Sorry if I’ve been sparse this past week, but I was traveling to LA and San Diego to visit my Mom, pick up my son from surf camp with his friend, and visit my brother. The last day at my brother’s we went to the beach, and a glorious time was had by all.

The water was so warm we could stay in as long as we wanted (a couple of hours) without wetsuits! My brother had several surfboards along (we forgot the boogie boards), and the kids took turns riding them, to various degrees. His older son has a soft foam board and had been several times before. My son had only his 3 half days of camp, but we’d talked about some of the principles. They were both catching waves and standing up to ride them in. His younger son and my daughter took some turns riding in on their bellies. My brother and I both took some time paddling out and catching waves for ourselves too (I was so thrilled that my work to get my arms in shape for paddling really paid off!).

The neat thing was the degree to which the kids advanced even during that one day. I’d once tried to teach my kids swimming, and forgot to break it down into the basics and get those drilled. I haven’t made that mistake since after hearing how the swim coach (and friend) we hired for a few hours per day for a week did what I’d not. Since then I’ve tried to find just one thing to point out and comment on for a day or so that will improve them the most, and it’s worked much better. When you’ve the time, and are working on major conceptual shifts…

Speaking of concepts, it pleases me my how my lad (in particular), can be given a concept and he will use it to guide his own performance. His soccer coaches say he’s “coachable”, and that’s great to hear. He’s not big for his size or particularly fast, but he quickly understands and applies. His sister is more the ‘practice practice practice’ type, but advances quickly. Two different approaches (sort of like the two different parents: I’m more like him, my wife’s more like her).

I learn so much about learning from watching them learn. And it’s fun, too.

I’m unduly proud of having now served on two eLearning Guild research reports – ILS (read: games) and mobile. I’ll argue that it’s due to my approach rather than genius (I know too many people that are way smarter than me), and of course from having great mentors. It’s believe it’s because I try to have a conceptual understanding of many models as tools to think and solve problems, both frameworks and approach. My PhD advisor’s focus (at the time) was on applied cognition, and that’s what I try to bring to bear. It necessarily includes an understanding of how our brains work, how to be systematic in examining problems and trialing solutions, organizations, and quite a bit of background in technology.

I’d started drafting this post and then read Jay Cross’ comments on lots of models, loosely joined, rather than one overarching approach. Exactly!

I want to suggest that these are great curriculum goals as well. Understanding the societal context, including economics and business, understanding technology systems, and how people think and interact, are critical components of an ability to meet the coming needs. Also having systematic processes of information gathering, design/problem-solving, and execution, driven again by a conceptual understanding of where and how they work (so you can adapt them to the situation) is a component.

Of course, your pedagogy has to have you working on complex problems and pulling models in to solve them, so you have practice and can meta-reflect as well. We’ve the knowledge, and the technology, now if only we had the political will. I’m afraid it won’t be done tinkering around the edges of No Child Left Behind, but throwing out the whole thing except the notion that we might want to assess learning, and starting again. I suspect the end result will be annotated portfolios, with profiles of performance, not ‘scores’. But I’ll leave that to the people who solve this particular problem.

Jim Schuyler, CTO of the Dalai Lama Foundation (and colleague, mentor, friend), writes in his blog:

My contention is that much of what we have to accomplish in educating people is to help individuals understand the limits of their own cognitive (and memory) abilities and find ways to interface with memory and cognition-devices in the external world so they can effectively and productively learn – and I mean learn and learn and learn for an entire lifetime – and make use of what they have learned.

In one sense this sounds a lot like George Siemen’s connectivism, and in another like the meta-learning (learning to learn) that I was promoting with Jay Cross and several others. I still think that meta-learning is a big missed opportunity in the corporate world, and it’s definitely part of the curriculum I’d like our schools to be working on.

It’s about developing a mind-set to steadily and systematically learn along our lives, and having the skills to do so effectively and efficiently. Sounds like the best investment I can think of. We know our limitations: great pattern matchers, poor arbitrary rememberers. Which is why I push my ‘external brain’ (my Treo) to see how much smarter it can make me (part of my mobile learning learning).

As a side note, I wish Sky allowed me to put this comment on his site, but he requires having a log-on and I’ve enough of those already. In general, when I’ve read others’ comments on my blog in their blog, I leave comments on their blog rather than reiterate them here. And maybe I’m missing one of the benefits or responsibilities of blogging? Live and learn, so opinions welcome.