Connected Learning: A New Path to Knowledge

Dr. Mizuko Ito began her keynote address at CIIE 2019 conference with a very peculiar anecdote. She recounted an experience with her son in which the young man played StarCraft just before bedtime. At the end of the game session, he printed a text that he took to read. When Ito asked him what it was about, her son replied that it was a fanfiction tale within StarCraft’s fictional universe.

Upon asking this, the professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine, discovered something crucial that would play an important role in her son’s educational future: his hobbies. The theory of connected learning holds that education is not a linear process; it is a set of interconnections that build the cognitive structure on which students rely to absorb and understand new information. As fabrics of an organism, the interests and passions of students chart the path to the areas that they most desire to learn and in which they will very possibly develop professionally in the future. In this context, what is necessary is not only a transfer of knowledge but also the educational experience that keeps them motivated, active, and eager to learn.

Dr. Ito argued that student engagement is a critical issue for maintaining the quality of the educational experience, and she explained that this involvement is on the decline as students grow older. By the time they get to college, 45% of students report learning little during the first two years of university education, simply because they are not engaged. Their personal interests and what motivates them are not connected to what they learn in formal education.

As a starting point for sharing this apathy, Ito proposes to ask us a series of questions: Where are the young people? What do they like to do? Where can we find common ground between what they like to do and what we need to teach them so that they can become what they want to be? These are the fundamental questions of connected learning.

“It’s not enough that your child sticks a couple of criteria on the list of what they learn in school. They have to have interests; they have to save the world a couple of times; they have to have a few thousand followers on YouTube or Facebook.”

According to a report from Common Sense Media, teenagers ages 13 to 18 spend 7 hours and 22 minutes a day behind a screen for entertainment only, as this time does not include activities such as schoolwork or day-to-day communications. Interacting online and consuming digital content is no longer something that young people do; it is what makes them. The internet is where they begin to receive their first instances of information; this information helps them define their interests, and these interests to choose their peers with whom they will join and learn together.

Ito commented that being merely the “gatekeeper” of the digital world and limiting the screen time of our children and students, denies us the opportunity to know how these interactions help students form the cognitive structures that could give them an advantage as they approach formal education.

The most powerful part of Ito’s keynote wasn’t the statistics or hard data she used to show the impact of this disconnect between what students want to learn and what we need to teach them, but the testimonies that exemplified what happens when there is a direct relationship between what students love to do and what they need to learn to develop and mature.

One such testimony was that of a high school student of Quest to Learn School. The student loved to play Minecraft so much that she and her cousin asked the school to form an extra-curricular video game club. It was in this club that the student learned to make Minecraft videos and used the technical and social skills acquired to improve in the sphere of formal education.

Another example is that of Manjit, 18, who did not believe that he could have a future as a writer until he learned about the work of young people like himself who wrote fanfiction. Ito also presented the example of 14-year-old Katie, who was not excited by reading or writing until she found a One Direction’s fan community who were writing on the Wattpad platform.

“It’s not enough that your child sticks a couple of criteria in the list of what they learn in school. They have to have interests; they have to save the world a couple of times; they have to have a few thousand followers on YouTube or Facebook,” Ito says. She explains that there are endless events that happen outside of school, crucial to the cognitive and emotional development of the students.

The professor added that teachers and education experts are still discovering how to connect the interests, interactions, and communities that motivate students to learn in formal education. Without a doubt, a complicated job, but we can begin asking our students what they like to do outside of school and discover with them what they learn by doing what they love.

Sofía García-Bullé

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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0