Review of A New Culture of Learning

For a grad school class I am taking we were assigned to read A New Culture of Learning by Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown. This book explains that three fundamental exercises: Play, Questioning, and Imagination are vital for learning to occur in our classrooms.  They argue the need to incorporate the principles into our classrooms is due to the fact that our world is changing and that innovation will be the key to a child's success in their future.  After the first few chapters I was intrigued with the ideas of "cultivating minds" of the learners in our classrooms and setting up learning experiences to encourage collectives to form.  I found myself unconvinced by the end of the book that their ideas are new or applicable to a classroom.
Most of their ideas remind me of John Dewey's work and other experiential education advocates.  Their description of tactic versus explicit learning made me think of Dewey's work that was written a hundred years ago, yet the authors failed to mention him or use his work to support their points.  I whole-heartedly agree that experiential education is the right choice for our classrooms, but I am still searching for a way to set up more experiential experiences and still maintain a high expectation for content understanding.  We still need people to know things.  Doctors need to know the symptoms of diseases for the patients they will see and understand the treatment for the disease.  Lawyers need to know and understand the law.  Service industry personnel need to know and understand the information and skills necessary to perform their jobs.  In many instances the skills needed for the professions in our world aren't changing and at what point do we just accept that a kid needs to memorize 2 + 2 is four?

Thomas and Brown also spend a considerable part of their book arguing that games such as World of Warcraft offer the youth and adult communities opportunities for learning.  Although they provide examples of the collective learning that takes place within these games I find myself unconvinced that playing these games for hours on end are a good use of time for our citizens.  I kept waiting for Thomas and Brown to provide evidence of the gamers using the skills they learned within the games to contribute to the actual world community (rather than only their virtual community) in a positive and productive way but that evidence was never presented.  The negatives of kids getting addicted to these games and the high correlation of depression with devoting a great deal of time to playing the games makes the possible positives of the learning that occurs (but maybe not even transferred) within the game not worth it to me.


I will implement some of the ideas Thomas and Brown presented in their book.  I specifically liked their reflections about feedback in that the feedback should lead to a desire to improve.  I plan to incorporate this concept in my classroom this year by using feedback with students not just to indicate whether they got the correct answer or not, but also to challenge them to improve in many skills a science class lends itself to.

Overall, I felt that I was reading a lecture about not lecturing.  If play, questioning, and imagination are the keys to learning, how could the authors have used this format in their book to demonstrate their point?  If knowing, making, and playing are vital skills, then what journey could the authors have taken me on so that I could know, make, and play so that I could move forward with not just explicit knowledge (as they indicate is not valuable), but rather an experience with tactic knowledge.  I wish that this book had relevant examples for how to implement their ideas about experiential education into classrooms.  Although I agree with many of the concepts in the book, I could not recommend it to a colleague for the many things I found myself wanting from this book that weren't there.

Source: 
 Thomas, D., & Brown, J. S. (2011). A new culture of learning, cultivating the imagination for a world of constant change. Createspace.