Five principles for new learning

I am living the founder's curse. That desperate wish that people will see the world my way, when they clearly don't! Each day is a cycle from hope to despair to hoping again! Endless quests to convert the unbeliever, and yet a scramble to cling onto those who I took for granted - again and again! There is no standing still, no summit to conquer - only the spirit to persevere! And, despite this grim description, this journey is as much fun as climbing Mount Everest, minus the promise of personal glory.

It does not help that I am in an unsexy industry - Higher Ed! How I wish I could call myself some sort of Technology entrepreneur, with an endless supply of buzzwords. Instead, I have to do with rather boring and incomprehensible words such as 'learning' and 'assessment'. These are words everyone seems to understand their own way, and no one wants to understand more. Particularly in the world of spreadsheets and elevator speeches, these are details best ignored.

Yet, I persist - primarily as I have no choice. Education, for me, is lived in its details, one person at a time. Enlightenment is not a scale business. Personal transformation is personal; no pied-piper formula exists for making it happen en masse. Here is the battle against the system: How I wish I took the blue pill and did not seek to understand? But once condemned to the red pill , there is no going back: A new system of education is needed!

Hence we are building one based on five principles. These are not new principles though. Educators sought to follow these across generations. What has changed now is that with technology and the breakdown of the industrial order, these have become, at the same time, more accessible and yet more difficult to follow.

These principles stand for something like the fire Prometheus stole: Always available to a few, but suddenly, with mass technology, within the reach of everyone! At the same time, technology can hide as much as it empowers, and it mostly hides, misleads and disempowers when it comes to the masses. The fire analogy is apt again: What made the human civilisation is not the discovery of fire, a naturally occuring phenomenon, but rather when someone figured out how to make it work for human ends.

Here, then, are the five principles of new learning:

First, context before content. We are building a syllabus of problems to solve and questions to ask, rather than of textbooks and reading lists.

Second, the self-responsible learner. We are creating enabling environments for learners to be masters of themselves, instead of timetables and seating arrangements to control and subordinate them.

Third, structured chaos. We are introducing chaos as the driver of learning, but within a structure - with norms and rules for everyone to follow - that promote shared understanding and common goals.

Fourth, knowledge is out there. We accept that the knowledge is not in the person of a Guru, or inside a textbook, or even in the head of a skilled practitioner, but out there, in performance of tasks, casual chatter, sharing of experiences and even in seeking to connect.

Fifth, and finally, learning is about making ideas explicit. We know that everyone knows more than they can tell and the process of learning, which never really ends, is about making explicit the million tacit things that we do everyday.

These principles are driving our quest of a learning system that will help build an open future-proof curriculum, bring experience into education, enable reliable assessment of performance-as-learning and make learners for life. I am painfully aware that these are goals larger than what I can hope to achieve in my own lifetime, and this is why I have fully embraced 'I am because we are' - the idea of collective competence over individual heroics.