Regarding test

Posted on February 16, 2015 by admin

Test should be more a test of the person who gives the test: how do you evaluate the person in front of you. Ask what he likes and what he has the most experiences in, ask him to describe it to you, evaluate his language skill, communication skill, critical thinking in the process. Don’t create any test that the candidate needs to spend extra time to prepare. The candidate only needs to do one thing and that is building up his portfolio. The person who evaluates should have the skills to get into details into any field, and know how to ask questions. So the test is more a test of the person who gives the test. With current testing, we saw too many crappy test givers and too many talented people suffering from those crappy tests. Repeat again: they should not spend any extra time just for the test. They only need to do well at what they are doing. Maybe they need to do some reflection and summarize their experiences. But we have tools to make that the ongoing process along the way. So they don’t have to do that particularly just for the test.

I still remember when I was taking a learning theory and technology course from a famous education school professor. When he discussed about test, I said plainly that I don’t like test. When asked why, I said it can never really test people’s understanding of the knowledge, and it wastes people’s time in doing the real thing. Instead, people can be evaluated just by what they have done and people should be given chances to try things.

I interview people and I hire them. I know the test is more a challenge to the test giver than the candidate. The candidate only needs to express themselves well. And expressing oneself well is the basic skill of anyone or anything who wants to play with others. As the person who evaluates, I need to look into their blogs, twitters, github and so on. I need to have a broad interest and have the knowledge to get into any field and need to know how to ask various questions, and is able to tell what I need to know, for example critical thinking ability, analytic skills, broad interests in tech or in life, design skills… Which college s/he goes to and the GPA? Doesn’t matter.

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Declaration of Self-learning, the long version

Posted on February 2, 2015 by admin

For the short version, read here.

Here we want to recognize what we have achieved in our understanding of learning, and call for further actions to lead to future learning.

The current prevailing education model, e.g. the school classroom based education model, or so called Compulsory Schooling, has only been around for 150 years. Its design goal is to strip away human beings’ higher capacities and keep only the lowest ones, so people can work along the assembly line and be part of the assembly line. So in this education system, human beings are just a higher form of machine.(John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education) But in the new era of economy, we need more people who are able to explore knowledge and think independently. The current increasingly severe crisis facing United States and other western countries lies in the fact that the far outdated education system cannot meet the needs of the new knowledge economy. So this is the era we are going to replace the old education model with the new one, one that brings out the true face of learning.

To do that, we have to think outside of the box of classroom, and think deeply what is learning and what is knowledge. We cannot turn to conventional educators for guidelines since lacking of learning experiences they only know of classrooms when it comes to learning and they tend to use all kinds of technologies to decorate their fancy classrooms. Without the concept of classroom, they are unable to think what is learning and what is knowledge. Fortunately, many years of practices and experiences from Sudbury Valley School, Summerhill and other democratic schools, from unschooling movement, and from many self-learners such as Mark Twain and Albert Einstein are the real rich nutrition we can turn to. Typically, we can learn from over 40 years of practices of Sudbury Valley School, a school that has no classroom, no homework and no exams and what kids there do all day is just playing:

  1. Learning is always self-directed, and children (adults too, of course) can make decisions on their own learning;
  2. Children can learn everything by playing. In sudbury schools, children play whatever they feel like playing;
  3. Children can equally participate in school matters, and if given that equal chances they participate in school matters in a rational and responsible way. Feeling and improving one’s surroundings is essential to the wholeness of a human being, and should never be taken away from one;
  4. Children learn in their daily lives. They don’t need to be isolated from their daily lives in order to learn. They also don’t need to be isolated from larger society for the purpose of learning;
  5. No external tests should be given to children. They can evaluate themselves according to their internal goals and from their playing. Children should feel of their own space instead of let that feeling being constantly interrupted and damaged by external tests;
  6. Sudbury staff do whatever they can to help protect children’s feeling of the space: space internally and space around. For example, children shouldn’t be timed with external clock. Children’s sense of themselves shouldn’t be interfered or driven by external tests. Children feel of their inner needs of learning. In sudbury schools, children can be with themselves. Children feel of their environments and make change to that environment, evaluate that change and make further improvement. Children participate in larger social life instead of being cut off and isolated from it. So you can see in sudbury schools, children feel fully of the space;
  7. Although children direct their own learning, sudbury staff also play an active role. They help make learning a little easier once learning needs arise. Sudbury staff made sudbury school a comprehensive supportive learning environment. They build a safe playground for children to play together.

So you can see sudubury experiences are simply about playing and feeling. No. 1 is the prerequisite of playing. No. 2 to No.4 are the content of playing. No. 5 and No. 6 are about feeling. No. 7 is about making learning easier and building a playground. I have to add it here that this playground very much mimics the playground the open source movement has built up for software programmers. It is all about making learning curve flatter and making things play with each other.

For those who still have doubts, it is not playing that distracts them from learning. It is external tests, meaningless homework and subjects they are not ready to learn that distract them. Actually playing provides all the context, drive, feedback and goals for their learning. They learn by playing. Please don’t ask me why playing. Playing is the primary activity. Learning is the secondary activity. Don’t sacrifice playing for learning.

Thus it is not school time that we have to guarantee our children. It is the play time that we have to guarantee them. People never became illiterate because they played too much. People became illiterate because they had to work day and night from a young age and had no time to play. Especially in the modern world where there are bookstores and internet anywhere, people don’t become illiterate because of playing.

Not only do we need to guarantee our children the time to play, we also need to guarantee them the time to pause and feel. We need to protect children’s time to be with themselves and feel of themselves. Children in sudbury are given time to be with themselves, to feel their internal clocks. And their feeling of the space is protected from external tests, meaningless homework and forced upon subjects, which are designed to destroy their sense of space and thus to make them unable to learn.

Trust us, play while equipped with strong feel is the most efficient way of learning. It may seem chaotic to the outsiders, but for the people doing it, they are following their own hearts and it is by all means following the natural order!

