Clay Shirky once said: The change we are in the middle of isn’t minor and it isn’t optional.As Clay describes the digital internet age, it is far from minor and not optional. Right on the mark isn’t it? This description is particularly relevant to the need for continuous learning lessons.
The amount of new technical information is doubling every two years. EVERY TWO YEARS. The top 10 jobs that were in demand in 2013 didn’t exist in 2004. We are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist, using technologies that don’t yet exist. All this in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet. Scary, isn’t it?
For students starting a 4 year technical or college degree, one-half of what they will learn in their first year of study will be outdated by their third year of study. We are clearly living in exponential times, aren’t we? For more background see Shift Happens 2013.
What is your choice for the top learning issue of the day? Continuous learning is our choice. Taught in schools? We have not found many that are changing their learning and education strategy based on this environment. In fact, most seem to be hunkering down even more into the past. We were very surprised by this finding.
In earlier times, perhaps several generations or so ago, our great grandparents and their parents faced an entirely different problem of learning. In their environment, both generations shared the same problems and basically the same solutions. Learning in this environment was a lot simpler. It was simply a matter of transferring information (facts) from the older generation to the newer one.
Enter the industrial age where the world had begun to change very rapidly and grow in complexity. Old solutions, old facts, were no longer enough. Learning needed to change to keep up, switching from learning old information to discovering and understanding new information and solutions. Clearly, a paradigm shift had begun. No longer dumping facts into a learner’s memory was going to be adequate.
In the information and internet ages, learning problems have gotten much worse. As we said earlier, the amount of new technical information is doubling every 2 years … doubling. We are apparently living in exponential times.
So how do we improve our ability for continuous learning in such a fast-changing and complex environment? We have defined ten ways we believe are essential to achieving this goal. Let’s discuss each of these:
Learning lessons … learn by doing
Most of what we know, we didn’t learn in school. We learned it in the real world, actually doing, not reading or listening about doing. Confucius once said:
I hear, I forget. I see, I remember. I do, I understand.
Related: How Good Is your Learning from Failure?
He appreciated that being a creator was the best way to learn. Make your learning be active learning and be creators as often as possible. And learn as many new things as possible. That means making your work environment a climate of change. Rotate into new jobs every 18 to 24 months (note that new jobs don’t necessarily mean new employers). We believe this is the most critical of the ten ways to improve your learning.
By observing life’s experiences around us and careful reflection of what we see, we can gather facts and information to learn new solutions and methods. Increase your ability to ‘connect the dots around you. Take notes and revisit them often.
Embrace the mess of complex learning. In this new world of continuous learning, we are all teachers as well as learners. We realize learning is often an ugly task. Accept that the process of trial and error is an acceptable learning process. And watch carefully what others are learning all around you in both the business and personal environment.
Lesson learned … look for novelty
Our brains pay more attention to things in the environment that are new to our experience. So, seek out as many new experiences to try as you can handle and become an explorer. Continuously expand your boundaries of new experiences … include some far-out things in different fields. Continually practice connecting the dots of your learning.
Continuous learning lessons.
Don’t fear failure
We need to be learners that ask hard questions and explore what might work and what won’t. As a student, we need to accept failure so we can use the often messy trial and error. Make failures and mistakes as learning sources (and the mistakes and failures need not be yours).
Develop curiosity
Continually think about what you don’t know, don’t be afraid of confusing our learning and evoking tough questions. You can develop interest. This curiosity can be used to tailor robust methods of blended learning. Curiosity must come first. Questions can be fantastic windows to great learning, but not the other way around. Build your skill of interest … it is a necessity for real learning.
Continuous learning … practice imagination
Albert Einstein once said: Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you anywhere.
He understood the complexities of the world today required imagination for the discovery of new ideas and solutions. Creativity requires lots of practice; it doesn’t just happen on its own. So start working on this skill to add it to improve your learning.
Employ emotion
We as learners respond to things around ourselves that elicit emotion. Put emotional stories to work to create a stimulus-response learning process. Listen to inspirational and emotional stories and use them as experiential learning for yourself and those around you.
Embrace change and contrast
People learn new things best when they are in contrast to other information in the environment or to things that are in contrast to previous experiences. To improve learning, work on your experience of change … study trends, and study changes going on around you. Step out into the unknown as often as you can.
Understand the meaning
In learning, we respond best when we determine things that are most meaningful. Find the definitions that provide that which motivates us to dig deeper.
The bottom line
Connecting with others in the internet world is a great way to share ideas and solicit feedback, new views, and ideas. Once you have found some interesting connections who share like goals, try a collaboration project or two. Collaboration is an excellent way to expand learning in a sharing environment.
If we as learners embrace the new paradigm of active learning, curiosity, and imagination, we could offer a spark to others around us and may even build a new movement.
So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is entirely up to you.
It’s up to you to keep improving your abilities for continuous learning. Lessons are all around you. In many situations, your competitor may be providing the ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.
It’s up to you to keep improving your continuous learning from all around in your environment.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.
When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.
Try. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy continually improve your continuous learning?
