Future Learning

Students are the future, but what's the future for students? To arm them with the relevant, timeless skills for our rapidly changing world, we need to revolutionize what it means to learn. Education innovators like Dr. Sugata Mitra, visiting professor at MIT; Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy; and Dr. Catherine Lucey, Vice Dean of Education at UCSF, are redefining how we engage young minds for a creatively and technologically-advanced future. Which of these eduvators holds the key for unlocking the learning potential inside every student?

[MUSIC].

The single most important thing we can do,
is to

make sure we've got a world class
education system for everybody.

That is a prerequisite for prosperity.

[SOUND] It is an obligation that we have
for the next generation.

>> I looked at the current education
system.

I said, what's wrong with it?

And the biggest problem that I found was,
it didn't know how to motivate kids.

>> Every person alive, it's in our DNA to
be motivated.

I think the current model, and I'm not
picking out any

players, the current model is just really
good at squashing that motivation.

>> How can you make that nine year old sit
in a class and say, "Do me 17 times tables"?

What for?

[MUSIC].

What if I were to say that arithmetic as
we teach it today is an obsolete skill?

Okay, the whole world will erupt if I say
that

because they'll say, reading, writing,
arithmetic, that's the core of it.

The core of whose education? Core of the
military education.

Go back 200, 300 years in this country and

say that you know, 300 years later no
one's going

to teach anybody how to shoot a gun and no

one's going to teach anybody how to ride a
horse?

And the teacher's going to say, you know,
I mean, those are basic life skills.

This guy will get killed when he moves
out.

And he'll say, no ma'am, the world will
have changed.

These things will become sport.

Shooting is a sport, horse riding is a
sport.

Will arithmetic be a sport in 2061?

>> Let's say I have 3 x is equal to 15.

>> For anyone who doesn't know what Khan
Academy is, it's most known for

its collection of videos that I've been

making, for really the last five, six
years.

Everything from arithmetic all the way
through

calculus and biology and all the rest.

It can be used for individual learners or
it can be used

in the classroom so that every student can
work at their own pace.

My videos are definitely not the state of
the current art.

They're, they're, they're a few steps
behind that.

But, but, but I think that's the mistake
that most

of the education technology's been going
is, that they just...

They just wanna take what's already there
in the current existing model.

And just use the next, the latest
technology to make up,

in their mind, a more refined version of
that same thing.

But they're not, they're not changing the
content, fundamentally.

If the content's really interesting, and
it really is.

I don't make a video on something unless I
find it fascinating.

And if the content is truly fascinating,
it should be reflected in the energy

or the voice of the deliverer and, and it
should be obvious to the student.

They shouldn't have to have a, a rap song

about, you know, a parabola to get excited
about it.

[MUSIC].

>> Video games are actually among most
powerful learning tools

that have ever been created, because if
you look at a

child when they first pick up a video
game, they'll

start and they'll play for five minutes,
and then they'll fail.

Picked themselves up, start again, play for
ten minutes.

They fail. And they will do this 500 times

before they finally succeed and master the
video game.

Learning things all along the way.

Completely self motivated and while I
don't always endorse the notion

of instant gratification [LAUGH] I
certainly endorse the notion of relevance.

In education we provide problems, separate
from the relevance

or the context in which they need to be
used.

That's one of the reasons why students are
so disengaged.

In the video game world it's all about

exploration. You solve a problem when you
bump into.

And in fact that provides the relevance
for solving the problem.

[MUSIC].

>> 12 years ago in 1999 I said, well, how
did I learn how to write a program?

Nobody taught me.

How do children learn to use computers?

Nobody seems to be actually teaching them.

So, I stuck a computer in a slum wall.

Nice big computer in those days with a
nice big broadband connection.

In front of children who had never seen
computers before, hadn't heard

of the internet, had no clue what was
going on, didn't know English.

And they started browsing at about five or
six hours' time.

And then it happened over and over and
over again everywhere.

Until the experiment kind of burst out
onto the

world media with the statement that
children anywhere in groups

can teach themselves to use a computer.

There appears to be no limit to this, that
children can teach themselves almost

anything if given the internet, given the
permission to interact with

each other and given the absence of the
teacher.

[MUSIC]

The absence of the teacher, in the
presence

of the internet, can become a
pedagological tool.

>> In order for education technology to be
successful in a classroom

we're going to have to marry the ecosystem, the

way technology works, with the ecosystem
of the classroom itself.