But this learning revolution is not just about children. It is actually more about us adults because it is us adults who already forgot what is learning and constantly interfered with children’s learning in a violent way.

We have put our minds into a cage called classroom. And without a classroom, either a physical one or a virtual one, we are unable to learn. Yes, we still learn intuitively and slowly little by little. But that speed of learning cannot catch up with the needs of the new era of economy and an increasingly sophisticated society. We need to learn a lot more. We need to learn big! We need to understand multiple domains of knowledge and understand the whole world. We need to be entrepreneurs and explore the world. People need to understand the sophisticated society and don’t get fooled by politicians and corporations. We need to build many things to make this world better. We need to empower ourselves by real learning! As the society gets more complicated and the world gets smaller, it is dangerous if we don’t upgrade our education system.

So let’s expand Sudbury School Model to the whole society including adults. Sudbury school is a safe playground for children to play together. For the adults, let’s turn the whole society into a better playground! Let’s make the whole society a comprehensive supportive learning environment!

We hereby call for actions:

  1. Call for the declaration of Freedom of Learning: individuals should have the right to decide for themselves what to learn, how to learn, from who to learn, when to learn and where to learn;
  2. Call for people who can truly bring technology and understanding of learning together. For that, software programmers need to turn to practices and experiences from Sudbury, Summerhill, and other democratic schools, and from the unschooling movement. They also need to be lifelong self-learners themselves and learn several big things in their lives and have very rich learning experiences. Only so, can we see how technology is really applied to learning and truly make the revolution happen. Especially we need to pay attention to various institutions that started to center learning around self-reflection, which has proven to be very effective in turning people who have been accustomed to school-way of learning (e.g. fixed, instigated) into a self-driven and self-initiated real life learning, and which is probably the major area that learning software will come from. With email, webpage, google, facebook, even with mobile internet and cloud computing, we are still at the beginning of this software revolution, which is a process of digitization of human world. We have been lingering around long enough not entering the core of that digitization. Now let’s march into the core! Let’s usher the era of consciousness software! We are all self-learners. Let’s make self-learning easier!
  3. Call for people of all ages, in school or out of school already, to engage in self-learning and learning in real life, to use self-reflection tools to help capture their learning every day and build up rich and well-structured knowledge, and to share that rich knowledge with others and guide others in their learning. The more people can learn out of school and in real life, the less significant school will be. When I was in college, only 5 to 10% of my knowledge was learned in school. As we build up strong self-learning communities and show people the power and richness of self-learning, we can make the old classroom based education model obsolete and replace it with this new one;
  4. Call for all organizations to participate in making the whole society a comprehensive supportive learning environment. We need various organizations to carry out their own education responsibility for the community. For example, hospitals should be the place for people to learn about health knowledge and law firms should be the place for people to learn of knowledge related to law. We need various organizations to open up their office space for young people (or not that young people) to tour during certain hours or over the weekends for learning purpose, or set up internship and programs for young people (or not that young people). We need various kinds of open labs and hacker space where people can learn and build stuff;
  5. Call for more comprehensive evaluation of people’s skills and capacities. For example, ability to explore and think independently is definitely an important skill. Devise tools or methodologies to make that evaluation easier for employers. The whole society needs to be more mature in how to comprehensively evaluate people’s working skills and capacities. And the internship we mentioned above is a key part of it. It would be the best if we programmers can build up some kind of crowdsourcing task distribution system and badge system that can rank people’s skills in different categories and levels according to the tasks they accomplished. At least, in some industry, that is possible.

We strongly believe that the future learning will be all about learn while play. People fully engage in playing, which means several things including improving their environment and participating in larger society. The learning part can be done by strong feeling. For that we can have meditation sessions that help people feel of themselves and things around (feel of space) with great clarity. We can also have software that help people capture their experiences and do self-reflection, at the same time build up well-structured knowledge and share that knowledge. Everyone can become a teacher, and they can teach in their spare time. Especially the barrier for teaching effectively will be extremely low for those who excel at their professions and do really possess the knowledge. We believe the future learning and teaching will be in this way. People don’t have to lock themselves up in an isolated environment for so long just for the purpose of learning. That is too industrial age. People can learn continuously and naturally in the same way they learn when they are very little: learn by play. The whole society will be the supportive comprehensive learning environment. That is our vision of future learning!

Self-learning was the reality from day one of human history, and has always been there throughout our history, even in the dark age of Compulsory Schooling. In term of accomplishing its design goal, Compulsory Schooling can be called a success. But as we enter the era of economy that calls for more explorers of knowledge and independent thinkers, we have to say to Compulsory Schooling:”Mission over. You are now dismissed!” Now it is time to bring forward the real learning. Now it is time to make human beings complete and return human beings to their full potential. In our time, instead of being choice of a few, self-learning is going to scale up to a massive level and become the mainstream way of learning. As the Compulsory Schooling was designed to prevent people from understanding the whole and thus being entrepreneurs, in this new age of economy, we need more people to be whole and be entrepreneurs. We need more people to explore social knowledge, build social products and solve social problems. It is the age about our happiness!

So together let’s bring out the true face of learning!

Let’s end with this from Kurt Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle”:

“Self-taught, are you?” Julian Castle asked Newt.

“Isn’t everybody?” Newt inquired.

“Very good answer.”  

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Declaration of Self-learning Version 2

Posted on January 29, 2015 by admin

For the newest version, read it here.

Here we want to recognize what we have achieved in our understanding of learning, and call for further actions to lead to future learning.

The current prevailing education model, e.g. the school classroom based education model, or so called Compulsory Schooling, has only been around for 150 years. Its design goal is to strip away human beings’ higher capacities and keep only the lowest ones, so people can work along the assembly line and be part of the assembly line. So in this education system, human beings are just a higher form of machine.(John Taylor Gatto, The Undergraduate History of American Education) But in the new era of economy, we need more people who are able to explore knowledge and think independently. The current increasingly severe crisis facing United States and other western countries lies in the fact that the far outdated education system cannot meet the needs of the new knowledge economy. So this is the era we are going to replace the old education model with the new one, one that brings out the true face of learning.