Do you have a lesson about making your learning better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.
More reading on learning from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
The Nine Most Valuable Secrets of Writing Effective Copy
What is your choice for the top learning issues of the day? Learning to learn creativity is one of our choices. Taught in schools? We have not found many that teach it. We were very surprised by this finding.
Tomorrow’s illiterate will not be the man who can’t read: he will be the man who has not learned how to learn.
In earlier times, perhaps several generations or so ago, our great grandparents and their parents faced an entirely different problem of learning to learn creativity. In their environment, both generations shared the same problems and basically the same solutions. Learning creativity in this environment was not a priority. Learning was simply a matter of transferring information (facts) from the older generation to the newer one.
Enter the industrial age where the world had begun to change very rapidly and grow in complexity. Old solutions, old facts, were no longer enough. Learning needed to change to keep up, switching from learning old information to discovering and understanding new information, and being creative with new ideas. Clearly, a paradigm shift had begun.
Related: Ideas on Learning Reform and Its Instructional Implications
In the information and internet ages, learning problems have gotten much worse. The amount of new technical information is doubling every 2 years … doubling. We are clearly living in exponential times.
So how do we improve our ability for learning creativity in such a complex environment? We have defined 8 ways we believe are essential in achieving this goal. Let’s discuss each of these:
Learn by doing
Most of what we know, we didn’t learn in school. We learned it in the real world, actually doing, not reading or listening to about doing.
Confucius once said: I hear, I forget. I see, I remember. I do, I understand.
He appreciated that being a creator was the best way to learn. Make your learning be active learning and be creators as often as possible. We believe this the most critical of the 10 ways to improve your learning.
Create curiosity
If we have the guts to think about what we don’t know, confuse our learning, perplex ourselves, and evoke real questions, we can create curiosity. This curiosity can be used to tailor robust methods of blended learning and creativity. Curiosity must come first. Questions can be fantastic windows to great learning, but not the other way around. Build your skill of curiosity … it is a necessity for good learning as well as creativity.
Practice imagination
Albert Einstein once said: Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you anywhere.
He understood the complexities of the world today required imagination for the discovery of new ideas and solutions. Imagination requires lots of practice; it doesn’t just happen on its own. So start working on this skill to add to improve your learning.
By observing life’s experiences around us and careful reflection of what we observe, we can gather facts and information to learn new solutions and methods. Increase your ability to ‘connect the dots’ around you. Take notes and revisit them often.
Embrace the mess of learning creativity. In this new world of continuous learning, we are all teachers as well as learners. We realize learning is often an ugly task. Accept that the process of trial and error is an acceptable learning process.
See our article on Continuous Learning.
Employ novelty
Our brains pay more attention to things in the environment that are new to our experience. So, seek out as many new experiences to try as you can handle and become an explorer. Learn from others’ creativity.
Change and contrast
People learn new things best when they are in contrast to other information in the environment or to things that are in contrast to previous experiences. To improve creativity, work on your experience of change. Step out into the unknown as often as you can.
Connecting with others in the internet world is a great way to share ideas and solicit feedback, new views, and ideas. Once you have found some interesting connections who share like goals, try a collaboration project or two, especially ones on creativity. Collaboration is an excellent way to expand learning in a sharing environment.
We have found two cool examples of learning creativity recently that we will share. Here is the first:
In 2009, scientists from the University of Louisville and MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences conducted a study of 48 children between the ages of 3 and 6. The kids were presented with a toy that could squeak, play notes, and reflect images, among other things. For one set of children, a researcher demonstrated a single attribute and then let them play with the toy. Another set of students was given no information about the toy. This group played longer and discovered an average of six attributes of the toy; the group that was told what to do discovered only about four.
A similar study at UC Berkeley demonstrated that kids given no instruction were much more likely to come up with novel solutions to a problem.
The second example is a piece of creative work from a high school student:
Hold onto your seat; don’t blink your eyes for a second! This is amazing. Seventeen-year-old Joe Bush got a high school assignment to make a video reproduction. He chose history as a theme and tucked it all into two minutes.
He took pictures from the internet, added the track Mind Heist by Zack Hemsey, and voila you have a very creative video.
Congratulations to Joe AND his teacher. You learn creativity by doing, don’t you?
The bottom line
If we as learners embrace the new paradigm of active learning, curiosity, and imagination, we could offer a spark to others around us and may even build a new movement.
The most explosive period of learning creativity occurs in the first years of life before we learn to read. There are lessons in that fact that our fixation on reading, and our stubborn insistence that play, art, music, theater, dance, and so on, are ‘frills’, keep us from understanding and appreciating. Schools are still being built with classrooms rather than flexible workspaces.
Schedules are still being imposed that keep kids in their seats and isolated from the larger world for most of every day. We’re ignoring research and common sense about how humans learn. So what is really new with that?
Prognosticators and futurists try to predict what will happen through some combination of extrapolation and supposition, but the truth is the future will mostly be shaped by the choices we make. We could have chosen to make our society more equal, healthier, and happier, but did not. We can, of course, choose differently. The future will be revealed in what we choose to build.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to continually improving your continuous learning?
