MariaD’s blog

What is the purpose of learning?
Model 1: learn for the future. Learn to move away from where you are now. Learn for a bigger, better, different future job. Learn to graduate and to become something else.
Model 2: learn for the now. Learn to grow at your present place and in your present role. Learn to increase quality and competence at your current tasks.

If we rely on learning for the future too much, there is a risk to de-motivate the present learning tasks and to push learners to slack, and to fake it. After all, the ultimate goal is to leave for some greener pastures, implying the current ones aren’t good enough and thus don’t deserve high quality work. In its pure form, learning for the future is completely removed from any current contributions, where taking a class in a subject definitely means you are not working on the subject. If you take a class in math, you are very unlikely to be working as a mathematician. Learning becomes an economic externality, removed from any current activities of communities. Such imbalance is especially dangerous for children, who are yet to find their roles in communities.

The original quote:

“The Confucian concept, which the West shares, assumes that the purpose of learning is to qualify oneself for a new, different, and bigger job… within a certain period of time the student reaches a plateau of proficiency, where he then stays forever. The Japanese concept may be called the ‘Zen approach.” The purpose of learning is self-improvement. It qualifies a man to do his present task with continually wider vision, continually increasing competence, and continually rising demands on himself.”

~*~*~*~*~*
This quote came to me via… Well, tracing the net is a fun game in itself, so here are some links that formed it, in case you want to connect to the people involved.

• “The starfish and the spider” book by Brafman and Beckstrom - they look nice, with such open faces, in the matching suits from eBay, the purchase they used as an example for the book.
  
• The book was recommended by the good people of a local learning group “Voyages” - this is the diagram of the group’s principles:
  
• Brafman and Beckstrom, in turn, quoted the idea from the book “The frontiers of management: Where tomorrow’s decisions are being shaped today” by Peter Drucker. He died in 2005, so instead of his own web home, here is the page on Wikipedia for connecting to people interested in his works. Here is Drucker’s photo, found on the Quotable Quotes blog created by Rob Millard:
  
• I was motivated to read all the way to Chapter 8 containing the idea not just by good writing, but also because I am helping Marilyn Shannon build metaphors for her projects, and “The starfish and the spider” has good metaphors. In terms of the book metaphors, Marilyn is definitely a strong catalyst for networks. Here is Marilyn’s photo, from her Cary, NC MeetUp “Coffee and Contacts”:
  
• This entry is the first in the category “The Now.” I created the category about a week ago, but today I can actually formulate what “The Now” means in terms of learning. I find it both touching and amusing, in the “If you build it, they will come” sense. All these people, and social objects they created (books, blogs, wikis, pictures) “came” this week to help me figure out an idea. Thank you, people.

The question comes up regularly, so here is an answer. I wrote it as a comment in the Learning is Messy blog.

Biggest bento ever by brenda, Flickr, under the Creative Commons license. Follow the link for detailed notes on each part of the picture.

This Saturday, my family was a part of a homeschool fair for a local homeschooling network. Families put together displays of what they did during the last year or so. Reading your post and thinking about this recent event that brought together a loose network of a couple of hundreds friends of, and families of friends, I was reminded of the question people ask regularly, on why we don’t use schools for our child’s education. My usual response is that schools don’t fit our (life)style, but it’s too broad. In particular, though, this Saturday I saw displays of how families help their kids pursue strong interests and develop new ones, with the general basic education being a background to what each person is about.

To give one example, my girl is very interested in a Japanese culinary tradition of Bento: highly stylized lunches in cutesy boxes. Bento became a strong node in her network of topics. The network includes cooking in general, with the science as it applies to cooking, and traditions of different nations as they are expressed in cooking. Also drawing and art in general, history of art, and Japanese styles such as manga and anime in particular. And then there are more peripheral, but related topics, people and social objects in that network, such as our Japanese friends, design and fashion, sewing, roleplaying, writing, ninjutsu, web design, Flash programming and so on. My husband, and I, and our friends and extended family support this networked learning of our daughter in various ways: helping with an anime club organized by a friend, spending time showing her the ropes of the web design for the site she is making, installing Flash on her computer, finding good art studio and driving her to two hours of classes there every week for four years, helping her find anime on youtube and manga from online booksellers, supplying stuff from Rosetta Stone Japanese disks to chopsticks and sushi-grade fish.

It is very easy to find people and resources for this particular network of interests, because most of them are now fads among young people in the USA. I daresay if I formulated this as a unit study for a class, and offered it at any school as an elective, it would be quite popular. The problem is that “a unit study for a class” is not a network - it is a unit of an organization. It would feel very different, because the way we do it, people, ideas, objects and activities come and go, and everything is distributed in time and space, and the connections are “weak ties.”

More and more of what our family does for education is of the network style, as opposed to pre-organized (corporative) style. To give an obvious example, the vast majority of reading my child does happens in collaborative participatory spaces: blogs, roleplay chats, wikis, or fanfic nets. I am happy about it, because these spaces invite my child to read actively and to become a writer. But I don’t quite see this style - the network style - as natural (or possible) in today’s schools. Because schools are inherently organizations, and classes are organizations, and curricula are organized, and these groups and curricula aren’t open, live networks of people and ideas. Maybe in a few years?

By this post, I want to pay respects to traditions, and to acknowledge that I am a newbie at what I do. “Hello, world!” accomplishes both goals. A “Hello, world!” program displays these two words, using a programming language. It is usually one of the simplest possible programs in any language, and the traditional first learning task for newbie programmers.

I took this picture about twelve years ago, when I first started the Natural Math project. Just now, I found it in the archive.org virtual time machine. It is thrilling to see this archive, and my tiny contribution to it, mirrored at the New Library of Alexandria, Egypt. In the picture, I see a toddler, the very image of inexperience, scaling a very steep slope easily and naturally - with loving support. When I first took the picture, I thought of learning supports as curricula: books, sites, software, movies helping people do math. My “Hello, world!” programs were all about designing better little games for demonstrating an idea, or writing better textbook prose, with better pictures, about a topic.

Now I am thinking in terms of human networks as supports for learning. I am writing this “Hello, World!” blog entry using software, of course, but the action is not about software. It is a text, with pictures, but it’s not about words or images. It’s about my hope of starting a conversation among the visitors of this blog, and the conversation, in turn, supporting mathematical learning. For the last three years, the software development company Phenix Solutions, Inc. was doing research and development with the Natural Math project. This partnership took the form of making small online modules. The modules are tools and frameworks for people creating mathematics, sharing it with others, and connecting with other math makers through that collective action. Instead of shouting “Hello, World!” to quietly listening visitors, I want to help visitors greet the world in their own unique voices, together.