To do that, we have to think outside of the box of classroom, and think deeply what is learning and what is knowledge. We cannot turn to conventional educators for guidelines since lacking of learning experiences they only know of classrooms when it comes to learning and they tend to use all kinds of technologies to decorate their fancy classrooms. Without the concept of classroom, they are unable to think what is learning and what is knowledge. Fortunately, many years of practices and experiences from Sudbury Valley School, Summerhill and other democratic schools, from unschooling movement, and from many self-learners such as Mark Twain and Albert Einstein are the real rich nutrition we can turn to. Typically, we can learn from over 40 years of practices of Sudbury Valley School, a school that has no classroom, no homework and no exams and what kids there do all day is just playing:

  • Learning is always self-directed, and children (adults too, of course) can make decisions on their own learning;

  • Children can equally participate in school matters, and if given that equal chances they participate in school matters in a rational and responsible way. Such active participation in improving their surroundings is a big part of children’s learning and is what make them complete as human beings;

  • Children can learn everything by playing. (Why? The needs of learning come from being social and playing, and they gain feedback of their learning from playing as well. Children naturally will like one thing at a time. After they have fully played and fully learned, another thing will gradually draw their interests. So they get to learn everything by playing. If they happen to find what they love to play for their whole lives, either by then they probably have tried and played many other things or they love this thing so much that they will learn everything with this thing. So no need to worry about children playing. Before children grow to full adults, their playing time should be guaranteed since that is their learning time to prepare them to become fully responsible adults，and playing is the natural way of learning);

  • Children learn in their daily lives. They don’t need to be isolated from their daily lives in order to learn. They also don’t need to be isolated from larger society for the purpose of learning;

  • No external tests should be given to children. They can evaluate themselves according to their internal goals and from their playing. Children should feel of their own space instead of let that feeling being interrupted and damaged by external tests;

  • Sudbury staff do whatever they can to help protect children’s feeling of the space: space internally and space around. For example, children shouldn’t be timed with external clock. Children’s sense of themselves shouldn’t be interfered or driven by external tests. Children feel of their inner needs of learning. Children feel of their environments and make change to that environment, evaluate that change and make further improvement. Children participate in larger social life instead of being cut off and isolated from it;

  • In addition to protecting children’s feeling of the space, sudbury staff also help make (self-) learning a little easier once learning needs arise. In summary, sudbury staff made sudbury school a comprehensive supportive learning environment;

There are many other lessons from sudbury practices. But to keep the manifesto brief, we stop here. Sudbury book Free at Last is a good book for you to read further.

So let’s have our future learning built based on these practices and experiences. Let’s expand Sudbury Model to the whole society, including adults, and make the whole society a comprehensive supportive learning environment. First, let us summarize our understanding of learning on a deep level. Especially we will summarize it in a way that helps digitize learning :

  • Learning is to shape our internal brain structure to match external world. So of course, it is both social and internal. It is never separated from real life. Learning activities are external, and they are scattered and everywhere. People engage in various activities in their daily lives to accumulate drops of experiences in various domains of knowledge over a long period of time. But learning is also very internal. Learners need to feel the space of themselves and the outside world. One needs to feel where they are and where they need to go in their learning. Self-reflection is central to one’s learning. One needs to discern what they have experienced and reflect on their experiences over a period of time;

  • Associated with the understanding above is that knowledge is flowing everywhere and has many layers. Knowledge at the bottom layer connects knowledge at the top together. People are sensing knowledge in different domains on different layers in their various activities. And once deeper knowledge is formed, it helps recall knowledge at the top when faced with new situations. Trying to make connections and forming deeper knowledge is “understanding”of knowledge;

  • Thus the basic skills of learning are breaking down (analyzing) and putting together (comprehending). Learners need to break down knowledge into various parts and sense them in various activities. Learners then need to put their drops of experiences in various activities together to achieve an understanding of the knowledge on the whole. Self-reflection is the way you practice these two basic learning skills, and through self-reflection you get to pull all the experiences in various activities together to form meaningful learning;

  • Since learning is never separated from real life, learning surely can be and should be driven by curiosity. Thus people can learn everything by playing. Thus we want people to have as much time as possible to engage in playing, and only spend the necessary time on reviewing their drops of experiences gained in playing to achieve the whole and deeper knowledge in order to play better;

  • Since real life learning is the main way of learning, the so called “informal” learning is actually the formal learning. Real life learning is the formal learning.

And we call for actions:

  • Call for Freedom of Learning: individuals should have the right to decide for themselves what to learn, how to learn, from who to learn, when to learn and where to learn;

  • Call for people who can truly bring technology and understanding of learning together. For that, software programmers need to turn to practices and experiences from Sudbury, Summerhill, and other democratic schools, and from the unschooling movement. They also need to be lifelong self-learners themselves and learn several big things in their lives and have very rich learning experiences. Only so, can we see how technology is really applied to learning and truly make the revolution happen. Especially we need to pay attention to various institutions that started to center learning around self-reflection, which is probably the major area that learning software will come from. With email, webpage, google, facebook, even with mobile internet and cloud computing, we are still at the beginning of this software revolution, which is a process of digitization of human world. We have been lingering around long enough not entering the core of that digitization. Now let’s march into the core! Let’s usher the era of consciousness software! We are all self-learners. Let’s make self-learning easier!

  • Call for people of all ages, in school or out of school already, to engage in self-learning and learning in real life. The more you can learn out of school and in real life, the less significant school will be. That is the way we make the old classroom based education model obsolete and replace it with the new one;

  • Call for all organizations to participate in making the whole society a comprehensive supportive learning environment. We need various organizations to carry out their own education responsibility for the community. For example, hospitals should be the place for people to learn about health knowledge and law firms should be the place for people to learn of knowledge related to law. We need various organizations to open up their office space for young people (or not that young people) to tour during certain hours or over the weekends for learning purpose, or set up internship and programs for young people (or not that young people). We need various open labs where people can practice and learn;

  • Call for more comprehensive evaluation of people’s skills and capacities. For example, ability to explore and think independently is definitely an important skill. Devise tools or methodologies to make that evaluation easier for employers. The whole society needs to be more mature in how to comprehensively evaluate people’s working skills and capacities. And the internship we mentioned above is a key part of it. It would be the best if we programmers can build up some kind of crowdsourcing task distribution system and badge system that can rank people’s skills in different categories and levels according to the tasks they accomplished. At least, in some industry, that is possible.

