Learning Theory

There are two fundamental challenges in learning: 1) people have trouble understanding and 2) people have trouble remembering (or more accuratly—recalling what they have, in actuality, stored into long-term memory). Although far from satisfactory, our early attempts to use technology in both schools and businesses have been focused on facilitating understanding. Few serious attempts, however, have been focused on helping us remember what we’ve understood longer than is necessary to finish assignments, pass tests or complete courses. The resulting status quo? We barely understand, then quickly forget most of what we learn. What an incredible waste of time, energy and both human and financial resources.

The truth is that while technology increasingly provides the requisite infrastructure, platform mobility and social connectivity necessary to solve both the comprehension and retention challenges, few have endeavored to put forth the necessary principles, methods and specific technological tools that will substantially answer these challenges. The reason? We’ve been so consumed with putting computing devices into everyone’s hands and building the Internet that we haven’t developed a proper vision regarding how people should leverage all that infrastructure to build their own personal knowledge wealth. In short, and with notable nascent exceptions—it’s like we’ve been running go-carts on a Nascar track, we’ve been propagating the same old ideas in our brand new environment.

We’re all familiar with the pattern. A person takes a course, studies, completes the assignments, takes tests, and then forgets everything. The fact is that most of us have trouble recalling knowledge we’ve assimilated when it’s not put to active, daily use. In this model, time is the enemy of knowledge retention. That’s why new courses often begin with review—to try to re-activate and bring to recollection learning that has gone dormant. Considering that we might spend anywhere from 10 - 50% of our time going back over ground we’ve already covered, wouldn’t it seem that traditional knowledge retention strategies are blatantly inefficient and ineffective? What would happen if a business spent 10-50% of its time re-doing things? The answer is that it would be out of business—yet, we as a society have become accepting of this model in every educational environment and at every educational level. How have we come to accept such mediocrity?

I believe that the answer lies in the fact that whether in a classroom setting or within an on- or off-line computer-based environment, throughout modern history, education has persistently been course-centric. This means that a person’s relationship with a course has been the basis for most knowledge building activities. The problem is that once courses are concluded and performance measured, short of the learner, generally no other course participant is around to preserve or expand upon what is learned or to care much about what happens next. What’s more, by and large we have no effective tools to compensate for the innate weaknesses for the human mind—a system which is geared toward suppressing recollection. Translated—we have no effective means of taking what we’ve learned forward into our lives in a way that is meaningful and useful moment-by-moment. This being the case, one might wonder (as many of us often do) why we’re spending so much of our lives participating in courses that teach us stuff that we’re going to quickly forget?

I propose a new notion—that the most important relationships we have in education are not with courses or with the individuals who help facilitate our learning. The most important relationships we have in education are with the subjects being learned, themselves. The person-subject relationship should be central and all of our interpersonal and technological efforts should be focused on strengthening that relationship. It’s not that courses or the individuals we learn with are not important—they are. It’s that long after courses are concluded and the faces have come and gone, only the relationships we have with subjects endure. Rather than being an enemy of knowledge retention, the right principles, methods and technological tools should make time its greatest ally.

In many ways our educational system is rapidly ascending to higher ground, but in other essential ways, it’s stuck on a plateau. To move beyond this plateau, I propose that our model must evolve. The book I'm currently writing, RACKING YOUR BRAIN: The art of Learning in a Wired World, has as its aim to help with that evolution by providing the principles, methods and tool-blueprints that will answer both the comprehension and retention challenge.

—John Lenker, February 25, 2009