A New Culture of Learning

With just a small shift, from answering questions to asking them, inquiry emerges as a tool for harnessing not only the passion of students but also the stockpile of tacit knowledge that comes from a lifetime of experience doing the things that have become second nature to them.

If the twentieth century was about creating a sense of stability to buttress against change and then trying to adapt to it, then the twenty-first century is about embracing change, not fighting it. Embracing change means looking forward to what will come next. It means viewing the future as a set of new possibilities, rather than something that for

Making knowledge stable in a changing world is an unwinnable game.

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.

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

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.

When we build, we do more than create content. Thanks to new technologies, we also create context by building within a particular environment, often providing links or creating connections and juxtapositions to give meaning to the content. Learning now, therefore, goes far beyond a simple transfer of information and becomes inextricably bound with

riddle. Games researcher Espen Aarseth describes the dynamic as one of aporia and epiphany. In both cases, whatever information one has is insufficient to reach a conclusion about meaning or knowledge. Play provides the opportunity to leap, experiment, fail, and continue to play with different outcomes—in other words to riddle one’s way through a m

We call this style of learning inquiry. It creates a motivation to learn and provides a set of constraints that make the learning meaningful.