Self-learning was the reality from day one of human history, and has always been there throughout our history, even in the dark age of Compulsory Schooling. In term of accomplishing its design goal, Compulsory Schooling can be called a success. But as we enter the era of economy that calls for more explorers of knowledge and independent thinkers, we have to say to Compulsory Schooling:”Mission over. You are now dismissed!” Now it is time to bring forward the real learning. Now it time to make human beings complete and return human beings to their full potential. In our time, instead of being choice of a few, self-learning is going to scale up to a massive level and become the mainstream way of learning. As the Compulsory Schooling was designed to prevent people from understanding the whole and thus being entrepreneurs, in this new age of economy, we need more people to be whole and be entrepreneurs. We need more people to explore social knowledge, build social products and solve social problems, for example, how music should be shared and how artists can better support themselves, how seniors can live better lives, healthcare… It is the age about our happiness!

So together let’s bring out the true face of learning!

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Declaration of Self-learning Version 1

Posted on January 22, 2015 by admin

For the new version, read on this page.

Here we want to recognize what we have achieved in our understanding of learning, and call for further actions to lead to future learning.

1. The current prevailing education model, e.g. the school classroom based education model, or so called Compulsory Schooling, has only been around for 150 years. Its design goal is to strip away human beings’ higher capacities and keep only the lowest ones, so people can work along the assembly line and be part of the assembly line. So in this education system, human beings are just a higher form of machine. But in the new era of economy, we need more people who are able to explore knowledge and think independently. The current increasingly severe crisis facing United States and other western countries lies in the fact that the far outdated education system cannot meet the needs of the new knowledge economy. So this is the era we are going to replace the old education model with the new one, one that brings out the true face of learning.

2. Fortunately, many years of practices and experiences from Sudbury Valley School, Summerhill and other democratic schools, from unschooling movement, and from many self-learners such as Mark Twain and Albert Einstein, tell us what is learning and what is knowledge. Typically, what sudbury practices tell us:

a) learning is always self-directed, and children (adults too, of course) can make decisions on their own learning;

b) children can equally participate in school matters, and if given that equal chances they participate in school matters in a rational and responsible way;

c) children can learn everything by playing;

d) children learn in their daily lives. They feel of their surroundings and make improvement to their surroundings;

e) no external tests should be given to children. They can evaluate themselves according to their internal goals. Children should feel of their own space instead of being interrupted by external tests;

f) sudbury staff do whatever they can to help protect children’s feeling of the space: space internally and space around. For example, children shouldn’t be timed with external clock. Children’ s sense of themselves shouldn’t be interfered or driven by external tests. Children feel of their inner needs of learning. Children feel of their environments and make change to that environment, evaluate that change and make further improvement. Children participate in larger social life instead of being cut of and isolated from it;

g) … there are many other lessons from sudbury practices. But to keep the manifesto brief, we stop here. Sudbury book Free at Last is a good book for you to read further.

3. So let’s have our future learning built based on these practices and experiences. Specifically, let’s:

a) Call for Freedom of Learning: individuals should have the right to decide for themselves what to learn, how to learn, from who to learn, when to learn and where to learn.

b) Acknowledge our understanding of learning:

i. Learning activities are external and they are scattered and everywhere. But learning is very internal. Learners need to feel the space of themselves and the outside world. Self-reflection is a vital learning skill. Learners need to pull all their learning experiences from various learning activities together to achieve a comprehensive understanding of the domain knowledge. In fact, learning is to shape our internal understanding to match external world. Of course, it is both social and internal;

ii. Since learning is scattered and everywhere, it is never separated from real life. Thus learning surely can be and should be driven by curiosity. Thus people can learn everything by playing. And they learn best by playing because at the very least the learning needs all come from playing, and that is the natural way of how learning happens;

iii. Once people start exploring knowledge, they will realize the source of knowledge is from real life. So people have to learn in real life;

iv. The so called “informal” learning is actually the formal learning. Real life learning is the formal learning.

c) Call for people who can truly bring technology and understanding of learning together. For that, software programmers need to turn to practices and experiences from Sudbury, Summerhill, and other democratic schools, and from the unschooling movement. They also need to be life long self-learners themselves and learn several big things in their lives and have very rich learning experiences. Only so, can we see how technology is really applied to learning and truly make the revolution happen. In the process of digitization of human world, we need to march into the core! Let’s usher the era of consciousness software!

Self-learning was the reality from day one of human history, and has always been there throughout human history, even in the dark age of Compulsory Schooling. In term of accomplishing its design goal, Compulsory Schooling is a success. But as we enter the era of economy that calls for more explorers of knowledge and independent thinkers, we have to say to Compulsory Schooling:”Mission over. You are now dismissed!” Now it is time to bring forward the real learning, in which self-learning is going to scale up to a massive level and become the mainstream way of learning.

So together let’s bring out the true face of learning!

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Consciousness Software

Posted on December 21, 2014 by admin

What we are building here at OSL is a kind of consciousness software, which helps people manage their consciousness.

One way to look at it, consciousness software is a deeper level of digitization of human world. As internet is transforming and affecting deeper of human society, we definitely see that the learning/education world will be fundamentally restructured.

Or you can look at it in another way, the previous waves of digitization have left people with a mess with their data. They have to go to various sites to enter their data, and the data they entered mostly don’t belong to them anymore, or at the least they don’t have any control on it. So we want to restructure internet in a way that we go back to where data come from, let people manage their own data and really “own” their data on their private storage. People choose to share that data with other people(team) or public. Once in public, companies can use that data to build their services. If that service is profitable, the data owners gain a percentage of that profit. The data owners also always own their data, which means they can take back their data if they want (depending on how they have chosen to share their data with public supposing there should be several mechanisms for choosing from).

