Learning in a Time of Abundance - A Conversation with Dave Cormier

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

There's a place for all the different kinds of knowledges we have. There's a place for problem solving. You know, if I have a leaky tap, I want it to stop leaking. It's the way that it excludes the uncertain that for me is the problem. Abundance leads to an awful lot of uncertainty, but that uncertainty was always there. It's that we didn't have enough access to see it.

Hi everyone, thanks for joining me this week for another episode of the Future Learning Design Podcast with me, Tim Logan. With information and connection being so abundant in our technology-infused world, why do we still try to pin down particular knowledges into a fixed curriculum? And what if the community itself was the curriculum? These are the fascinating questions that Dave Cormier is asking in his brilliant new book, Learning in a Time of Abundance. With 25 years of experience as a teacher, researcher, and author, Dave is interested in how technology how technologies change what it means to learn and to have learned. He is currently the learning specialist for digital strategy and special projects at the Office of Open Learning at the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada. Dave is also a man of many talents, as an active blogger, keen gardener and set builder, and previously a lobster fisherman. So there's some exciting stuff to be talked about here, I think. Dave, good, very good to meet you. Thank you for taking the time to join us on the podcast, firstly.

Thanks for having me. It's great to get a chance to talk.

Cool. So people will have heard me say this before, but I'm a bit of a sucker for really good book titles and yours, yours is a corker, man. I mean, it's really a great title, Learning in a Time of Abundance. The Community is the Curriculum. Mm-hmm. Like, wow, there's some good stuff going on there, right? So there's a lot, a lot to talk about.

Yeah, I know. It's, it's funny cuz the title came together over a long time. Community is Curriculum is the title of one of the first articles I ever wrote.

Yeah.

And the abundance piece took a long time to understand that that's what I was talking about. Yeah. But it's sort of, it's almost the story of the title is almost the story of the book.

Interesting. And they just, before we get into the book, Is this an urban myth? I just wanted to clarify. Is it correct that you coined the term MOOC?

I'm afraid so.

Ah, dude, it was you.

I'm afraid so. I'm sorry about that. So the way that story goes is Stephen Downs and George Siemens were planning for the first so-called MOOC in the summer of '08. And I was on a call with George and I was like, almost feel like, 'cause they'd gotten to like 1,700 people who were coming and we're like, okay, happening.

Yeah.

And I was like, it's almost like it's a muscle memory course. And I wrote a blog post about it like 3 days later or whatever. And it's gotten taken up as the sort of place for that word. But I mean, it's, it's like anything else.

You say lots of things in your life and sometimes people would say, yeah, but that's, you know, to, to coin a term that has, has become globally resonant and relevant is a good, good claim to fame, I reckon.

It's got its upsides and its downsides.

And then just, sorry, just as another aside, you went massively up in my estimation when I got to chapter 2 and you quote Annie DeFranco as the first. That was brilliant. So you were, yeah, brownie points there. Definitely. There you go. We'll get onto that. But so abundance, there's this idea of it being a kind of a time of abundance, but informational abundance. And that's clear, you know, with the idea of MOOCs and the ideas of just ubiquitous information everywhere and access in our pockets and all of those kinds of things. Does it mean more to you than that? But, you know, is it, is it about informational abundance or is it, is there something else going on with that word?

Well, as I'm wont to do, I kind of cheat when I use that word because I do use it for multiple things.

Yeah.

So I think there's that abundance, I think is technical in the sense that we can count the information. So yes, information abundance. I think there's an abundance of connection and an abundance of sort of access and an abundance. It's not only the information that's abundant, but our decision-making is also abundant. So because we have all this access, because we have all these things, because we're in a variety of discussions across a variety of different code switches, like not just with our family group, not just with our work group, but across a bunch of spaces, because our friendships don't close off the way they used to. So like, I'm still in contact with the people I knew in high school, in university, when I lived in Korea, when I lived in Slovakia, like all those contact points. There's an abundance of decision-making that I think is probably the crux of the challenge for folks is that you're constantly in a whole bunch of different sort of expected decision-making places on things that don't have any.

And do you think of it as a challenge, like as a negative challenge? I mean, I'm sure we'll get into many of the aspects of that, but that was an interesting choice of words that it's a, it's somehow a challenge to deal with. Yeah.

Well, we certainly, one way or the other, we certainly have not developed the tools to deal with it.

Sure.

So it's definitely a challenge now because we're still teaching from a scarcity model of learning, right? So where acquiring new information is always of value and where we have an, I would say, non-sophisticated way of deciding what we should use as part of our decision-making process and also how we go about doing that, right? And how we have this idea that people should be able to respond to things and like somehow my opinion about a refugee crisis is relevant or like where we get engaged in those things. So I definitely think it's a challenge for most people now. And I mean, there's a lot of people making connections between those challenges and anxiety and decision-making is really even like at a, at an individual personal level. So like when I look at my kids and they decide who they want to be, my choice, I had like 5 choices. There were like 5 kinds of people when I was in high school. There was those guys and those guys and those guys and those guys and those guys. You know what I mean? And there were some people were really carving out their own space, but their identity wasn't being compared against somebody else. They were trying to shape their own, right? Whereas now there are like 7 memes that came out this week, and your choice between them identifies where you fit in the thing with the—

like, it's, it's true. Yeah, huge overload in many ways. Yeah, no, that's interesting. And it, it makes me think, actually, I heard Indra Adnan talking about, because that's often seen as a negative, right? But actually, she spoke about that as almost an increased capacity for self-reflexivity in relation to, because you're seeing, you're not only seeing all those choices, you're also seeing yourself reflected back from your own feed, right? And so there's something interesting going on there, I think, for young people about my self-reflexivity, my positionality that I can somehow see more clearly in relation to all those other abundant choices.

