Making Learning a Part of Life — Beyond the "Gift Wrapping" Approach of Technology

Wisdom is not a product of schooling but the lifelong attempt to acquire it. Abstract The previous notions of a divided lifetime — education followed by work — are no longer tenable. Learning can no longer be dichotomized, spatially and temporally, into a place and time to acquire knowledge (school) and a place and time to apply knowledge (the workplace). Professional activity has become so knowledge-intensive and fluid in content that learning has become an integral and inseparable part of " adult " work activities. Professional work can no longer simply proceed from a fixed educational background; rather, education must be smoothly incorporated as part of work activities fostering growth and exploration. Similarly, children require educational tools and environments whose primary aim is to help cultivate the desire to learn and create, and not to simply communicate subject matter divorced from meaningful and personalized activity. Lifelong learning is a continuous engagement in acquiring and applying knowledge and skills in the context of authentic, self-directed problems. The research in lifelong learning in our Center for " Lifelong Learning and Design (L3D)" at CU Boulder is grounded in descriptive and prescriptive goals such as: (1) learning should take place in the context of authentic, complex problems (because learners will refuse to quietly listen to someone else's answers to someone else's questions); (2)learning should be embedded in the pursuit of intrinsically rewarding activities; (3)learning-on-demand needs to be supported because change is inevitable, complete coverage is impossible, and obsolescence is unavoidable; (4)organizational and collaborative learning must be supported because the individual human mind is limited; and (5)skills and processes that support learning as a lifetime habit must be developed. We claim that most current uses of technology to support lifelong learning are restricted to a " gift wrapping " approach: they are used as an add-on to existing practices rather than a catalyst for fundamentally rethinking what education and learning should be about in the next century. " Old " frameworks, such as instructionism, fixed curriculum, memorization, decontextualized learning, etc., are not changed by technology itself. This is true whether we use computer-based training, intelligent tutoring systems, multimedia presentations, or the WWW. We are engaged in developing computational environments to support " new " frameworks for lifelong learning such as: integration of working and learning, learning on demand, authentic problems, self-directed learning, information contextualized to the task at hand, (intrinsic) motivation, collaborative learning, and …