This is the idea that Opera Unite has proposed on restructuring Internet, although they didn’t touch on the semantic part. The semantic part resembles the efforts in semantic web a little, but still quite different and simpler.

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What we learned from Sudbury Valley School?

Posted on March 12, 2014 by admin

We can learn many things about learning/education from sudbury experiences. In fact, we can learn everything about learning/education from their practices. Here I want to list four of them for you to consider.

First, sudbury protects children’s feeling of space, either space of themselves or space of the surrounding. For example, children have the time to be with themselves without being interrupted by others. They are not timed with class clocks or any external schedules. They listen to their own hearts and they feel of themselves. They can also feel of the surrounding, and try to change it for the better. They equally participate in the process of making their schools better. In contrast, students in traditional schools have their feelings of the space constantly interrupted, destroyed and denied.

Such feeling of space is very vital of one’s learning. Without feeling of one’s internal and surrounding space, one is unable to learn. Self-reflection is the center of learning. However, many people coming out of school haven’t learned how to reflect.

Secondly, children are also a group of people. At any place that you have a group of people, you will have what a group of people will have. For example, how to clean up the place. People are different, and they have different likes and dislikes. Since they live in the same space, they need to resolve the conflicts. People want to form various interest groups. So as we can see in sudbury practice, they have the honor system, the personal account, Judicial Committee, school meeting, clubs, and so on. In traditional schools, since adults have the absolute power over children, they simply take everything under their control and simplify everything by making children simply being governed, thus denying children their feeling of the space. So this is why more and more people start to realize this is more about “how to be democratic”.

This alone probably makes sudbury very difficult to reproduce massively. Actually sudbury model is not too costly or complex to reproduce massively. The obstacle is mainly mental, e.g. people’s understanding of equality and how they trust children. This is a profound issue and it will take people many many years to truly understand it. But it doesn’t mean it cannot spread out to become mainstream. Especially with the help of internet and software, we will make that spreading happening faster.

Thirdly, learning is never separated from real life. As the principle of sudbury said, children learn little by little in their daily lives, and when they combine all those experiences together, they try to build up that knowledge. Since learning is never separated from your real life and what you do, learning can surely be driven by curiosity.

Fourthly, whether children should have the freedom of learning? Whether they can be trusted? I think this is a very deep worry in many people’s minds. From my own life experience, I strongly believe children should have that freedom and they can be trusted to guide themselves. I think sudbury experiences also proved so. If we want to talk about this philosophically, I can also talk convincingly why so. The practical question here is how to ensure children’s right in making decisions on their own learning be protected? Should we declare something like “Freedom of Learning”?

So if you are only working with adult learning, do sudbury experiences give inspiration to your work? We think they surely do. Although adults are not confined by schools and classes as how children are, adults are still confined by the conceptual model of learning they got used to after more than 10 or 20 years in school. So when they build online learning software, they still think in term of class based learning in school. Only after all these years, they start to realize little by little that they are not bound by anything on the internet and thus start to make learning a little more flexible (Khan Academy, MOOC, for example). Still the great potential of internet for learning is untapped. Few people are really building learning software that we need in the internet age.

So what kind of learning software we need in the internet age? I have been thinking and exploring this for many years. What have been really helpful in my exploration are: my own schooling experiences, especially my primary school experiences, which mimic sudbury experiences quite well; my broad learning experiences in various fields; my reading of works from John Taylor Gatto, Sudbury, Summerhill and all those unschooling practices. They are very rich nutrition; my broad teaching experiences of various groups of people (children, migrating manual labor workers, college students, young professionals, seniors…); the unique research methodology:exploration with software. If you are interested in seeing what kind of software we are building here, you can check out summarization of our work, and the projects page. Particularly I want to mention briefly knowledge engine here (a notebook to turn experiences into knowledge). It helps train people’s reflection skills and helps people feel of the space. By doing so, it also aids people learn in real life. Surely sudbury children are already doing so. Sudbury children are already very strong self-learners. But this tool still can help the self-learners with their learning, just as it has helped me with my daily learning. Also the result of learning and the knowledge constructed can be some kind of demonstration of what they have learned, and they can also use it to teach others. This tool is to make learning not separated from your everyday activities. It is to lower the barrier of self-learning and thus make learning truly pervasive, instead of being isolated and withering.

Sudbury experiences have shown us what learning really is. With that understanding, we need to build learning software that really helps self-learners and makes self-learning pervasive. Learning activities are definitely scattered and everywhere. Learning is never separated from real life. We are all self-learners. Together let’s bring out the true face of learning.

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Super Inverse Class

Posted on February 26, 2014 by admin

Chinese Version

Nowadays when people work on online education, they still think in term of classes. So when you look at those online learning sites, you see all the classes, such as courseware, videos, lectures, and so on. What the learner actually gains from such a class is just a little more understanding in some aspects of the domain knowledge. The learner certainly can get such understanding through other means, for example, reading, talking to people, or other activities. They can even gain the same insights from some seemly unrelated things. We know knowledge is flowing everywhere and connected. So it is just natural that people might gain insight in one area by interacting with some other areas. And quite often, it is much faster to gain such insights from other sources than from these “well-designed” classes. There is no wonder that people turn away from these classes and learn by themselves through whatever ways they deem most effective for themselves.

So for online education, instead of building such online classes, it is better to go inside the learners’ minds and build the classes that are inside their minds. So for a learner, if s/he wants to build up knowledge in a domain, such as knowledge on product management or human resource management, he can learn in whatever ways to gain those important insights or understanding, then put all the insights and understanding together to construct knowledge for that domain.　This is the internal class inside his/her mind.