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
More reading on continuous learning from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Is Learning a Significant Teaching Product of our Schools?
Why Questioning is Critical to Learning and Problem Solving
What is your choice for the top learning issues of the day? Secrets of creative learning are one of our choices. Taught in schools? We have not found many that teach it. We were very surprised by this finding.
In earlier times, perhaps several generations or so ago, our great-grandparents and their parents faced an entirely different problem of learning to learn creativity.
In their environment, both generations shared the same problems and basically the same solutions.
Learning creativity in this environment was not a priority. Learning was simply a matter of transferring information (facts) from the older generation to the newer one.
Enter the industrial age where the world had begun to change very rapidly and grow in complexity.
Old solutions, old facts, were no longer enough. Learning needed to change to keep up, switching from learning old information to discovering and understanding new information, and being creative with new ideas. Clearly, a paradigm shift had begun.
In the information and internet age, learning problems have gotten much worse. The amount of new technical information is doubling every 2 years … doubling. We are clearly living in exponential times.
So how do we improve our ability for learning creativity in such a complex environment? We have defined 8 ways we believe are essential to achieving this goal. Let’s discuss each of these:
Creative learning methodology.
Learn by doing
Most of what we know, we didn’t learn in school. We learned it in the real world, actually doing, not reading or listening to about doing.
Confucius once said: I hear, I forget. I see. I remember. I do, I understand.
He appreciated that being a creator was the best way to learn. Make your learning be active learning and be creators as often as possible. We believe this the most critical of the 10 ways to improve your learning.
Learn creativity … create curiosity
If we have the guts to think about what we don’t know, confuse our learning, perplex ourselves, and evoke real questions, we can create curiosity. This curiosity can be used to tailor robust methods of blended learning and creativity.
Curiosity must come first. Questions can be fantastic windows to great learning, but not the other way around. Build your skill of curiosity … it is a necessity for good learning as well as creativity.
Creative learning … practice imagination
Albert Einstein once said: Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you anywhere.
He understood the complexities of the world today required imagination for the discovery of new ideas and solutions. Imagination requires lots of practice; it doesn’t just happen on its own.
So start working on this skill to add it to improve your learning.
Observe and reflect
By observing life’s experiences around us and careful reflection of what we observe, we can gather facts and information to learn new solutions and methods. Increase your ability to ‘connect the dots’ around you.
Take notes and revisit them often.
Embrace the mess of learning creativity. In this new world of continuous learning, we are all teachers as well as learners. We realize learning is often an ugly task. Accept that the process of trial and error is an acceptable learning process.
Our brains pay more attention to things in the environment that are new to our experience.
So, seek out as many new experiences to try as you can handle and become an explorer. Learn from others’ creativity.
Change and contrast
People learn new things best when they are in contrast to other information in the environment or to things that are in contrast to previous experiences.
To improve creativity, work on your experience of change. Step out into the unknown as often as you can.
Connect and collaborate
Connecting with others in the internet world is a great way to share ideas and solicit feedback, new views, and ideas. Once you have found some interesting connections who share goals, try a collaboration project or two, especially ones on creativity.
Collaboration is an excellent way to expand learning in a sharing environment.
We have found two cool examples of leaning creativity recently that we will share. Here is the first:
In 2009, scientists from the University of Louisville and MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences conducted a study of 48 children between the ages of 3 and 6. The kids were presented with a toy that could squeak, play notes, and reflect images, among other things.
For one set of children, a researcher demonstrated a single attribute and then let them play with the toy.
Another set of students was given no information about the toy. This group played longer and discovered an average of six attributes of the toy; the group that was told what to do discovered only about four.
A similar study at UC Berkeley demonstrated that kids given no instruction were much more likely to come up with novel solutions to a problem.
The second example is a piece of creative work from a high school student:
Hold onto your seat; don’t blink your eyes for a second! This is amazing. seventeen-year-old Joe Bush got a high school assignment to make a video reproduction. He chose history as a theme and tucked it all into two minutes.
He took pictures from the internet, added the track Mind Heist by Zack Hemsey and voila you have a very creative video.
Congratulations to Joe AND his teacher. You learn creativity by doing, don’t you?
The bottom line
If we as learners embrace the new paradigm of active learning, curiosity, and imagination, we could offer a spark to others around us and may even build a new movement.
The most explosive period of learning creativity occurs in the first years of life before we learn to read. There are lessons in that fact that our fixation on reading, and our stubborn insistence that play, art, music, theater, dance, and so on, are ‘frills’, keep us from understanding and appreciating.
Schools are still being built with classrooms rather than flexible workspaces.
Schedules are still being imposed that keep kids in their seats and isolated from the larger world for most of every day. We’re ignoring research and common sense about how humans learn. So what is really new with that?
Be creative.
Need some help in improving the creativity of you and your staff? Creative ideas to help the differentiation with your toughest competitors.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new creative ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.
Try. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to improving your creativity, innovation, and ideas?
Do you have a lesson about making your creativity better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find him on Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.
More reading on creativity from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
