Learning in the 21st Century

This month I was privileged to participate in the Aspen Ideas Festival in Aspen, Colo., a leading forum for public dialogue in our country. Among this year's speakers were President Bill Clinton, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, New York Times columnist and author Thomas Friedman, Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, JP Morgan Chase & Company CEO Jamie Dimon, and former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Oconnor, among more than 250 other experts and opinion leaders.

If you're not familiar with the Ideas Festival, I encourage you to check out the event Web site, where video of the many panel discussions will soon be posted. The Ideas Festival is a gathering that defies easy description. Briefly, though, it is one of the few places where members of the public can exchange ideas with Nobel laureates, Pulitzer Prize winners, MacArthur Foundation "Genius Grant" recipients and myriad other luminaries in considering the most pressing issues of our time.

As an employee of one of the Aspen Institute's policy programs, my role at the Ideas Festival prevented me from taking part in many of the sessions that I wanted to attend, but I managed to make it to a couple sessions in the program track called "The 'Net Generation," which is of great interest to me.

Among the panels I enjoyed was "Learning in the 21st Century," which centered on how youngsters prefer to learn today and already learn, in many instances — and how very different those learning styles are from twentieth century approaches.

Connie Yowell, director of education at the MacArthur Foundation program on human and community development, moderated the panel. She began by noting that the organization's research has shown that young people are changing the way they learn in part as a result of digital media. "It's not really about technology, but about the social and cultural practices of young people," Yowell said. "Learning is happening anywhere at any time."

We have arrived at a juncture that requires us to rethink the very paradigms we use to characterize learning, Yowell said, adding that we soon will need to develop a new field.

Following Yowell's introductory remarks, the first panelist to speak was Howard Gardner, Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at Harvard University, who is best known for his theory of "multiple intelligences." He opened by saying that he felt digital media held the potential to change the way people percieved time, space, objects and the self. Not so long ago, he observed, a person would write a letter to a friend or colleague and could expect a response in maybe a week or two. "Now, we're in touch with people everywhere, all of the time," he said.

Research focusing on new media is emerging as several distinct areas of specialization, according to Gardner. They include the following:

• The sense of identity
• Issues of privacy
• Issues of ownership, involving copyright and intellectual property, which the courts are tackling
• Trust and credibility (and how to achieve it), and
• Community (how to define it, what it means to participate, and how communities can be influenced or mobilized, such as for advocacy)

Panelist Danah Boyd, a fellow at the Harvard Law School Center for Internet and Society, noted that up until very recently IT was recognized as providing two major functions: information access (think search engines) and communication (email).

"These functions used to be separate," she said. "Now they're interconnected, and they're getting interconnected more and more."

Growing numbers of children are not only going online but also using tools such as social networks, Boyd added. As a consequence, the process of learning to interact with one another — once primarily the province of the playground — increasingly is occurring when youngsters are engaged online.

Facilitated by digital media, youth are building communities of practice around their interests. They are taking on all manner of projects simply because they enjoy them and yet they are learning a great deal in the process, Boyd said. Often they are not aware that they are learning.

As an example, Boyd related the story of some 200 Chinese youth who set out to see how quickly they could translate Book Six of Harry Potter. In a terrific example of what is known as "cloud computing," the Chinese teenagers used a Wiki to translate the entire book from English to Chinese in less than two days following the work's official release in the United States. This exercise did little to please the Chinese copyright holders, but it nevertheless was a meaningful lesson in collaborative dynamics and the power of digital media.

The panel discussion made clear that new media would be a driving force in education. Boyd ended her remarks by challenging the audience to consider how schools could use digital media to encourage students to pursue things that truly interest them.

"Young people are pushing at the edges," Boyd said. "They are learning to do things that adults don't know how to do."

Even so, youth will always need adult guidance, Boyd added. So we must value the role of adult co-participation.