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