Page 165 - Microsoft Word - The Future of Learning April 2017.docx

can then set up businesses that pay said king/queen an ongoing tax for the next hundred years or so, and you then use that money to build a bigger army to take over countries that are closer to home and where you can get a better return (greater rewards) with less risk (to said king/queen).
The simple concept underpinning investment is:
(Variable 1) resources are contributed (Variable 2) for a period of time
(Variable 3) and you may reap a return (Variable 4) based on the risk you took
The concept of investment is an extraordinary powerful one as it can be applied to a range of contexts such as investing in shares, people, creating resources, or saving species/environments by contributing time, money, intellect or other resources. The return you receive for the investment may be social justice, financial, saving habitats, friendship etc. It does not take 10 weeks to understand the concept of investment. However, by understanding this idea and having experienced several contexts to do with investment, you form a concept surrounding investment and you can then start to predict how to invest wisely, in the things that might make a difference such as people, relationships and learning, along with money to make a difference in our world.
So ... back to the fourth learning paradigm shift and how we should invest in this wisely. If you are going to invest then you want a return on what the resources you invested. If you just get back what you invested, then there is no point in investing. When schools invested in technology there was little improvement or change to the education and learning outcomes, so the investment can mostly be described as a loss. The third paradigm shift provided us better access to knowledge and understanding, if the book was structured purposefully. Educators mostly reinvented the notion of thematic projects but rather than crating posters they created PowerPoint presentations.
Instead of using the internet to simply gather knowledge, what if we used it to find a prompt to highlight a social issue that needs resolving and let the learner’s curiosity drive them to find a way to help that situation. We need to make sure that the solution that they create does not just solve the problem for right now, but rather, it enables the recipient(s) to help themselves, so they can take pride in their own accomplishments. In this way, the investment in other people is ongoing.
What technology allows us to do is to navigate the learning journey beyond the still water of knowing ‘stuff’ (knowledge) and send us through the rapids of building ideas and concepts, experiencing the thrill of the ‘aha! moments’ we experience. Moments later we are back into the next set of rapids as we build further ideas across new contexts to build additional concepts. Then over the waterfall of extending those concepts to form concept frameworks that can then be applied creatively to ...
... come up with innovative new concepts and concept frameworks as we are swept away by the realisation that new and innovative concept frameworks could be applied to create totally new products, services, systems, environments or media, that might just change people’s lives.
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