Our Culture of Learning

This week’s Thomas and Brown reading from A New Culture of Learning is super relevant for me! I have been having conversations within my collective about the changes happening in learning and our understanding of information, legitimacy, and truth.
I have two brilliant friends one who went through the ranks of school and earned a masters degree and another who did not attend any formal post-secondary education. These two friends both have an insatiable thirst for knowledge and learning. They both dabble in engineering and “making” and can create and maintain the most complicated and complex systems I have ever encountered. We have recently been engaging in a debate over the validity of a degree and formal education. As you can imagine, both friends have unique learning styles and experiences, but in practice they are both skilled and highly knowledgeable. I think this is a perfect example of how we are reconciling the status quo of the education system and the thrust forward in technology and the ‘new culture of learning’. Both use the internet and self-driven learning to progress forward, and are building off of collective knowledge that they both reference and contribute to, and it is all self-motivated.
I can say I enthusiastically participate in the same sort of self-driven learning. I can access information and interactions based on my personal preferences, which I think has been extraordinarily beneficial to me, but has also sparked a few concerns. I think there needs to be some form of structure, to mitigate misinformation and promote safety. For example, I work with power tools and large machines and in one of the forums I participate in, someone suggested using a hole-saw drill and lathe simultaneously; while this is very innovative and a creative solution to a problem, it is also extremely dangerous! I tried it on cork, but not after doing some more research, consulting experts and adapting the method to reduce the potential for injury. I also used Youtube videos to better understand the tools I would be employing and methods for working with the materials, but most of the information I encounter online is tempered by talking it over with a professor or expert who has experience with the tools and materials firsthand. I cross-reference the internet with real life regularly because I think hybridizing the two makes the most sense to me.
When I think about the new culture of learning I think it is a double-edged sword; we have the potential to try new things and push forward in more meaningful ways but we also have the potential for really damaging and harmful things like the rise of extremist groups and bigotry, or misinformation online. I think that while the new culture of learning is incredibly efficient and inspiring and empowering, I think there has to be a balance with some form of structure, and some tie back to real life and real people.