Learning and nuance in a digital context
When technology came to the workplace, we asked ourselves “How do we increase productivity with digital tools?”
When technology came to the workplace, we asked ourselves “How do we increase productivity with digital tools?”
When technology came to schools, we asked ourselves “How do we increase learning with digital tools?”
When technology came to governments, we asked ourselves “How do we increase control with digital tools?”
When technology came to our personal lives, we asked ourselves “How do we increase our entertainment with digital tools?”
The digital revolution has brought about massive change, but the differences were generally framed as increases in choice and abundance. Every advancement in technology has generally been for “more, better” of what came before it, but not necessarily “different”. Unfortunately for us, our modern networked technologies don’t work in consistent and expected ways. The increased social connections, data transfer, and knowledge accessibility has brought about unprecedented new occurrences that aren’t just more of what came before them — they are something completely new.
Despite this, we continue to seek more ways to teach more people how to use more digital apps and tools, to achieve more productivity, more connectivity and more happiness. We have not yet internalized, as a collective species, that things today aren’t simply the same as yesterday with more convenience — things are now different.
Take for example the modern workplace, which is unrecognizable from even 10 years ago. Teams can be distributed across many locations and work on the same project, companies can be started with founders that never met each other in person, developers may not even speak the same language as the designers in an organization. This was facilitated by digital tools like freelancing marketplaces, modern communications platforms, and powerful task management software, that have enabled unprecedented flexibility in the way we work. They have also brought about feelings of uncertainty and stress to the employees that constantly feel in danger of losing their jobs, and anxieties for managers that feel they aren’t moving fast enough relative to their competition.
Still, we chug along while the response from employers and educational institutions has been to rush into training the modern worker on an increasing set of apps and methodologies that make them “digital”. From the plethora of online classes on “digital marketing”, “coding”, “digital project management” and many others, it’s clear there is a sense of urgency around getting people up to snuff for the new era of work.
Our focus continues to be training for digital tools and content, but not for the digital context.
Realities of prioritizing digital tools, not digital context
This distinction is key as the world today isn’t simply about learning about what’s written in a widely published encyclopedia or newspaper. Think about the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal. Politicians in the States are only looking at Facebook’s data usage critically now, 14 years after Facebook’s founding, and it’s clear from the hearings with Zuckerberg that the politicians were completely ill-equipped to discuss the issue intelligently. Take a look at this sad question below:
“If I’m emailing within WhatsApp…does that inform your advertisers?”
Why did it take so long for Facebook’s activities to be recognized? What were governments waiting for to actually understand the difference between e-mail and an instant message — small as it may seem? How will they deal with the newly leaked confidential document that highlights how Facebook uses AI to predict future actions for advertisers?
Here is another, more minor, instance of giant organizations lagging behind:
On April 1, 2018 the New York Times wrote an article with a video, titled Tech Thinks It Has a Fix for the Problems It Created: Blockchain. The unfortunate reality is that millions of people will only now be educated about blockchain, which was highlighted for me last week when I overheard someone in an elevator state “I keep hearing about this blockchain thing but I only learned about it in the New York Times article that came out recently.” If that person was interested, a simple search would have revealed that Vox released a video explaining Bitcoin 3 years ago, and that some channel called WeUseCoins released a similar video 7 years ago!
Why did my mystery elevator rider not think about simply searching online for “Blockchain” on a search engine or social media platform at its first appearance?
The simple answer may well be that some people simply aren’t interested enough in certain topics. However, are they consciously not interested, or do they feel unable to navigate the digital landscape and learn? It’s like someone hearing about some monumental sports event they don’t know and consciously deciding not to look it up because they don’t care, versus hearing about the same event and feeling helpless.
This small difference of agency in information acquisition is exactly the difference between learning in a digital context as opposed to a digital tool. When you are able to decide not to use a search engine, knowing full well that it could give you the answer, you have moved towards understanding the digital context of search as opposed to merely the digital tool “Google”.
Context carries with it extra nuance, which is necessary to navigate a modern world filled with complexity and chaos at every corner. We are all being slowly pushed into learning about everything constantly and at a rate that is terrifying and unprecedented. The promise is that this is for our betterment, but without a thorough consideration of context, we will simply find ourselves bloated and unsatisfied with digital tools that weren’t intended to actually improve our quality of life.
Beginning to understand the digital context
It’s imperative that we start building educational systems and workplaces that value context over content and tools. There is no easy solution for this, nor a convenient plan, but we should absolutely shift our focus away from immediate, tool-based training.
In her article, Future of Work: Learning to Manage Uncertainty, Heather McGown discusses how we will live and work for longer than any generation before us, and face an incessant stream of shifts throughout our careers.
For generations, new technologies — from the steam engine to the Internet and beyond — have fundamentally changed the nature of work and the economy. But it is happening faster now while we are living longer. Where our parents and grandparents might have experienced only one, or even no, significant change in their lifetimes, you have likely already experienced a dramatic technology-driven shift in your career, and your children will likely absorb a major shift every ten to fifteen years across theirs. — heathermcgowan
She also argues that the main talents for our generation will be “Learning agility”, “adaptability”, “sense making”, “culture”, “interdisciplinary”, whereas the main talents between 1970 until now were “Deep expertise”, “disciplinary”, and “STEM”.
The most striking attributes of today’s talents is how multiplicity, art, and learning are forefront. Our needs for specialization are dwindling outside the realm of academia as machines assist us with focused tasks, and humans are instead tasked with communicating, collaborating and mediating across teams and departments. It is impossible for someone to expect a comfortable life twenty years now simply by climbing the corporate ladder at an accounting firm with just their accounting bachelor’s degree.
In the digital context, learning isn’t just a defined, finite moment that happens at a chosen interval. The rate of change in our work and the world around us necessitates that we learn constantly, but this speed also goes against some of the most important principles of healthy learning.
Spaced repeated exposure, a lack of distractions, and reflection are all incredibly important elements of learning and understanding new concepts which are in danger within the digital context. The constant barrage of new and supposedly exciting information means that people’s attention spans are simply not the same as they were before, and merely introducing more digital tools into schools may not be the answer to better learning today.
Of course, asking people to revert back to paper books is not a useful recommendation, and as this is a highly complex situation, I don’t know that it’s possible to recommend a simple thing that will fix this. In fact, it may even be that there is nothing to fix. Things aren’t necessarily worse, they’re just different, and it’s highly important that people shift their attention away from vilification and towards examining the details. Just as in the past, we moved away from valuing rote memorization to now, those that strive are able to discern and navigate large amounts of information at the right time and apply it in the right context through extrapolation of information from multiple sources.
Our focus should be less about compounding more and more content and tools to fix our problems as we are already heavily inundated. Yuval Noah Harari states it beautifully in his fantastic book Homo Deus:
In ancient times having power meant having access to data. Today having power means knowing what to ignore.
This powerful shift in focus sums up perfectly how our way of thinking should shift from craving more to craving nuance, if we expect our minds to continue thriving in this modern digital context.
