海角大神

Play is essential, says John Seely Brown, to becoming the kind of learner that keeps up with the ever-moving flow of activity, interaction, and knowledge of today鈥檚 networked world 鈥� learning that needs to be more like whitewater kayaking than a steamship that has a set course and just keeps moving along it for a long time.

In a kayak, said Mr. Seely Brown, author, senior fellow at the University of Southern California鈥檚 Annenberg Center for Communication, and former chief scientist at Xerox PARC. 鈥淵ou have to be in the flow, pick things up on the moment, feel it with your body, be a part of the flow 鈥� in it, not just above it and learning about it. In this new world of flows, knowledge is an action sport. How do we participate in these flows?鈥� he asked in his keynote talk at the 2012 Digital Media & Learning conference in San Francisco in March.

Our kids can demonstrate

It might help us to watch our children do just that. Watch them participate in the unpredictable, constantly changing flow of play in multiplayer games and virtual worlds online and in gaming communities such as Xbox Live (Pew says 97% of US 12-to-17-year-olds play games; do they know something we鈥檙e only just beginning to figure out?). Video games are simulations of the world that Seely Brown is describing.

Today鈥檚 digital infrastructure is 鈥渞adically different from anything civilization has ever seen before,鈥� he said. In the past, we鈥檇 have 鈥渂rief moments of radical disruption,鈥� then 40 to 60 years of stability [e.g., "electrification hasn't changed one iota in the past 100 years," he said] during which we developed the institutional and social forms and practices that knew how to use those infrastructures.

In the 21st century, there鈥檚 鈥渘o stability in sight,鈥� with change 鈥渄riven by continual exponential advances in computation鈥�. It鈥檚 not about learning the old so much as creating the new.鈥� We鈥檙e now, at the societal level, having to figure things out as we go, learning and picking up skills on the fly while immersed in the problem. 鈥淲e can now expect the 1/2 life of a skill 鈥� most skills we pick up 鈥� to have about five years,鈥� Seely Brown said, whereas in the past 鈥渨e could pick up a set of skills and basically hold those for life.鈥� Now we鈥檙e constantly reinventing, augmenting those skills.

Not knowledge transferred & stored

So it seems to me, he鈥檚 talking about something our children are quite skilled at, though the skills are not typically being acquired in school. He鈥檚 pointing to a significant disconnect between that immersive learning-as-they-go in games and the learning at school, which is still preparing steamships for the future rather than whitewater kayaks. School is based on the knowledge-transfer model 鈥� 鈥測ou pick up a set of fixed [knowledge] assets that are authoritative and transferred to you in the delivery mechanisms of schooling, which has wonderful scalable efficiency鈥� for delivering the assets to 30, 100, or a million people simultaneously.

That worked when we/the world had those 40-to-60-year periods of stability, when knowledge and authority had time to become 鈥渇inal鈥� and be transferred to the future adult generation鈥檚 repositories of authority: experts. Knowledge that鈥檚 stored is inaccessible, Seely Brown seems to be saying; knowledge that鈥檚 shared is useable.

But what type of knowledge are we working with? Tacit knowledge, he said. 鈥淚n a world of constant flux, learning has as much to do with creating the new as learning the old 鈥� but in creating the new, much of what is created is basically tacit, hasn鈥檛 had enough time to be crystallized out as explicit knowledge鈥� 鈥� the explicit knowledge that was transferred from our teachers to us when we were in school.

So how can school 鈥� and if not school, then parents 鈥� help our children 鈥渃ope with the tacit knowledge that kind of flows hidden beneath us all the time,鈥� as this author, scientist, and educator put it?

Know. Make. Play

Back to that point about play. Besides the discussion about school, my takeaway from Seely Brown鈥檚 talk is that we very much need to clear space for our children to play 鈥� with digital media, solid objects (I鈥檓 thinking of the film Hugo), whatever they love to play with, and make sure some of that is the collaborative or social play that many children love too. He said that, especially now, we need to be all three: homo sapiens (man as knower), homo faber (man as maker, or 鈥渢inkerer鈥�), and homo ludens (man as player).

Psychiatrist Stuart Brown said play is 鈥渁 process of nature that鈥檚 within all of us鈥� and essential to mental health and social efficacy. In that process of play, the player figures out how to鈥�

1. Work with and create constantly flowing tacit knowledge
2. Turn it into the solution needed in the moment
3. Respond to a new set of conditions with the experience just gained and new tacit knowledge flowing in from fellow players and other sources, and
4. Repeat and
5. 搁别辫别补迟鈥�.

It鈥檚 a dynamic process for our dynamic, shrinking, networked world, where answers, solutions, and 鈥渕eaning emerge as much from context as from content,鈥� Seely Brown said 鈥� the context that鈥檚 like whitewater, the flow of a classroom, a multiplayer video game, an improvisational theater stage, a group videochat, protests online and on streets, etc. So is it possible that the 97% of US 12-to-17-year-olds who play video games know something intuitively that we鈥檙e only just beginning to figure out? Might we consider what their process has to teach us?聽

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