I'm not always happy about what I'm seeing, frankly.

Right.

Sometimes when I, I'll look at my feed or like say my Instagram Reels or something, I'd be like, is that what I'm looking at? You know? And so like right now all my Instagram feed is filled with gardening stuff, which is fine cuz I just built a backyard garden, a squirrel-resistant backyard garden. So a lot of squirrels in my feed as well.

Abundant squirrels, right?

An abundance of squirrels. Exactly. But there are other times where I look at my feed and I'm going, you're not healthy right now. I can tell just by the looks of it that you're not stopping on the kinds of things that reflect the person you want to be.

Yeah.

And I think you're right. But, but that's exactly the kind of literacy we need to be talking about. What you just described is one of those things we need to understand about ourselves the same way as, you know, you look in the mirror. Well, look at your feed. There's some stuff there you're going to learn about yourself that I think is super relevant in terms of your own growth journey.

Yeah. Yeah. No, it's interesting. But just to dwell slightly on the, some kind of disposition towards the world of abundance, right? Because you use the word scarcity, right? And so scarcity and abundance usually are held up against each other as somehow opposites. But there's also something about a dispositional state about, I can perceive things in terms of scarcity, like there's not enough for me and I need more of this and that, or I can perceive things in Actually, there's a lot of this incredible stuff that we live in and through to go around and let's, let's kind of work with the abundance of life to create more generative spaces. I don't know. There's something there.

I hear what you're saying. I think it's important to make a couple of distinctions. One is the difference between material abundance, which we do not have, and information abundance, which—

Right.

So from a material abundance standpoint, like we're running out of oil. There's going to be no cobalt in 10 years. Like, I'm not suggesting that that's abundant. And I'm not also just to say, I'm, when I say information abundance, that's obviously structured by those people who have access to that.

Right.

And this abundance also creates a bigger range of difference between the haves and the have-nots, which is also part of the story too. So I'm not meaning to not include that conversation, but you're right. I think that there's a disposition towards this that's healthier and a disposition towards this that is less healthy, but it's exactly that realization that once you understand that we've made this transition from scarcity to abundance. You can look at abundance in a positive way.

Yeah.

Like I say to my kids, you can choose to be bored and allow that space of creativity to happen and understand that in that space of creativity. So let's say that you're— to use the example of, I forget what song it is, but there's a Beatles song. Paul McCartney tells this story all the time where they needed a chord and they knew they didn't have it. And so they get on a bus and they go across London to some other place and go to this guy's house and he shows them the chord. And then they get back on the bus and they go back to their house. They make one of their famous songs. And abundance means that you can have access to that chord immediately, but what you have to do is choose to create the space of creativity ahead of time. And then you can just have that thing you need.

Yeah.

So that mindset of saying, I'm going to shape my experience and then use all of these amazing things out there to help support that experience. That's an amazing time to be alive.

Right.

It's the inverse where you are just trying to grab all of the things you can, as you might do in a scarcity model of information, which overwhelms. And then eventually you just stop. And then you get the factionalism that we have from a political standpoint, for instance, where people have way too many decisions to make. And so they align themselves from belief standpoint with a demagogue rather than having to parse through all this stuff they couldn't possibly understand.

Yeah. And no, I appreciate that. It, I think it's, it's interesting to think about it from both the kind of more positive and more negative aspect. Mm-hmm. Because I, I think the other piece of it is something about the commodification, which is, and that is predicated on the scarcity model, right? It's like I can only put boundaries around it and sell it for a certain amount of money if there aren't you know, a billion of these things freely available, right? Yeah.

Illich would tell us that, uh, you can't control something that isn't scarce.

Precisely. Yeah. So that, so that's where, that's, I think where I'm coming from is that there's an interesting power and control aspect to scarcity when it gets weaponized. The, the flip side of that is much more like open source or MOOCs or Creative Commons, that idea of generating possibility and abundance. That people can have access to that aren't behind paywalls and that aren't— because those paywalls are trying to artificially create scarcity in this abundant landscape.

Which, and to carry that forward into, say, the classroom, what we do is we say, here's this piece of information, I'm going to hide it from you for your testing period.

Exactly.

And then you're going to see if you can guess what's behind the hand. Yeah. And then later on, I'm going to go, this is what's behind the hand, you get a B+. Right? And you're creating scarcity inside your classroom. That student has access to the information that you're hiding behind your hand.

Yeah.

But you've stopped it. Like you've created an artificial cone of scarcity around your classroom.

Yeah.

That allows for that model to still work.

And that's, that's exactly it, isn't it? In terms of where your book sits, because you are then saying, so what does it mean to learn in abundance? We can't create this artificial scarcity as educators anymore, but even more so with AI, it's very, very difficult to do that. And it's such a, a dissonance from the reality of the life that our young people are leading, that it becomes even more of the strange contrast, this strange artificial world. So how does learning and education respond to and in this abundance? Yeah. Interesting question. You should write a book about that. I should.

Good idea.

