A New Culture of Learning

three different, yet overlapping, frames for redesigning it. They are homo sapiens, homo faber, and homo ludens—or humans who know, humans who make (things), and humans who play.

What we do in play may best express the sense of becoming. Whatever one accomplishes through play, the activity is never about achieving a particular goal, even if a game has a defined endpoint or end state. It is always about finding the next challenge or becoming more fully immersed in the state of play. In play, therefore, learning is not driven

The new culture of learning actually comprises two elements. The first is a massive information network that provides almost unlimited access and resources to learn about anything. The second is a bounded and structured environment that allows for unlimited agency to build and experiment with things within those boundaries.

The result is a system of reciprocity, where both sets of astronomers are invested and take an active role in learning from each other.

Embracing change and seeing information as a resource can help us stop thinking of learning as an isolated process of information absorption and start thinking of it as a cultural and social process of engaging with the constantly changing world around us.

From this perspective, therefore, the primary difference between the teaching-based approach to education and the learning–based approach is that in the first case the culture is the environment, while in the second case, the culture emerges from the environment—and grows along with it.

Indwelling is the set of practices we use and develop to find and make connections among the tacit dimensions of things. It is the set of experiences from which we are able to develop our hunches and

with an interest or passion that they want to explore are faced with a set of constraints that allow them to act only within given boundaries.

The personal is the basis for an individual’s notions of who she is (identity) and what she can do (agency). It is not necessarily private, though it may be, and it does not exist in a vacuum. We shape and define the boundaries of our agency and identity within the collective.