which demonstrates aspects of the theory of the acceleration of time. In accordance with this theory we can deduce that although the 21^st century will hold 100 years, it will in fact hold 20,000 years worth of experience. This reality creates the need for people to adapt and be enabled to participate successfully in life and work and in groups that matter to them– in other words, enable people to learn. Learning can take two forms. One is formal learning characterized, for example, by classes, grades and curriculums. The other is informal learning characterized, among other things, by discovery, trial-and-error, asking, storytelling, networking, coaching and observing. This second form is Natural Learning. In the lifecycle of the typical learner we evolve progressively to less and less formal, more natural ways of acquiring knowledge. The productivity of the acquisition of knowledge can be hundreds of times more in one individual than another. It’s a logical conclusion that, in today’s scenario of knowledge as a product, to allow for the stages in learning styles and the possibility of such a wide difference in knowledge worker productivity, our systems need to be flexible. The Read/Write Web provides such systems through wikis, blogs, rss, and other continually evolving media. In recent years, this web has been used to resolve problems that traditional infrastructures could not. Additional tools for the facilitation of learning and communication are the increased use of visuals as well as networks rather than more traditional hieratic structures. Visuals, often neglected in traditional textual communication, are powerful facilitators. Networks, with their natural subversion of hierarchy and exponential growth, create lighter, more agile, enabling organizations. Cross closes with the notion that learning structures are like setting up a garden. “It’s setting up conditions where things can grow.”

After listening to the presentation, the point that most impressed me was the analogy of the valorization of time units relating it to the de-valorization of money units. It was a clear well laid out explanation and lead smoothly to the description of and call for new learning conceptions and administrative structures to which the read/write web is well adapted.