All right. So let's get into some of that then. So in terms of maybe just for a moment, we could just dwell on the technology piece, cuz I think given that feels to be a significant part of your own personal journey is the how we relate ourselves with the technology. Yeah. And that feels like, I mean, even this morning, just, I was watching some of the videos from OpenAI about the new GPT-4. Oh my Lord. Yeah. And it's, I mean, it's, it's crazy, right? It's really—

I was showing it to people yesterday. Yeah.

It's phenomenal. I mean, I, I wrote a post about it earlier that my 10-year-old struggles with a chatbot on a website, a basic chatbot on a website, because he's convinced sense that that is a human being answering my question as we're sitting there together on this website. I mean, the idea that he can tell between this funny, sarcastic, responsive AI that can see you and see your, you know, see what you look like, see the situation you're sitting in through your camera on your phone. I mean, how we relate to technology is becoming by the day almost, it's becoming the question, right?

I almost think that the last week and a half is more shocking than when ChatGPT came out in 2022.

That's crazy.

What the, the 4.0 is going to force us to ask some really serious questions. Well, no, it's not even going to force us. We can avoid them and we probably will.

Yeah.

We should probably ask ourselves some real questions. Like you say, like, what is the human thing? And as we've moved more and more of our education system away from that question and towards career readiness, towards what I would call the problem solving end of education. We are less and less capable of answering that question. Like, we're less and less ready. I would say we're probably less ready than we were from an educational standpoint. I mean, culturally, certainly we have far more global awareness than we used to. Like, people know more about— you'd never have Tears Are Not Enough released in 2024, like the song from the '80s where they say there's no rain in Africa. Like, obviously we're past that point. But at the same time, when I talk to people about educational policy, they're talking about getting people to solve problems. And when I look at, and this comes right out of the, I've got an article here from a Rand Corporation funded article here from 1958 where it all starts, right? Where you've got this idea that we really need to be teaching people to solve problems and they were correct then, but now all the algorithms are going to do that. If the problem has a right answer, the algorithm can take care of it. And we as humans are no longer required for that process. What we're required for are shoulds and judgment and making decisions through wicked problems or whatever model you want to use. But those are the human things, like the feelings part of it, the priorities part, the values part of it.

Yeah.

But that's not the way we've been moving as an educational system.

Yeah. And isn't that, I mean, that's deeply ironic, isn't it? That actually, you know, our systems and the people in them were better prepared to ask those more ethical, moral questions about what matters, what's it, you know, what do we really value decades ago than we are now? Because I, I, I hear you. We've, I think it feels like we've been really sucked in by the instrumentality, right? Like you say, the problem solving, it's like, oh, there's a thing I need to do. Like, it's like our goal-directed network has been hijacked so fundamentally that we just, that's all we seem to want to do is just solve problems, do stuff, complete a task. And the way that—

That's a learning design model.

Right, exactly. And that's an interesting question for, as you say, decades worth of innovation in inverted commas in education, moving it towards a problem-based learning or project-based learning framed around problem solving.

Yeah.

Actually has potentially just exacerbated that real kind of deep dive into that instrumentality of like, there's something, I'm going to fix it.

Yeah, and for sure. And again, I love problem-based learning. It's the solving part I don't agree with. So my experience of real life, and this is, it's so funny how people are resistant about this. So the vast majority of the book, if you guys are unfortunate enough to read it, is me telling various stories to try to contextualize a bunch of different concepts. And I think maybe for me, the hardest decision in writing the book to do it the way that I did it was to talk about learning as if it's something that happens every day. Like talk about learning outside of the formal frameworks that we think of it in. And to me, the, the vast majority of the decisions I make on a regular basis are of the uncertain variety. They lack goal framing, uh, a consistent approach, or any way to know whether or not I've gotten the right answer. And that's, that's real life. So whether it's giving my kid a cupcake or whether it's deciding what vegetables to plant in my garden or deciding how to vote or any of those things, I never get a pat on the head and told I've done it right, right? Nobody comes along— more wrong than right in terms of feedback.

But, um, yeah, that too.

That's real life.

Yeah.

And the things we need to learn are to be able to make those kinds of decisions. Mm-hmm. And you can do problem-based learning that way where people come up with opinions, they have to defend them, where there are things that are probably wrong answers, but not necessarily a right answer. But that's hard to measure. It's hard to bureaucratize. It's not as satisfying.

Yeah, I think there are, I mean, ironically, the relationship with the technology is affording some possibility to do some of those accountability pieces, the measurement pieces, assessment pieces with those more open-ended pieces of work and, you know, and engagements, learning experiences. So I think, you know, I think that, that is coming to a certain extent. I've just put out an episode this week with Mastery Transcript Consortium and Melbourne Metrics. And you know, there's movement there, but I still think often we try to narrowly bound. I don't know, there's an interesting question there, isn't there? About whether that is our responsibility as adults for our young people to constrain to a particular kind of experience, right? We're not just dropping them in the deep end of life and saying, go figure it out for yourself, right? There's something happening there, I think, around the role and responsibility of an educator to constrain the conditions to a certain degree.

So Paul Kirshner would tell us that we need to develop background knowledge before we do any problem solving.

Yeah.

Right. So all the background knowledge stuff comes first, get all that done. And once you have that, then you're going to be a more effective problem solver. I call bullshit, but because the model that we use is one where we're developing you to be an expert in each of those things that we're training you in. So when you look at chemistry, we're developing you in grade 11 chemistry so that you're on the path to get a PhD. We develop you as a writer so that you're on the path to write books or essays. We develop all those pieces as if you're going to be an expert someday. The simple fact is, is most of us are never an expert in anything.

That's true.

