(2011-01-24) Brown New Culture Of Learning

John Seely Brown and DouglasThomas have a book out called A New Culture Of Learning ISBN:1456458884 about Educating Kids. Typically, when we think of Culture, we think of an existing, stable entity that changes and evolves over long periods of time. In A New Culture, Thomas and Brown explore a second sense of culture, one that responds to its surroundings organically. It not only adapts, it integrates change into its process as one of its environmental variables. By exploring play, innovation, and the cultivation of the imagination as cornerstones of learning, the authors create a vision of learning for the future that is achievable, scalable and one that grows along with the technology that fosters it and the people who engage with it. The result is a new form of culture in which knowledge is seen as fluid and evolving, the personal is both enhanced and refined in relation to the collective, and the ability to manage, negotiate and participate in the world is governed by the play of the imagination.

Hmm, it's published by Create Space. And has no EBook version available. (The body of the book is ~100 pages.)

Amazon's Search Inside finds 0 mentions of Sudbury School, 1 mention of High School, 0 Middle School, 0 Elementary School, 10 of college. And the 2 authors are currently college professors. I'm not sure if the focus is more on college-level, or if it's just so philosophical as to not directly address tangible current practice.

Henry Jenkins has a 2-part interview with them.

Mar01: Gordon Cook gives his take and points to a Video of speech JSB gave. In a world of constant flux a person who is not curious is screwed. (Daniel Greenberg and Ken Robinson would say that humans are naturally curious, and have that killed by structured Schooling.) JSB used the same two examples of self-taught surfers in Hawaii and World Of Warcraft generation of knowledge that he did in his April 2010 Power of Pull lecture. But by late June 2010 he had evolved these concepts in new interesting and refreshing ways. One point in the lecture that was quite critical indeed was the concept of Study Group-s in the learning 21st-century terms as opposed to education the 19th century term. Success now is found to be dependent to a very large extent on one’s ability to form study groups and that these groups could enable a self-motivated socialized learning experience (Connectivism?) that a more solitary approach to some rigid curriculum could not.