First of all, it is a “reverse” class. Different from conventional class, which is built by teachers or educators for students, this internal class is built by the learner himself inside his brain. It reflects his understanding of the domain knowledge.

Secondly this class is “super” because it encompasses all the important resources and insights he has accumulated through his exploration of the domain knowledge. So it is much bigger than the conventional class, which is very limited.

If we really want to realize learner-centered learning, we need to give learners the tools to help them build up their internal super classes. This super class is dynamic, asynchronous, and always ongoing. For example, when I was building this internal class for Product Mgr, when I gain certain insight in this area, I can record it and share it with others. Others can comment on it and form a discussion. So after a period of time, we can see all the important points in this internal class and the discussions behind each point.

We need good tools to help learners build up their internal classes, and share them with public. Other learners can participate in the learning as well to achieve peer learning. Teachers or experienced learners (teachers are learners as well, aren’t they?) can provide guidance to the learner through this internal class, thus we have “teaching”.

Software is to digitize various domains of human world. For many years, we cannot truly tap into the great potential of online education because we have always been trying to digitize classes that are built by teachers. But actually that kind of external classes is everywhere. There is no place in your life that cannot be a lesson for you. So trying to digitize in this area is just fruitless. I think many educators have the same feeling. So you spend all the energy to make those instructional videos. Are you a film maker or educator? You spend time organizing those learning events. Are you an event organizer or educator? So the videos made by non-educators have no usage for learning? When I was in college, much of my liberal arts learning was achieved by watching western movies and reading western novels. Much of my critical thinking ability was trained through reading the best newspapers and magazines, and through selling stuff on street and other business activities I was doing for my part-time jobs. So as educators, are you going to make better movies, write better novels, or publish better newspapers or magazines?

So what online education should really focus on, or what we should digitize, is this super inner class. The future road of online education is to help individuals building those super internal classes. This is the digitalization of learning/education should be about.

Actually this inner super class is just KNOWLEDGE! The essence of knowledge is: past personal experiences can be immediately recalled to help identify problems and solve problems when faced with new situations. And to recall the experiences timely and accurately, you need to rely on a certain abstraction and structure of experiences. This inner super class, is to continuously construct a better structure of those experiences and insights. Only when we shift our focus of digitization to this inner class, can we really enrich the “learning” content and thus “knowledge”.

For this kind of class, how should we call it? Super Inverse Class? Or you have a better name? I am trying to avoid the word “flipped” as “flipped class” is already used to mean something else.

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Change the way of learning content production

Posted on February 9, 2014 by admin

Chinese Version

Note:This article is targeting people providing online education solutions for corporations.

For online education to truly boom, we need to change the way learning content is produced.

In the traditional way of learning content production, the producers have to work with the domain knowledge experts trying to get their knowledge into something called courseware or similar. This kind of learning content production, is too costly and it takes too long. The learning content made, is very few, covering too little, unable to meet people’s learning needs. And it is often out-dated, not taken good care of and full of errors. In the era of knowledge economy and with explosion of knowledge, this kind of learning content production certainly cannot meet the needs. For companies in this knowledge economy, this kind of learning content production falls way behind employee’s learning needs. So we can see employees often go to blogs or twitter for learning. When people want to find some knowledge, they often go to such places to look for it. So for knowledge on blogs or twitter, even it is not strongly knowledge-oriented, at least it is timely, rich and can roughly meet people’s learning needs.

As we can see, the conventional way of learning content production has two big separations. One separation is the separation between people who produce the learning content and people who have the domain knowledge. We have mentioned this above. The other separation is the separation btw teaching and learning. Learners cannot actively contribute to the building of learning content. The domain experts also cannot gain feedbacks from the learners.

These two separation result in a static and non-interactive knowledge, instead of dynamic and interactive knowledge. This is probably due to a hidden assumption people have on knowledge. People tend to assume knowledge is static instead of dynamic. So knowledge is either gained or not. So if you haven’t gained the knowledge, then you don’t have whatsoever knowledge in this domain. So learners have no place in building the knowledge. If you have gained knowledge in this domain, then that knowledge won’t evolve any longer and will always stay the same. So the domain experts don’t need to update the knowledge once it is built. This is surely a false assumption.

This kind of understanding of knowledge has to change in the knowledge economy. Now more people are in the process of exploring knowledge. In knowledge economy, we don’t need the majority of the people to just do simple operations based on rules discovered by a few scientists. What we need is more people to join the efforts of exploring new knowledge. They need to know where knowledge comes from, what is insufficient in our current knowledge and how to improve it. With the knowledge economy, we don’t need as many people to do the mechanic repeated operations along the assembly line. Now we only need a very small percentage of the population to do that kind of work (actually even that might gradually be replaced by a new kind of manufacturing industry, which is heavily influenced by software and internet and is more customized, small scale and innovative). More people are working on sophisticated knowledge jobs. Here I can quote directly what Mark Anderson wrote in his article on WSJ: “many people in the U.S. and around the world lack the education and skills required to participate in the great new companies coming out of the software revolution. This is a tragedy since every company I work with is absolutely starved for talent. Qualified software engineers, managers, marketers and salespeople in Silicon Valley can rack up dozens of high-paying, high-upside job offers any time they want, while national unemployment and underemployment is sky high. This problem is even worse than it looks because many workers in existing industries will be stranded on the wrong side of software-based disruption and may never be able to work in their fields again. There’s no way through this problem other than education, and we have a long way to go.”

If people start exploring knowledge, they will find that the process of knowledge exploration is actually very intertwined with their daily lives. Knowledge is not something high in the cloud. Knowledge is related to every aspect of our daily lives. Only so, can knowledge have the source where it comes from, so we can keep making breakthroughs. This is often ignored by conventional education models. But for us working on online education, this is what we need to really pay attention to.

So how can we get rid of the separations? We can offer those knowledge experts tools to build up knowledge while they are exploring, and share that knowledge with other people. Other people can learn from this “learning content”. They can also contribute to the construction of knowledge as well. The knowledge experts are not building content just for the learners to learn, they are also building their own knowledge, and that knowledge is constantly evolving. So you can expect that knowledge is taken good care of and often updated.