If we are, we're only an expert at a very small number of things and usually in a very narrow field. So the vast majority of the things we actually need to decide about, we're never experts at, but we never get taught how to do decision-making about things we're not expert at. Which is actually the thing that every citizen needs. So I need to, to use a recent relevant example, I need to be able to make decisions about vaccinations and for COVID, right? And what we ended up with was a whole bunch of people who were reading scientific research articles and making judgments based on what they did. And I'm like, y'all have no way of making any judgments from like the pharmaceutical companies' release notes and just all kinds of crazy business. Pretending like they're experts without any of the tools they need to be able to examine those things, because that's the way we're trained, right? We're trained to imagine that we're supposed to reach the, the original sources. No, if you're not a scientist, don't bother reading those. You're not going to understand them. You don't have the context.

Yeah, right.

But that's the way we train people, as if all this background knowledge and all this thing and all these approaches are driving you towards expertise. Which most of us never need. What I need is to have someone, like I do with my Bachelor of Education students, so like, what I'll do is say, we're gonna go and, and research something together right now. And I want you to go out and search for it in whatever way you want and put it in a, I use Google Slides, put them in Google Slides, and then I'm gonna go through them with you. And we're gonna talk about the thing you searched for, the response you got, the interpretation you got. We're gonna walk you through how to do that a little bit better. So that you are able to dodge the corporate influences, or you're able to do a better job of understanding that conversation we're having is more broad than the one you're having. So trying to give people the basic tools to do a little bit better at decision-making. And that is not what the research tells us we're supposed to do because it doesn't, it's not as effective for problem solving.

Yeah, but I think that leads us quite nicely into the community as the curriculum, right? It does because, because, because what you're doing there is you are bringing those people into a community with you to participate in the process of coming into knowing, right? Together. And I think, so I like, I have to ask you about the lobsters because the, the lobster fishermen, I think it's just a great example of what you mean by community as the curriculum. And I think it, I think it's a really powerful idea because it's, it's a different way of thinking about the work that we are doing as educators and as communities of practice, right? Of communities of learners. So yeah, maybe, Mike, tell us about some lobsters.

So I grew up a lobster fisher on the East Coast of Canada. My parents were both lobster fishers as a part-time job. Long explanation, Canadian fishing laws. But so I was on a lobster boat from the time I was 5 or 6. And there's a whole process by which, like, there's an escalation of process and almost a mentorship and indentureship that happens there where there's a sense of lobster fishing that you're kind of given. Nobody sits you down and puts you in a school and talks to you about traps and about currents and about all of these things, some of which are really a feel issue. So like, if you drop— imagine 5 lobster traps. If you have a vision of that in your head, imagine them all attached by ropes. If you drop the first trap in the water, obviously the rest of them are going to go with it. Lobster traps are heavy, they're going to take, right? So if you drop that lobster trap going into the current, then they're going to stretch out and lie flat on the ground. If you do it with the current, they're going to fall right on top of each other in a tangled mess. And there's a feel of the water, there's an understanding of your boat, there's a whole sort of multiple whatever. My father was a genius at it. I still, like, I never got anywhere near where he was going, but I would watch and whatever. And then one year he broke his leg. In a massive snowmobiling accident, and I had to do it myself. And it was at that point where I was like, okay. And then our conversations were totally different after that, right? Because I had actually made it into that conversation where I could talk about it not as a watcher, but as somebody who was involved in it. And the simple fact is, is we do this all the time. That's how doctors are trained, right? Residency is exactly that.

Yeah.

So I managed a med school here for a year. And that conversation was really fascinating because the doctors were very serious about students having to learn to whatever else. But whenever they talked about learning, they were always like, well, they don't really learn anything until they get into the hospital.

Right.

And then they walk around with us and they see how we do it. Now, that's problematic because it means that if you want to change the way that doctors, say, interact with patients, you have no mechanism with which to do it because they're only learning their curriculum from the community of doctors.

Right.

And no matter what you do in the school, it has no impact. On them as doctors.

Yeah.

Because their curriculum is the community of doctors, not whatever you're talking about.

Exactly.

There's upsides and downsides to that.

Yeah.

But I really believe that that's the way we've always learned. And what we've done is done something really amazing. So a guy like Pestalozzi is like one of the guys I think about from 1789, '98, or whenever he did all of this stuff. We put stuff into books because we didn't have enough communities for people to be part of.

Yeah.

And so that was like a, a period where we got things on paper and it was a really great way of getting stuff, but it was, it comes with some drawbacks.

Yeah.

Right. You have to take that community curriculum stuff and then kind of write it out into a step-by-step process. Much like measuring learning, you kind of break it a little when you do that. And it's fine if what you're writing down is the design of a moldboard plow that helps us remember that You know, if we have this thing that digs into the ground and turns the soil over, we can get more food, but it's not as good when we start talking about ethics, when we start talking about decision-making, right?

And it's not as good when those things start changing very, very rapidly. That's right too. Right? Because, because, you know, it's fine if the, you know, as we're talking about GPT, right? The plow, it's changed by next week how it works, you know, it, so that responsiveness to change requires something else that is also responsive, which is a community that, because as soon as it's, I mean, it's the same thing, you know, you publish it in a school textbook and it's irrelevant by the time it reaches the desks of the students. So it's, there's something important there as well. But, but I think just to dwell on that, because I think it's a really powerful idea, the idea of it's some kind of an apprenticeship model, right? Yeah. So yeah, just kind of love to go back to, as you are coming into knowing in relation to all of those terms about lobster fishing and all of those ways of being, right? They're not all explicit. They're not all possible to write down in a textbook, even if you wanted to. And because as you say, even if you did, you'd kill the thing. It's not actually the thing. The thing is living it and feeling it. And there's a lot that's implicit that goes on in that space and you learn it. Oh, I don't know. I mean, how, how would you reflect on the fact that you How did you learn those things?

