Learning, as a psychological activity, also evolves as the product of individual and social evolution. Our species becomes more knowledgeable and able to quickly learn anything, so the expectations for learning increase too.
From oral presentation and static text-books to BYOD tablets and web apps, the future will always nurture more efficient and also more diverse ways to communicate. The latest app, gadget, wearable, protocol, stack, meme, slang. From the Oxford comma to the latest build, the ways we communicate and fulfill our needs is not only a reflection of our psychology, it is in itself an extension of the fundamental rules of life.
Everything we invent is a product of life
Communication describes itself (words about words), is self-referential and can be studied as an aggregate organism: the sum of the minds that filter, persist and communicate the individual memes. Just like the sum of the bees that make a hive and produce honey for a queen. The Queens of our societies are our muses and the projections of our ideals, needs and motivations. Our honey is that new tech, that sweet ride or accessory.
Our feathers that show others we are doing great
As a business idea gains market traction, the market rushes and supply meets demand; significantly sharpening the efficacy and efficiency of product and delivery. There is an app for that. There is a startup for that. There is a post-it for that. We live in an era where ideas are abundant and the laws that regulate the market complex enough to necessitate at least one full-time, competent (competitive too) lawyer. And a marketer. And a designer.
And a unicorn
But the key to all of our human existence lies on our individual ability to produce that which the ecosystem finds valuable, one way or another and to extreme degrees: the poor, the miserable, and the absurdly rich. An extremely distributed system that shaves off barely-existing quantities from a mind-boggling number of transaction fees is basically invisible to the users but can rake these obscene amounts of cash, and less likely to garner objections or scrutiny because it feeds so many mouths under its shade. This is the power of the brand and the tycoons behind them.
The ability to almost-imperceptibly be everywhere and take almost nothing until it adds up to everything (that matters)
Teachers need certain materials to be learned, and students need to learn these materials. That is what the money is for: to have people learn useful things. A teacher who can communicate effectively and also meets the needs of a modern student fares better than another, who is disinterested in communicating at all.
A babysitter is not a mentor
Efficient communication is not only the ability to interact through physical media (talking, face to face, visual aids) but also cyber-media: a classroom web app, mobile site, beacon, geotag. If a person speaks more than one language and can program too, there are that many more tools to reach a broader audience and aid in the formation of fundamentals.
People go to schools to learn. Multiple channels of communication, as well as a structured and organized maintenance of knowledge body, are the fundamentals that allow the success of any school or place of learning. A multilingual course coupled with electronic aids for translation and accessibility.
More people can learn and understand, better and more
Our current universal tools, the HTML/CSS/JS trifecta are still not to the point where just anyone can pick them up and produce something decent (or at all) in a short amount of time, but they are evolving one way or another. Each library, each project is a specimen with a specific set of mutations with the purpose of addressing a specific set of needs. Some of these projects will succeed and imprint in others the successful pattern, uncovering yet another new set of needs ahead.
function soon(){ '...' }
A mentor must seed ideas to harvest knowledge, anything else is just data in memory
ReplyDelete