On Leaving the Garden of Eden

The Edenic myth is about growing beyond and out of cultural comfort zones.  First, we had to deal with exposure as we forsook temperate climates.  "Adam and Eve" clothed themselves out of necessity, not modesty, as they learned how to survive harsher environments.  Modesty followed custom, not vice versa.

Then we learned how to produce and store enough food to last through longer and harsher winters; next we learned how to transport goods, including by sea and eventually air, to facilitate production, storage and distribution of essential goods.

What we learned in the second half of the 20th century is how to inhabit extremes of atmospheric pressure--from the vacuum of space to the breathing of compressed gases underwater.

Each of these advances takes us out of the "Garden of Eden" of our species' current comfort zone, always carrying with us the tools we learned to use in previous advances.

It makes me wonder where the next advance will take us....  Somewhere, no doubt, where outer space, inner space, and cyberspace converge.

And, of course, as individuals we are continually cast out of the Garden as we learn to be ashamed of our previous ignorance/innocence.

The serpent in the Garden is the urge to continually advance, to grow in knowledge, which eventuates in wisdom.  The forbidden fruit is knowledge itself, the fruit of our seemingly unwise desire to leave Eden in search of additional knowledge and greater wisdom.

On Future Education

Future education will consciously include machine learning as well as human learning.  Regardless of whether the learner is a human or a machine, education will be characterized by these traits:

·         peer-to-peer learner networks

·         open source wikis

·         experiential and exploratory

·         process oriented

·         individualized and learner-directed

·         global collaboration

·         interactive use of genuine text

Human learning plus machine learning will spur progress by providing immediate access to knowledge development.  The machines will be primarily concerned with relationships, cross-checking and validating facts as they are collected; the humans will be concerned with interrelationships, appropriating and revealing truths as they are discovered.

"Facts" will consist of data points in all formats: video, voice, music, hypertext, space-time information,¹ and their relationships to humans and other machines.  "Truths" will include opinions, emotions, insights,² and their interrelationships to literature history, mathematics, science, and technology.  As truths are posited in the cloud, they become facts to be cross-checked and validated, then made available for human access, peer review, substantiation, and appropriation.  Thus information becomes knowledge and recursively eventuates as wisdom.³

Self-directed learning automatically adapts curricula to personality type, intelligence strengths, and learning style, whether the learner is a machine or a human.

Most people will not say, "I am a student" or even a learner; fewer yet will claim to be teachers, though we will all fulfill both roles as we access and post information.  We will simply be living our lives—traveling, working, shopping, scuba diving, or whatever—but we will engage in these activities through media that are conscious of themselves as learning organizations.  There will be a role for Blackboard, Moodle, and their heirs, but it will really be tomorrow's Googles, Facebooks, and the like who facilitate this transformation to learning systems that are not merely lifelong—they are eternal.

We will pay for our truths with a currency of facts, finally becoming the prosumers that Alvin Toffler predicted in The Third Wave.

1.  i.e., bioinformatical, logistical, transactional, financial, meteorological, astronomical information, etc.

2.  i.e., medical, economical, cosmological knowledge, etc.

3.  i.e, truth, beauty, and goodness