Some of it has to do with the risk, I think, involved, the uncertainty that's involved in it. So like one of the main decisions you have to make as a, as a person who works on the ocean is when to leave. And you sometimes you see the storm coming and sometimes you can feel it coming. Like you can actually get to the point, I don't know if I'm feeling barometric pressure or what it is, but when I was on the water every day, I could tell. That we were in trouble.

Yeah.

Because I'd just done it enough. And I don't, I don't have an explanation for that. And it's entirely possible that somebody has written it down in some kind of treaty somewhere, but I don't know anybody who works on the water who can't tell. And that's like one of those things where I remember once I was consulting for a scientist who's out doing measurements in the water. I was driving the boat, contracting is the word I meant. And I was 16 or 17 and I was like, we need to go. And he, he's like 30 and he's like, we're not going. I gotta finish this thing. I'm like, We need to go. And he's like, no. And I'm like, okay. Cause I'm 17. Cause I think I'm indestructible, right? I don't care if the storm's coming. And so we got hit hard and he not only wouldn't work with me, he never spoke with me. He never spoke to me again. He was so terrified on the way in, but I couldn't explain it to him. I couldn't tell him what I was feeling or give you a rationale for it. I just knew there was a feeling in the air and, and all those things. And those gets passed on through stories. They get passed on in conversations. They get passed on through just experience. Moments where I'm on the boat and somebody goes, oh, we should go. And I'm like, why? And you're like, they're like, oh yeah, you feel that feeling on the back of your neck? And I'm like, kind of. And it just little pieces, right? And I think teaching is such a great example of that. So I teach teachers, so I'm constantly trying to give them those interstitial pieces. One of the activities we do is what's happening inside your head while you're doing this. And that's the only thing I'll, I'll focus on in classroom. So they'll write a lesson plan or whatever, but I'm like, I don't care about any of that. What I care about is what's happening in your head while you're— what are the things you need to think about? Oh, you're handing out computers. You know, little Jimmy's gonna drop it on the ground. You know that you saw Hyunji in the corner and you know that she feels nervous about this and you know that Fred's parents don't have technology. So you know that he's gonna be a little weaker on this and you're gonna need to get over there ahead of time so that he doesn't feel bad about it.

Yeah.

And those are the sort of things that make for a good classroom because you stay ahead of— if you've ever taught with kids, if you stay ahead of the kids, you're fine. Right. And I'm trying to open up that part of it rather than the way that it gets talked about in the literature, which is just like, first you bring your lesson plan and make sure that you've got your outcomes aligned to your whatever. And I'm like, okay. But at the end of the day, in a K-12 school with 195 days a year, your outcomes are fine and everything. And you'll get to those, but the real business is getting the kids on side. If the kids are onside, you can do anything. It's, it's the first step, but we don't.

Yeah. It's an interesting question, isn't it? How much, and this comes up for me in different ways, it has done on the podcast in different conversations, how much to make explicit the implicit learning curriculum because yeah, the hidden curriculum or just all of, you know, the way that we, the things that we learn through noticing through experience, like reflecting on experience or just You know, just through, as you were saying, like you're out on the water and you, and sometimes it's helpful to some, for someone to point out the thing that you hadn't noticed.

That's right.

But, and sometimes it's just necessary to just to do it a few times to then create some pattern recognition in yourself about these implicit things. But I think there's a really interesting, yeah, question about, because as you said about Pestalozzi, when you bring the knowledge into the textbook, you make it explicit and to a certain extent you pull it out of context and you you break it in a way, right?

And, and I mean, that man was a genius. I, I mean, no shade on the great Pestalozzi. He tried to teach an entire country how to read. An astonishing vision. But that's what he had to do. So if any of you are curious about this, check out How Gertrude Teaches Her Children, which is Pestalozzi's book. It is fascinating.

Ah, interesting.

If you're an ed geek, it is fascinating.

Nice. I'll have a look. Yeah. And, and the other thing that it, Also, maybe what you're talking about, the community is the curriculum, made me think about is Charles Sanders Peirce and his ideas of communities of inquiry. Because I think as you all, you kind of implied there's a timeless insight that this is just how we learn, right? We learn in community through like Barbara Rogoff calls them apprenticeship in thinking or cognitive apprenticeship, right? It's like there's just this idea of apprenticeship, I think really needs to make a strong comeback. And not just with this association of vocational learning, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I couldn't agree more. And I think that, I mean, there's a place for all the different kinds of knowledge as we have. There's a place for problem solving. You know, if I have a leaky tap, I want it to stop leaking. Like, yeah, fine. It's the way that it excludes the uncertain that for me is the problem. So I frame all this through the idea of confronting uncertainty. Abundance leads to an awful lot of uncertainty. But that uncertainty was always there. It's that we didn't have enough access to see it.

Yeah.

