Book Review Learning in the Digital Age by Cathy Davidson and David Goldberg

Future of Thinking (John D. and Catherine T. Macarthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning)

by Cathy N Davidson, David Theo Goldberg

"The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age" gives a very interesting analysis of the how social media and web 2.0 could and should change the way that learning institutions structure and run their learning. The book is aimed at universities, but is equally applicable to any organisation concerned with learning or knowledge, particularly professional membership institutions, such as the British Computer Society or Royal College of General Practitioners.

The book was itself developed collaboratively, with an early draft being posted for comment and a couple of seminars to discuss the main points.

The ten main conclusions are presented in a chapter titled "(In)Conclusive: Thinking the Future of Digital Thinking" which forms a good summary of the book and the way forwards. A summary of them is:

1. Self-Learning: the move to self guided learning rather than following structured courses.
2. Horizontal Structures: peer-to-peer rather than teacher to student.
3. From Presumed Authority to Collective Credibility: the need to prove credibility with content.
4. A Decentered (SIC) Pedagogy: rather than chalk and talk in a lecture room.
5. Networked Learning: a participatory process where interaction is expected, corrections made through exchange and knowledge deepened through extended engagement.
6. Open-Source and Open Access Education.
7. Learning as Connectivity and Interactivity: including examples of shared decision making in massively multi-player games.
8. Lifelong Learning: a given for most professional membership organisations.
9. Learning Institutions as Mobilising Networks: for me this is the key recommendation - that institutions should become mobilising networks, offering opportunities to learn and create knowledge collaboratively. This is recognised as being a major challenge for many institutions as it cuts across traditional course and assessment structures, and requires a flexibility and agility that can be difficult where tradition and rules are deeply embedded. [See also: blog post Institutions as Mobilising Networks]
10. Flexible Scalability and Simulation: the need to support groups of varying size.

I do have a few minor quibbles. The book does rather labour some points (perhaps a consequence of the collaborative online authorship and commenting), some of the conclusions are rather tentative, and there is an assumption that all learning will be via teams.