When we look at all kinds of blogs, twitters or SNS sites inside the corporation, there are a lot of content there. If I want to find some knowledge, I often look for it there and then build up my knowledge. So for these blog, twitter or SNS sites, are they learning solutions? These places, are they learning places? Here I raise this question for everyone to ponder.

When TeachStreet came out in 2008, I had that kind of idea at least 2 years ago. But I didn’t start building such a website because I knew the content problem had to be solved. Even though TeachStreet focus on learning in everyday life, if there is no good way to produce content, then it is hard for people to stay on the site. And without rich knowledge from everyday life, it will be very hard to challenge the conventional mainstream education model, and it will only become a hobby site or “informal” learning site. So it is no surprise to me that they didn’t sustain themselves a few years later. Learning cannot be separated from daily life. But we need to offer a good tool to help people build knowledge from their daily experiences.

Evernote, as a personal notes site, has been used more and more by people to share things, similar to blogs and twitter. But the same as blogs and twitters, evernote also lacks structure to make it more knowledge-oriented. The founder of Evernote said they plan to add more structure to evernote so that evernote can be more like knowledge.

If we look at the history of Internet, we can see it as a history of digitization. We started from digitization in things that are easier to digitize, such as shopping, information, news, media, music, and so on, and we move deeper into the process of digitization, such as education and healthcare. We can also look at it in a very simplified way: the first wave of digitization is led by google in information and communication area; the second wave of digitization is led by facebook in human relation area; the third wave of digitization, in my view, should be in the human consciousness area, the rise of so called consciousness software. We need to better manage our consciousness in the age of internet. If I have some experience or insight to share with other people, I don’t have to go on twitter or various SNS sites to share it. When I write a blog article, the article might come from several experiences that I accumulated in a domain over a period of time. So how can I quickly locate those past experiences? Am I repeating things that I already wrote before? To do all these better, we need get deeper into human consciousness, and observe how people learn and how knowledge is formed. Only on this level, can we understand what is learning and what is knowledge. Our learning, construction of knowledge, and sharing of that knowledge, all these are continuous process of consciousness management, and we need better tools to help us do that. With these software tools, we can better join the efforts of exploring knowledge, bring knowledge back to its source: the daily life, and make knowledge a flowing structure instead of static “knowledge” covered with cobweb.

In the Internet age that is full of exploration, the learning capability of an organization becomes the core competitive advantage of the organization. As learning of employees of many corporations have already become explorative in nature, people providing learning solutions for these corporations are still trapped in the old educational model. We need to support employees’ explorative learning, help the organization to truly become a learning organization. We are very fortunate to be at this transition stage to push for this paradigm shift. Together in our hands, we will bring about the future learning!

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Summarization of our findings

Posted on March 22, 2013 by admin

We want to summarize our finding here, so you know what we have achieved through our work. We want to be brief here in this essay so that you can quickly grasp it.

We tried in many domains of education and did various experimentation. Our goal is to find out on a deeper level what is knowledge and what is learning, and how that understanding can help us building software for education or learning in the internet age.

What is Knowledge?

So here is what we find out about knowledge. We summarize as below:

  • Knowledge is of big blocks. Knowledge is understanding of the whole, otherwise it is just information.
  • Knowledge is flowing. When different knowledge comes together and condense, it forms a concrete matter or thing that we can recognize as a human being. So anything in real life must contain multiple dimensions of knowledge.
  • Learning is to interact with these various things, to extract out one particular dimension of knowledge, and to accumulate drops of experience in that dimension of knowledge. Thus learning cannot and should not be separated from daily activities. We should learn in real life, and learn by doing it. So learning activities must be very scattered and everywhere, and one core ability of learning is to extract out that dimension of knowledge from various scattered activities. We need to know how to break down.
  • Then we put all our Significant Experiences together, try to achieve an understanding of the whole. Here we need another core learning ability, which is to summarize and to comprehend.
  • The key of learning is reflection. The above two activities of thinking (breaking down and comprehending) are the two basic forms of reflection.
  • Knowledge needs to be applied. After you gain the understanding of the knowledge on the whole, you will not be limited by the literal expression of the knowledge, and you will be able to “see” knowledge flowing everywhere in real life.
  • Since there is no need to separate learning and daily activities, surely learning is naturally driven by what you are interested to learn.

Above we briefly summarized our understanding of knowledge and learning. For more of our understanding of what is knowledge, you can view our frame (a frame is an outline that includes several notes or other frames) What is Knowledge. Below we want to list some daily phenomena to show how they are anti-learning and anti-knowledge.

Anti-learning and anti-knowledge phenomena

  • People often pride themselves on possessing a large amount of information, and others often get intimated by them.
  • People got confined by the literal expression of knowledge, lack of true understanding of it, and cannot recognize knowledge in other forms.
  • School teachers generally lack experiences in the subject they are teaching. They cannot tell which ones are more important in the textbook, and often waste students’ time by reading from page to page.
  • When in school, people are very diligent in keeping notes. However, once out of school, they seldom make any notes.
  • If schools cannot teach people courage, at the very least, they should be able to teach students on self-reflection. However, after so many years in school, many people still don’t know how to reflect.
  • Whenever people think of learning, they think of going to school, or paying money to take courses. They think of getting a degree of certificate.
  • People tend to think that learning is the duty of the kids (shouldn’t it be a right?).Only kids need to learn. Adults don’t need to learn anymore. We already learned painting and geography at school, we don’t need to learn them anymore.
  • Since knowledge is always taught instead of being explored out of one’s own needs and curiosity, people lack the ability to explore knowledge.

There are too many of these to be all listed here. But I think you get what I mean.

The learning in the internet age

Internet has already changed how people learn. When we talk about how internet changed our world, on a deep level, I think the overall change is to bring us closer to the core values of human being. Of course, that is a big topic. But when people talk about the agile programming methodologies and compare that to the traditional ones such as waterfall, I think it is of that kind of change. When it comes to learning, we can also say that learning in the internet age is becoming more agile, instead of waterfall.