So, you know, the— and again, to, to use the, the controversial conversation around COVID, every vaccine has always had failures. It's always had problems. It's always had challenges, but we didn't really see them on a day-to-day basis because we just didn't have like all the stuff coming at us. Whereas in, in every conspiracy theory mostly was curtailed to the 12 people who could find each other. And look at the spread of flat earthers in, in the United States now. They can all connect with each other. They all fly to get together, which is astonishing to me. You'd think you'd notice the roundness while they were up there, but no, there's no, no accounting for cognitive bias, is there? Well, and this is just it. There's an epistemic crisis here.

Yeah.

If you think that knowledge comes from power, the details don't matter. So you, you see in the political conversation, certainly in my country, in the United States, in Australia, like when you look at the nasty political conversations we're having here.

Yeah.

People are not having a discussion. They're presenting their bias, right? And the idea that knowledge is something that's made through interaction is just not, you know, the teacher told you it was right. Somebody gave you an A and you're done. You yourself have no responsibility to negotiate that. I think that's the problem.

I agree. And I think it's a really interesting provocation to bring it back to that much more relational way of learning as a healing from that kind of weaponized— that's like this instrumentality of it, right? And, and this is maybe a perfect way to bring back in the reels because you— I heard you say nothing more— there's nothing more dangerous in our culture right now than reels. I think so, right? It's brilliant, mate. So yeah, maybe just, just speak to that for a minute because I think that idea that we've been told something in our educational experience and we take it as truth, but actually now we're being This thing, the reality is being curated for us at such a high definition.

Oh, it's unbelievable.

It's trauma, right?

Oh, insidious. So if folks are listening and you've never actually, if you don't know what we're talking about, very politely ask a young person about their reels. And it's, you're asking very private information to ask somebody to see what is they're actually seeing, like, because it really is a history of what you've been thinking about. And often what you've been thinking about in private with no one else watching, right? So not your external, what you've been thinking about voice, but your internal, what you're thinking about. And the way that it works is that, let's say that to use one of the, the situations that concerns me the most, let's think that I'm a young white male in Canada and I'm like, oh, I heard about this Andrew Tate guy. Somebody's talking about him at school. I'm gonna go and find out who he is. And as soon as you click on something for Andrew Tate, he becomes part of your feed. And also all of the people, so Andrew Tate, just if you don't know who he is, look him up, but not for long cuz it's not an enjoyable experience. Yeah. All of the connections to that. And then you get another one and then you get another one and then you get another one. And slowly into your sometimes mindless, sometimes not, but scrolling through something, you're slowly getting more and more of this sort of white nationalist extremist. Content that doesn't look like white nationalist extremist content necessarily. Yeah. You won't necessarily know that it is, but if you're young and impressionable, and I have no blame for young people being impressionable, like that's normal, actually we all are, but yeah, more so maybe it's gonna start to reprogram the way that you see things.

Yeah.

Without you noticing. Right. And so all of these insidious processes, the way that if I said we're cooking with gas, that expression, is common in our culture, at least in my culture it is, but it's an ad campaign, right? And it was an ad campaign when they were trying to switch stoves over to gas because the gas companies wanted to be able to sell more gas. And so we've had corporations doing this to us for a long time, but it takes a long time and not very many of them work.

Yeah.

We have like the Torches of Freedom is still my favorite is the Virginia Slims in like 1915 or whatever it was. I had women marching down the street with cigarettes in their hands calling them Torches of Freedom. So they were trying to attract whole new market space and identify smoking as a freedom instrument, which very much succeeded.

Exactly. Bernays, right?

Genius. Evil genius, maybe, but genius. But now that's happening every day to everybody across a thousand different spectrums, right? So any child sitting in front of a phone right now is being influenced by one decision that they made. So look, eating disorders is another huge one, like thousand different things, and each one of them is just subtly being influenced.

Reinforcing dynamics. Yeah, absolutely. And it, I mean, it kind of brings us back to where we started about that idea of, cuz you're also through with that abundance, you're not really experiencing the abundance, you're experiencing a very particular slice of it, right? Very narrow that you then, you are somehow, as you say, consciously and subconsciously curating for yourself or the algorithm, the algorithms are curating for you, but based on your your information through which you then curate your own selfhood, right? And that's, I mean, that, I mean, if anybody hasn't seen it, the documentary, Adam Curtis, Century of the Self, where he talks about Edward Bernays and that, that whole torches of freedom. I mean, it's phenomenally interesting documentary because it, I think we have this naive idea that we like to imagine ourselves as independent beings curating our own self, you know, our own identities and our own selfhood. Foods, right? And it's just, as you say, throughout the 20th century, it's been sold to us, the desirability of what, what's a, yeah, an attractive or a responsible or a, you know, pick your virtue. Yeah.

All these things.

Yeah, exactly. It's crazy.

Sourdough bread.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I think one of the questions maybe that comes up for me is like, what does it mean to be independent now? Because what, and I've heard you talk about this because in relation to, you know, when we see our kids trying to navigate around a new place or whatever. And, you know, you can't really do it without your phone. And so there is a, there is a dependence that is embedded into the way that the technology relates to us. And we relate to it without a phone now, right? So there's, there's an irony there about the fact that what we want, these independent young people that can navigate the world.

Don't think, but I don't think we do.

Okay.

I think we say that we want independent young people, but I don't think people actually, I mean, it's like creativity in the classroom, right? It sounds great, but in practice it's a nightmare. Like a truly creative kid. Oh my God.

Yeah.