The goal of this is to get teachers

doing higher order things and let the
computers do

the more basic things of is 2 plus 2

equals 4 and all the practice that is
necessary.

[MUSIC].

>> We want technology that helps us

create an environment where students are
active and

engaged, not just in memorizing facts, but

in working with faculty to really create
knowledge.

Something like the iPad application for
anatomy, I think is going to help them

learn more efficiently, because it gives
them

information when they need to know it.

And one of the principles of adult
learning is you

should learn something when you have a
reason to learn it.

[MUSIC].

>> To begin, connect us together.

>> We think there's a blurry line between
play and learning

and there should be an even blurrier line
between those two things.

When a learning experience is playful and
exploration-oriented, it puts people's

minds into a relaxed state where learning
actually can happen the easiest.

>> I think the future of learning is

really to add a new dimension to learning,
which is the dimension of collaboration.

Collaborator's Classroom is a place where
people can share

ideas that they may not have felt
comfortable sharing in class.

>> There's always some kids that are shy
or they

don't want to raise their hand in class
and when you're

told to do it at home you can actually see
their

opinions and you get to know them as a
person better

[MUSIC].

>> Science has recently told the world
that Pluto is not a planet anymore.

But it's gonna take, literally, a decade
to remove

that fact from the United States science
text book.

With connections, because anyone is able to
improve on the materials and keep things

up to date we can make that change in ten
minutes rather than ten years.

>> We hope that what we're doing is going

to create a far more diverse group of
university students.

Because they will come to the university

with just so much more self-directed
knowledge.

So much more passion and information about
what they want to do.

That's the future.

>> Everyone in the education space, you
know, it's like,

does it work, prove it, this, that and the
other.

And they wanted you to go and prove it
before you even put it out there.

>> Why would schools be so rigid, if they
didn't need to be rigid?

But when did they need to be rigid?

If you look at history the answer stares
at

us, education as we know it came from war.

>> I, I don't know if it's purely an
industrial age type of

thing, if it's a Victorian era, the

educated learned to suppressed, that
suppression of,

of nature instincts is, is part of
becoming part of society.

>> The Victorians, the amazing Victorians,
produced

an education system, which would make us
photocopies of each other.

>> Being quiet and being submissive, I
think

that's, frankly, the only thing that's
taught right now.

Is how do you be submissive?

How do you sit patiently

and be disengaged for an hour and take it?

>> How do you motivate a kid, how do you
keep a kid engaged?

How do you keep them interested?

That is all psychology.

When the gamers went and they created the
best video games that ever existed,

they didn't sit down and say, hey, you know,
what is the cognitive science behind this?

They didn't do that.

They just did it.

They created it and now all the

cognitive scientists are coming back and
saying, what

did you do? Because that's actually one of

the most motivating, engaging media we've
ever seen.

And, and the video game programmers all
said, I

just created something that I would want
to play.

>> A sober prediction might be that
nothing will

take place in the next 40 years despite
the fact

that we now have gone from a PC to an
iPad.

We, the education innovators and the
education industry, need a win.

And once there's one win that everyone can
point to then it's gonna help all of us.

>> A five year old today, by the time he's
25, it's going to be 2031.

Can any teacher say that they're preparing
that child for 2031?

For an unknown world?

But I believe that I can make a curriculum
for that teacher.

And that curricula needs to only have
three things in it.

Reading comprehension, is the most
critical skill at this point in time for

a generation that's going to read off
screens for the rest of their lives.

Information search and retrieval skills.
If people know

what are key words, follow a link or not.

It's a key skill.

If arithmetic is an outdated skill, this
is the skill that will replace it.

And finally, if a child knows how to read,
if a child knows

how to search for information, how do we
teach them how to believe?

See, in our adult heads, each one of us
has a little mechanism.

It comes from different places.

You and I have different mechanisms of how
to believe.

Sometimes we say, this is obvious.

Sometimes you say, because so and so told
me.

Sometimes, you say, this is rubbish.

What's that machine inside?

How early in a child's life can we put
that in there?

If we can do it really, really early,

then we would have armed that child
against doctrine.

And I don't mean only religious doctrine,
I mean doctrine in all its forms.

I think our job as educators, the

biggest job in today's information
saturated world,

is to give the child an armor against
doctrine.

Just as, in another generation we used to
teach the child

how to fight with sword, and how to ride a
horse.

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