🌀 on the present & future of authentic and transformative learning - tools, resources & pathways

intro & context

learning is a huge topic, so i'll share a few of the perspectives and resources that have been the most alive for me over the past few years.

in this essay i'm going to focus more on the perspective of the individual learner, as she navigates the increasing complexity of our world.

institutionalized education is a very impactful area of our world today, and there are wonderful works of people like zak stein with education in a time between worlds and initiatives that support holistic learning in the form of self-development, regeneration, decolonization, social responsibility and civic engagement such as bildung, ecoversities, gaia education, civic square and many others. i have even curated an innovative education projects & organizations database.

but the discussion about systemic impacts of our existing educational design and emergent approaches will come later. after all, we create institutions, pedagogies, tools, resources and support networks, precisely to support individuals in their learning processes.

for now, there are many resources out there on unschooling, homeschooling and self-directed learning. in brazil, there are many folks doing amazing work on this direction such as alex bretas and luis sérgio ferreira, as well as transformative pedagogical approaches such as pedagogy of the oppressed and cooperation pedagogy that add to the more disseminated montessori, waldorf, constructivist approaches. beyond their bright contributions to the field, from my own experience of growing up being obsessed with gaming and seeing how much it both developed and hindered my cognitive processes, i'm particularly interested in the role of games and technology in learning.

there are many fields that deepen this understanding, such as serious games, (...), computer supported collaborative learning, but where i found the most enlightening perspectives/literature was in the studies of cognitive science, extended cognition, personal knowledge management and tools for thought.

this, plus the tons of value i found in my own anthropological explorations/research on wisdom traditions such as buddhism, taoism and shamanism, as well as emergent fields such as adult development theory, integral theory and metamodernism will compose the majority of this article.

granted, i still haven't delved as deep into early cybernetics, information theory and a few other computer scienc-y topics, which hold very interesting insights too.

a few important distinctions

1) active vs passive learning

the first simple, yet major distinction that helps me make sense of everything else to come is that there are 2 "paths", "modes" or "approaches" of learning/growth/transformation:

active & passive. they're always on and you're always flickering through them. they kind of map into iain mcgilchrist's research on brain hemispheres (right and left).

active: intentional focus, objective-oriented approach. maximize your active time (biohacking, support systems, etc), design your lifestyle. (RH).

you experience this type of flow by intensely focusing/directing your attention into something.

passive: optimize your systems/environments so you're learning even during downtime/low-energy moments. "learning through osmosis". "you are the result of the 5 people you live with the most". CEP+N. (LH)

you experience this type of flow by intensely letting go into the experience, into what's emerging NOW.

modern western culture is much more used to the right hemisphere route - define priorities, goals, plan, act on it.

but the feeling of interconnectedness, flow, magic, only really happens when we're able to tap into this other hemisphere.

2) expanding our understanding of knowledge & cognition

cognitive scientist and buddhist scholar john vervaeke proposes 4 ways of knowing, being they: 1) participatory; 2) perspectival; 3) procedural; and 4) propositional knowing.

that's somewhat associated with the concept of cognition as 4e cognition: 1) enacted; 2) embedded; 3) embodied; and 4) extended.

the role of ontological design in learning: how much context influences us and tapping into other forms of intelligence.

researchers/practitioners such as maggie appleton on the primacy of metaphor in learning, visual communication and in the design of our whole web.

gordon brander on personal systems design.

bret victor - on exploring the unique capabilities of the computational medium - to help us move beyond interactivity, into creating/representing world models and enabling new [modes of thinking]. a few great examples: a brief rant on the future of interaction design, explorable explanations. simple examples/low-hanging fruits: scrollscape...

robert haisfield on collective knowledge management, with his research on scaling synthesis.

andy matuschak & michael nielsen's cornerstone work on [developing transformative tools for thought](How can we develop transformative tools for thought?), augmenting long-term memory and intelligence as a whole.

jacky zhao's ideas and curation on research debt, knowledge distillation, interoperability, composability, distributed systems and human-computer interaction.

+ speculative designs/prototypes such as project xanadu, wonderOS, mercuryOS, codexOS, and my own l1f3 OS.

+ other researchers such as: raghav agrawal, omar rizwan, serj hunt and pretty much anyone associated with the ink & switch lab.

++ communities that apply these principles in practice such as música do círculo - 4e cognition, 4e cognition and music - integrative literature review.

they point at something that rings very true to my young, eager, child self: ⬇

visual, spatial, interactive learning.

explorable explanations
gallery of concept visualization

3) discovery-based learning

learning is much more effective if we have immersion and meaning in a persistent context. -> curiosity-driven, agent-driven vs imposed.

they give the learner agency (interactivity) and meaning through worldbuilding - major aspects of gamified learning - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_uH-C5MZRA

it's easy to talk about

discovery-driven, insight-driven, learner-driven, proposition-driven, provocation-driven, curiosity-driven learning.

who is doing it, and how?

-> globe engineer
-> sublime
-> learn anything

can you have it really be divorced from disciplines? abordagens conteudistas (discipline-based). (e.g. TTfT on memorizing key elements of a field).

knowledge-based (insight-based) -> thing is: block-level. -> a book isn't an approachable level of abstraction. neither is a paper. an article is more like it. supporting, challenging and given context to a paragraph.

caution: "learning porn" (as in developing skills), not reflecting, applying, sharing with others -> 4-quadrant journeys, rest, other frames of relative importance.

play-to-win, post-work/post-scarcity society, library of economic possibility / deep wealth / etc -> interbeing inc + lots of other web3 examples, public goods/incentive structures, digital commons as online spaces vs personal systems design as developing digital commons.