I mean, they're wonderful, but creative within a very narrow bounds. Oh, that's right. We want creative, but within a really narrow scope, not actual creativity. Yeah. And I think it's the same with this, right? So it's, it's always a balance. We want, we don't want people to be truly independent. We want them to follow cultural mores. We want them to work inside of it. This is it. We want them to handle a balance of uncertainty within a scope that allows them to be a member of that community. And then the question becomes, what are your values? And that's to me where this all comes back around is it used to be that these things were structured societally, that we didn't have a lot of room we could move in. And now with this abundance, we've got all these decisions that we need to make, and we're not accustomed to talking about our values in a decision-making process. And that's where we're stuck. And we're talking about being human. That's the human part. How do we take this values turn where we're like, I want you to go out into the world, but I want you to be safe and I want you to be nice to people and I want you to be all of these other things. I want you to be self-reliant, but not at the expense of the people around you. Like, it's always a, a balance between all these things, right? And the abundance of the, the cell phone is a great example. It gives you so much power, so many things you can do. Like, I started traveling before the phone and I was on the road before the phone. And I remember the first time I got access to, uh, the internet from travel and just the difference that made.

Yeah, right.

Just the ability to find things and like the way that it leveled things out, like the playing field. So not just the people whose parents traveled, knew where things were. And that's great. But now you end up with, you know, 100,000 people a day going to Machu Picchu.

Yeah, it's true. Yeah. Yeah.

No, it's never a bargain. I mean, I love that. I love that quote. I love that movie. It starts chapter 1 and just says change is never a bargain. It's always an exchange.

Yeah.

And that's, we've had this massive exchange and I think we need new tools to think about how to deal with it.

Yeah. And one of the other things that I think comes up in your work is about serendipity and the fact that we've, you know, when Lennon and McCartney were crossing Liverpool to get that chord, right? Some other stuff would happen, right? They'd see somebody else along the way and might stop for a beer or, you know, they, they would, other things would happen, right? When you are looking for that paper in the library, you're going through and you're having to look for those things, right? Yeah. And other things happen. You bump into other people, things, there's a life that happens around that thing. Whereas now we've, through the technology, it's become so quick and easy to access the thing that we need. That again, that back to that kind of instrumentality and goal direction, we've become so good at getting to the thing that we say we want, we think we want, but in exchange for the loss of all of those extrinsic things that are actually like, make life super interesting.

Well, so this, this article, it's called Elements of a Theory of Human Problem Solving, funded by the RAND Corporation in 1958. They're talking about replacing intuition with problem solving. Ah.

Right?

And so what this whole article is about is how intuition is such a weak method of approaching problems. And what you really need to do is standardize these things and be very clear about the process so it can be replicable. Yeah. So it can be scientifically verifiable and all the rest of that business that we're you're so familiar with in our decision-making. Intuition may allow you to understand that your problem-solving for the housing crisis in your city is going to have an impact on the greening process that you're trying to do in your city.

Yeah.

And that you are going to affect property prices and you are going to affect all those other things that are part of the process. Intuition may allow you to get there, but problem-solving won't.

Exactly.

Right. And so, yeah, I think you're exactly right. I think it's true from the whimsical sense of travel and inter alder and, and that part of the conversation, but it's also true when we're talking about important conversations where if we get overly focused on the algorithmic solution of a specific problem, we lose that intuition of context.

Yeah. Right?

What Rylan Webber would talk about as wicked problems.

Yeah.

Right? Those things where it's hard to frame them. And when you make one decision, there are unintended consequences that happen over here. And then it's, it's this giant miasma of decision-making, which is what real life looks like. So Simple example that I use with the kids that I mentor: every time you post on social media about a party you went to with 2 of your friends, 3 others of your friends have just seen that you weren't— that they weren't invited, right? There are all these unintended consequences.

Yeah.

And seeing the world in that way, particularly with abundance of connection, is the challenge that we have in front of us.

Yeah. And in one sense, it creates phenomenal cognitive load, to coin a phrase. Which creates challenges for people, you know, it's demanding on your energy. But at the same time, and this is what I was thinking as you were talking, that we have also as human beings evolved to sense many more dynamics, like you said, right? How can you feel the storm is coming? You don't, you don't feel that the storm is coming because cognitively, you know, whatever that word means, but you know what I mean? Like you, you have explicitly learned that these are the conditions in which a storm coalesces and therefore calculating, you're computing. It's like you are not a computer, right? You are a living organism that is sensing in multiple ways, and that has evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to be phenomenally sophisticated at doing that. And then we try and strip away all that and ignore all that evolved sophistication to just say, oh, well, no, let's make it explicit. Let's do the Rand Corporation thing and just get rid of all these things that we can't quite—

I understand why we needed that to be able to write things down.

Right.

Like paper is an astonishing development and the fact that we're able to conserve, I mean, I can only imagine how much we lost from the ancient, ancient Greeks to the ancient Greeks. Like we had the Dark Age in there around the 7th century BCE and all of the ways in which all of those crazy buildings were built and all this crazy cultural reality, it's all gone.

Yeah. Right.

Because there was no paper that could conserve that story. And we still haven't seen what Linear A is. But I wish we knew, and I'm glad that paper allows me to read Aristotle. Like, I'm happy about that. But there's a trade-off in paper. There's a trade-off in making things concrete. And Socrates literally told us this was going to happen. Like, in the Phaedrus, he literally says, paper is going to do this to you. So it's not like we weren't warned.

No, it's true. But, but I would also say what a couple of times you've invoked story. Right. And story is also a carrier. It's a technology that carries knowing. It carries cultural knowing across generations.

Inside of its context.

