The Three Is of Learning in the Digital Age

it was

march 2020 just before the spring break

in america out of nowhere

colleges and universities announced they

are shutting down the campuses

students were asked to leave the

dormitories and go home

international students struggled because

they had no place to go

and their flights were cancelled

staff and professors and college

teachers were asked to go home

and work from home the spring break was

extended by

two weeks so that we can prepare to go

from

in-person teaching to remote learning as

it is called

faculty were trained how to use zoom

technology

or its counterparts use

canvas as a platform for having all of

the course content put in

and we made the transition from the real

world

to the virtual world surprising to

everybody it went well there was a sigh

of relief

there were a few glitches here and there

students got too used to having classes

taken from their home

or apartment complexes and faculty got

used to teaching from

their homes or their personal offices

and we had more equipment more software

hardware etc put together

as they began to teach the spring

semester

the grades were given online fund exams

were given

online this is the world of

digital learning welcome to the world of

digital learning

this is the new phase of learning and

what i’m going to articulate is

how learning has changed over time from

the days of hunters and gatherers

to the farming economy to the industrial

economy

and now the digital economy learning is

fundamental

it’s innate in human beings but it is

also true in

animals true in vegetation all the

scientific evidence shows

a living species unless it learns and

adapts to the environment

is not likely to survive learning is as

innate therefore as hunger

and as you can start to death without

learning

you may not survive because you are not

able to adapt to the changes taking

place in the environment

so learning being so critical we need to

understand

how people learn in the hunters and

gatherer days

learning was individual you learnt on

your own you went out into the jungle

and you found prey you figure out how to

catch the fray

you become entrepreneurship by necessity

by survival essentially

and it was all experiential learning

didn’t speak much either at that time

now comes the farming age where you

congregate together as a community

of several thousands people or more

this is predating the big metropolitan

cities

and you learn three ways i call the

three c’s of learning

you learned from the congregation the

academies like the greek academies of

aristotle and plato

so there was a guru a teacher who taught

you

how to do things or philosophy

then you had the learning by craft you

learned another c

called craft and that you learned how to

be a goldsmith

or how to be a silversmith or whatever

the

occupation that you were involved and

you learned from the community

how to live in the community how to

behave in the community

and at that time a person born

will be dying in the same community in

fact he would never leave

the community so communities were very

local there was no national identity at

that time

there were no sovereign states in their

mind as it is true in many parts of the

world even today

now comes the industrial age all of a

sudden

mass production in the factories needs

more people with literacy

so we invented three hours of learning

reading writing and arithmetic

governments even had policy to make sure

that the people don’t work in the form

as children

but come to the classroom and study so

high school education became mandatory

in other words either 12 years

or 18 years become necessary

and you had to learn three hours of

learning

now comes the digital age where the

learning will shift again into what i

call

three eyes of learning hours of learning

becomes obsolete

three eyes of learning becomes mainframe

mainstream

and the first law i is interactive

learning will become more interactive

because of the technology and of course

all the scientific evidence shows

that when you have a lot of interaction

between the student

and the teacher of student and the

knowledge then the

there is more engagement because of that

there is more retention because of that

there is more learning

learning will be integrated what is

common between math

and music we never thought about it but

there is something in common because

both

are languages so one can go to a

meta-analysis

and figure out the common structure and

therefore we don’t have these debates

anymore in the digital world

that you are good in math but not in

music or arts and culture

you’re good in arts and culture but not

in math i think that’s a myst

uh that’s a philosophy or something we

have created

which is not absolutely true and then

the learning will be individualized

so we will have mass affordability with

this technology

that is unprecedented and learning can

take place any place anytime

does not have to be for example learning

in a local environment in a local

community

the reach of internet and the digital

technology is enormous

the three eyes of learning will be the

new framework

interactive integrated individualized

which by definition means that one can

democratize

learning and have these halves and the

have-nots

in the digital divide that we talk about

could be made into common platform

the world can be flat in the process

there is no some such thing as

unlearning people and learning people

democratization of technology is today

very possible

in the digital age compared to the

electromechanical age

i also believe that this learning

platform will be having consequences

like any technology has consequences

but positive consequences will be

greater than the negative consequences

so what is likely to happen

first of all tablets will become

textbooks

all the content is digitized today

anyhow

so traditional textbooks that we have

will be

peripheral essentially printed copies

will give way to a digital

content content will be so massive

that we’ll have to learn how to curate

the content how to organize it

just like a library organizes the

content or museum orgasm

organizes the artifacts there’ll be more

self-learning

rather than relying somebody else to

teach us we’ll be learning how to

self-learn ourselves

just like artificial intelligence is

self-learning

machine learning is self-learning we can

do as humans even better

and learning will be assisted by bots

and robots

especially for professors and teachers

there is no need for teaching assistants

today i can have bot and a robot that

assist me does all my work beforehand

i go into the classroom this is a

totally different world

but it’s a world where the journey has

just begun and things that are happening

so fast from a technological viewpoint

that the three eyes of learning will

happen sooner than later

the divide between the emerging

economies and advanced economies

will become plateauing especially with

the

cell phone technology bypassing the pc

revolution

that we went through china india

africa all those countries will find

that they can be in the knowledge

community

as as quickly and as well as any place

in the advanced economies

welcome to the world of three eyes of

learning