Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

10.29.06 | One of the things I find most exciting about the MacArthur Initiative in Digital Media and Learning is that it is itself a “skunkworks.”  (If you don’t know what that is, please go back and read my last Spotlight blog entry!)  By putting its name and its funding behind an initiative so innovative, MacArthur, in one stroke, gives credibility to those who have been slogging along in this field, often to the incredulity of our colleagues. 

If it takes a village to raise a child, it may just take a national initiative to develop a new field—especially one that spans all of the established disciplines.  The trick is how to galvanize energies, knowledge, methods, and expertise from many fields to make a new one?  Especially given resistances inevitable in those fields themselves?

The best way I know is the combination of top-down and bottom-up that the MacArthur Foundation has hit upon.  Fantastic teaching and learning already under way as well as a visible national launch that will elicit proposals from all the best researchers. 

But what happens next?  When I wrote about skunkworks, I mentioned that one reason for these rogue operations is that, if they fail, the loss to the larger institution is minimal.  A wise respondent reminded me that, of course, failure can be the most important contribution skunkworks make.  Great teachers, like gamers, know that you learn as much from failure as success.  (That’s why it’s called “trial-and-error” not “trial-and-perfection.”) I hope MacArthur supports some risky projects where the learning potential is enormous even if the possibility of failure is high.  I hope it puts some of its clout and impeccable reputation behind the concept of the bold, daring, and implausible.  The visionary.

Why?  Because if Digital Learning is really something different, then we need to mine it differently.  If we are right in our hopes for Digital Learning—Web 2.0 social learning, peer-to-peer education, collaborative cross-field thinking—we may have to unlearn our expertise (and status) and relearn the risky business of learning.  Giving up the power of one’s home discipline requires something I’ve heard called “epistemological humility.”  That means we first must be humble about what we know in order to see the value in what someone else knows.  The risks are high.  But the rewards are huge, for ourselves as lifelong teachers and for the next generation of students.