The Centrality of Learning — I

Human beings are animals. As biological creatures, we are bipedal primates that wander from one location to another and engage with our environment by walking, running and other forms of active exploration. As living beings of flesh and blood, we are mobile, embodied creatures.

Education, for the most part, tries to take us away from our fleshy heritage. Learning brings forth images of classroom and textbooks, of environments where we are forced to set aside our animal nature.

I think that image is about to change. Recent technological developments are taking us back to our bodies. The experience of using Google is more like navigation than browsing a dictionary ever was. As computing technology becomes more mobile, more multimedia driven, we will see education becoming less about the classroom and more about being in the world. At the same time, we will also move towards a culture where learning permeates everyday life instead of being secreted away in schools and colleges.

The posts in this sequence are a series of reflections on the future of learning.