Inside of its context. Nora Bateson, Warm Data. Exactly. It's exactly, no, super powerful. So if we could just finish on humility and care, cuz I think, you know, it's, it's a phenomenal thing that you've, you're charting in the book. It's an, it's amazing. But I think this idea of just something that grounds us in that abundance, because it's, it's wild out there, right? Yeah. If you say a bit about humility and care, why are they such important dispositions right now?

So my 15-year-old daughter who has read the book got very frustrated through the first 5 chapters that all I did was ask questions and didn't answer any of them. She's like, well, you give me an answer already. And so the start of the 6th chapter, I start talking about humility as the first literacy you need for the 21st century. And I firmly believe that I'm an old white dude. Like, I literally have a lot of humility to learn. I came out of the box without an awful lot of it just by gender and disposition. But that first step of I don't know, that first step of not I don't know, I don't care, but I don't know and that's okay. And I can sit in front of you and learn from you. And it doesn't mean I have to agree with you. And just because I disagree doesn't mean I have to fight with you. I can be humble inside of my own space. I can approach all of these challenges with humility. I can accept that There's only so much that I can do. There's only so much I can take in. I can make mistakes. So, and again, the, the real thing is a perfect example. They're never gonna be perfect. You're gonna look at them sometimes and go, oh my God, is that me? That's okay because you can still affect that. But that humility of going, it's, I can do better. That's the first piece. And then for me, then you need to start making decisions with your values. And for me, care is the safest one. If I'm always trying to decide, and again, you're never going to get it right all the time. There are definitely wrong decisions, and I'm not a relativist, and I'm not saying there are no reasons for right or wrong answers. But the right answer is always care. If at any time you're stuck in a values-based decision process and you can look at it and you can ask yourself whether or not you want to be speaking to all the teachers out there, rigorous or caring, always choose caring and you're going to be fine., right? And to me, it's almost like a, like a place of safety in that sense, because then at least my decisions are being made based on the human in front of me, not based on the system I'm trying to hold them accountable to.

Yeah.

And I think we have inside of this sort of scientific verifiable process, we have made cruelty okay, a part of our education system where, you know, being mean to someone and punishing them for coming out of a family that doesn't don't have reading practices or punishing them for not having the literacies of a culturally centered group is cruel, right? Punishing them for being sick, punishing them for— I just think it's organized cruelty. Frankly, I think a lot of grading generally is organized cruelty.

Right. But also the incredible competition that we set up between young people, you know, it doesn't, it doesn't reward care. It rewards ruthless goal direction and, and get it done and beat everybody else. So that's, that's not a caring—

the way a lot of sport gets run, right? It doesn't have to.

No, exactly. But I also think that there's something— I think both of them are incredibly deep human groundings, right? In the face of uncertainty, you're standing in inquiry, like saying, I don't know, but I do care. Yeah, right.

Yeah, like, great way of putting it.

Because I want to stay alive, like, at a very basic level. I am an organism that wants to persist across time. I care about staying alive, but in connection with caring about staying alive, I care about the conditions around me that might afford that, whether you want to frame it as entirely self-oriented or, you know, that's a different conversation. But I think there is a deep disposition of care for the life that we are a part of and those conditions that we are situated within that we kind of—

for the communities that we are a part of. Yeah.

Right. Exactly. And then you're back to like coming into that community as a learner. And again, like, you know, humility on the boat, right? If you're, if you're gonna be arrogant and think you've got all the answers because you're a young upstart lobster fisherman who thinks he knows that the storm's not coming, I think the world will probably give you some feedback, right?

And that you are constantly the curriculum of that community, right? So it's not only the community you're trying to join, it's the one that you represent.. And as you represent that community with care, you're spreading that. I always think about it whenever I've done a lot of talks lately that have not been super cheerful. And I had this young woman, and maybe I'll close with this. I had this young woman who was sitting in the back of the room. She was kind of curled over like this and she was waiting, you know, you can tell someone's waiting for you. And I'm like, she's waiting for me. And there's a bunch of people I was talking to and then I was like, oh, I gotta go talk to her cuz she's waiting. For me. So I go up and she's curled over like this because she's like 12 months pregnant. She is pregnant. And she's sitting there and she looks at me and she goes, I agree with you, but what do I do now? And I'm like, oh my God. And you could tell like it— something about something I said had connected with something that she'd already been thinking about, and now she's gone down this path. And I think about it as a tug of war. You're not going to solve the world's problems. You're not going to make the world a caring world overall. I think of myself as on the rope, and I'm pulling for my side, and I'm trying to get more people to pull on my side and move us a little bit in this direction. And the least I have to ask from you is to not let go of the rope and understand that every time you give up, it's a little harder for everybody else, and every time you tug a little harder, it's a little better for everybody else. And that's kind of where we're at. Right, is we're pulling in our direction about the things we value and the things we care about. And if you think about it as a problem you can solve, you are going to be forever disappointed.

Yeah.

You can just do what you can do in front of you a little bit better, and it makes everything a little bit better. And that's, that's gotta be enough.

Beautiful. Thanks, man. Yeah. There's, there's another conversation there about tug of war and opposition. Like, how do we bring the people on the other side of the rope? Into the community too, right? There's another, that's a different conversation. Yeah. How do we transcend the tug of war? But no, beautiful. Thank you, man. This is, yeah, really, really interesting. And yeah, I very much recommend people go read the book because it's, as you say, lots of lovely human stories that convey deep and important concepts in it.

So yeah. Thank you.

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