The rapidly increasing capacities of information and communications technologies make possible quantum changes in our individual and collective ability to access, manipulate and share information. There is little doubt that these capacities will continue to expand and that these change will accelerate over the coming decades.
Whether this accelerating capacity to access information results in improvements to the human condition will depend on how well societies respond to three challenges: 1) reorienting education systems so that the skills of information assessment, sense making and knowledge construction become core skills; 2) increasing the focus on the young child and on the events in the home environment in the earliest years and months during which much of each individual\rquote s learning capacity is established; and 3) ensuring time and space for reflective learning, creative expression and building of learning communities.
The first challenge is to rethink learning objectives and to align the learning technologies with the learning objectives. Education quality must be redefined and framed to include critical thinking, information management and sensemaking capacities. It is no longer enough merely to be efficient in helping learners achieve mastery of content and basic skills. The need is for a different education, with success measured more by the ability of learners to think independently, exercise appropriate judgment and skepticism and collaborate with others to make sense of their changing environment.
The understanding of learning will shift from the current emphasis on acquiring knowledge to one of generating new knowledge and testing previous understandings against current realities. One of the qualitative measures of education outcomes will be the efficacy with which learners address new information, unanswered questions and opportunities for further learning. Such changes in education perspective and purpose raise profound questions for effective pedagogy, for systems of measurement and evaluation and for governance and management. Perhaps the most profound shift is from systems of teaching and supervision of learning to systems of learning and facilitation of learning. These shifts will be as difficult for advantaged communities to make, with established schooling authorities and capacities in place, as for disadvantaged communities which have yet to establish the physical capacities and for which questions of appropriate knowledge and relevant skills are still open.
A second challenge will be to focus on the young child and the events that shape learning capacity in the early years and months. There is rapidly growing understanding of the information processing, networking and memory capacities of the human brain and the processes by which learning capacities are shaped. Among the new understandings is that the young brain is much more plastic than previously assumed. Environment matters. As much as half of adult potential is set by age four. For some capacities such as vision and sound recognition the critical period is measured in months, even weeks. Even with currently limited understandings of the infant brain and how it develops, it is clear that differences in nurturing environment result in significant and permanent differences in adult intelligence and learning capacities. These differences may be as much as 30 or more IQ points. As much as 20 points can be attributed to good nutrition and effective stimulation in a diverse sensory environment with attention by a caring adult. Similar amounts can be lost due to environmental assaults in the early years, ranging from poor nutrition to environmental contaminants, substance abuse and child abuse including psychological trauma and emotional neglect.
People also matter, particularly the parents and other adults in the child\rquote s environment. The most critical events for the young child occur in the home, not the school, and are not particularly dependent on economic resources or formal institutions. Singing and reading with a child and helping a child to feel confident and whole are basic. Many different types of environment can provide purposeful contexts for learning. For the child, play is serious work and even the most mundane tasks are new experiences full of wonderfully complex learning challenges and questions. Effective early learning environments require that the child is able to explore and interact and that the child\rquote s instinctive and natural efforts to explore and make sense of the environment are validated and supported. That is the essence of learning, and is the essential starting point for a lifetime of engaged learning. Those children fortunate to have such support and validation in the early years will have vastly better chances to explore more distant frontiers as they grow and become more competent. Those who do not will find their frontiers closer to home, literally as well as metaphorically.
A third challenge is to keep learning in perspective as a process of making sense of information, understanding things in context and learning how to act and function effectively as a member of a community, or of several communities. Howard Gardner has helped identify the multiple intelligences with which people learn and express themselves. Gardner and others assign particular importance to reflective intelligence, or metacognition. The core tasks of the learning support systems of the future include facilitating opportunities for reflective learning, creative expression and building of learning communities through sharing, dialogue and interactions with others trying to make sense of their environment and gain control over their lives. This includes quiet time and opportunities to listen. It also includes opportunities to test ideas, make mistakes, explore options and change to new choices when reflection forces reassessment. Such opportunities for reflection and human interactions in real contexts may be increasingly difficult to achieve and protect in the fastpaced cyber environment of the future. They also are difficult in the degraded environments of the poor at present.
These are the real challenges for a future of learning without frontiers. Learning must become more of a sensemaking activity. Attention to learning capacities must begin early with support, stimulus and care for the young child. The most critical of learning tasks may be the continuing processes of reflection on what is known, how it is known and what such knowledge means. Expanding technologies and accelerating access to information can enrich the environment for each of these tasks, but they cannot substitute for them.
These processes must become central to the new learning systems. Where they are, there will be few limits to learning, for individuals and for the society at large. Where they are not, the frontiers for learning will continue to be the rigidities of the institutional education systems, the fact that children begin life in very different environments and the fact that most people have too little time or economic and social space within which to reflect on what they know, what they are learning and what their communities are becoming.