The traditional education is waterfall style instead of iterative. Learning at the internet age, is to meet the needs at hand quickly, and keep getting feedback along the way. The traditional education, however, has a grand design at the very beginning, and you don’t get feedback for a very long time.

The traditional education is separated from experiences, while learning in the internet age is all about gaining experiences quickly.

Thus learning activities in the internet age must be scattered and everywhere. We cannot demand people to just come to our place to learn. That would be too wide a range to cover and too costly. This is the pitfalls of many online education efforts. However, reflection after those scattered activities is the place that we can focus on. Especially, because learning activities are scattered and everywhere, learners need some learning software to help “pull all the strings” and coordinate all the learning efforts. If we say software is to digitize human world, this is what learning software in the internet age should digitize.

Here let me give an example of such kind of learning at the internet age. I use Linux, for work and for life. And I am learning shell programming. So as I am using Linux every day, I will encounter issues, for which I can quickly find solutions on the internet. So I learn little by little about various aspects of shell programming. After some time, I may have accumulated quite many of them. Then I put them together, and try to figure out the rules of shell programming and understand the essence of it. You can also find a book to read it very quickly at this stage. So you can see this kind of learning is very fast, with little waste of time. You also get to train your reflection and abilities to explore knowledge.

So what does the above help us design learning software for the internet age?

First of all, it has to be based on Significant Experiences, since Significant Experiences are the center of all the things above.

Secondly, learning should not be separated from daily life and work. People accumulate Significant Experiences through their daily lives and work.

Third, through simple editing operations, people work on Significant Experiences and accomplish the task of reflection. The result is a dynamic streaming structure, e.g. knowledge.

So any knowledge related cooperation, such as peer learning or teaching, should be based on the Significant Experiences. For example, teaching can be done by giving feedback to Significant Experiences directly.

Hence our work on Knowledge Engine. For that, please read our Knowledge Engine essay and other essays to know what we have done.

If we say software is to digitize human world, then the profession of software programming is about how we digitize various domains of human world. We have domain driven design. Actually the methodologies of agile programming and practice of lean start-ups are also about how we do that work of digitizing various domains of human world.

When we come to online education, we see over and over again that people often treat online education as a place to take tests for a degree or certificate. There are many learning activities in people’s lives that were not captured by these online education software.

Only in the recent years, we get to see breakthrough apps such as khan academy, MOOC, and so on. These breakthrough apps didn’t come from learning theories of education school professors. They also have no real technology breakthrough. They could have happened 5, 6 years ago or even earlier. Their birth is just because someone suddenly realized with all what we have been doing, why not…

Yes, the innovations in the online education field mostly come from thinking outside the box of traditional education system. We are happy to see that now even the mainstream media in America realized this and called for re-think our education from ground up, and really dig into what is learning and what is knowledge, and design software around it.

I was turned off by the elearning research in the academic world about 10 years ago (my research paper only got published 4 years after I wrote it. Well, personally I don’t really care much about publication.) and decided to pursue the research outside of the academic world. Now I am glad to see that people start realizing what is really wrong with our education.

So here is what we share with you our work at Open Source Learning. We would like to get your feedback. If you are willing to join our efforts, you are more than welcome.

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Mentored

Posted on March 18, 2013 by admin

中文版

I always believe that one important aspect of future learning/education is that everyone can become a teacher. To be more specific, people who really have rich learning experiences and domain knowledge — usually those accomplished professionals — should be able to teach and guide learners effectively in their spare time. Thus we will really change the profession of teaching, and bring out the true value of “teaching”. We can see now that many websites are making efforts in this direction. Some allow individual teachers to host a class online and teach students like in a classroom. Some connect individual teachers and learners so that the teachers can teach offline face to face. But all these current efforts have serious drawbacks. They didn’t fully leverage the power of internet, and they cannot compete with the current mainstream teaching, e.g. the classroom teaching in schools.

What 3exps.org is trying to bring about is something that is dramatically different. Let’s say, someone who wants to learn something, for example, software programming, photography or management, post his request. People who think they can teach can answer the request by commenting or giving a simple learning/starting plan for the learner. For example, what good books there are, what areas the learner need to learn, what kind of path that he will go through. Or the teacher can share with the learner the learning material he has organized with the notebook. Based on these infos, the learner can decide who can be his teacher. He can have one or several teachers. So the teachers can give out specific areas that the learner can try. The learner has to make notes of what he has learned in the process and questions he has. The teachers need to provide feedbacks and guidelines in time. The teacher can also share his learning materials. The charge of service might be free for the starting period. Then the learner need to pay to get continued service.

This way the teacher knows where the students are in their study and the teacher is able to provide very effective and timely guidance to the students. The teacher can also use 3exps.org to record his own learning experiences and learning materials, and provide them later for the students to study. These learning resources are unlike the traditional ones, which are just knowledge that need to be memorized. These new resources include the teacher’s own experiences and reasoning in his exploration of knowledge. The students are supposed to replicate similar experiences and reasoning in their own various daily activities and construct their own knowledge. So the teaching shifts away from traditional way of filling in students with knowledge and starts to focus on guiding students in their exploring and building their own knowledge. The students also get trained to form the habit and skills of self-reflection, which should be the center of learning. Thus compared to other sites, 3exps.org provides a more complete learning experience. And the research work of knowledge engine, provides the technology backbone of the above process.

In United States, more and more learning centers and schools are starting to bring contemplative skills and methodologies back into learning and teaching, and start to have very powerful impact. I think the future learning won’t be like the current schools, where the students are supposed to grasp (quite often memorize) the knowledge in the book and pass the tests. Learning will not be separated from real life. Learners learn to solve their problems or to live a better life. Teachers are those who are able to guide the students in that process, helping students bring their experiences and reasoning together to reach some systemic knowledge and understanding. With 3exps.org and knowledge engine, we hope we can start to explore a systemic way to do this.

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