Embedded Learning

Brad Hargreaves, A Story About Learning, 7-September-2011.

[W]e strived to meet the needs of a booming New York technology and design community with a new kind of collaborative environment. Over the past year, General Assembly has become a campus for technology, design, and entrepreneurship and a social education experience for developers, designers, entrepreneurs, dreamers, and those simply wanting to learn.

 
Dougald Hine, The University Project: Five Reasons, 25-September-2011.

There’s something important coming together around networked technologies and new sociable collaboration spaces, that’s beginning to feel plausible as an alternative home for the spirit of the university.

 

 
Several months ago I wrote about a startup called BioCurious that calls itself a “hackerspace for biotech.” In the post, I wondered aloud if BioCurious provided an example of tomorrow’s university. Does learning embedded in a collaborative community like a lab or hackerspace, focused on a single domain and structured around team-based projects offer a view of one nascent institutional form of learning?

BioCurious has made interesting strides recently, but it is still too early to tell which direction they’ll end up going. Follow the links listed below to find out more.

Like BioCurious, General Assembly (GA) bundles incubation, co-working, and learning in a physical space designed to be deliberately collaborative, but focused on the community of entrepreneurs, designers, and technology developers in New York City. For a startup that is only about a year old, GA brings deep pockets ($4.25 million investor funding) and a prime location (20,000 sq ft in Manhattan). Apropos I guess is their first certificate program on web design that costs $3000 for 60 hours of instruction. But they also offer a variety of single classes (e.g., Social Selling with Facebook Apps on the OpenGraph) and are home to an impressive number of startups. For more information, please follow the links listed below.

The University Project offers an interesting contrast to both BioCurious and General Assembly. It is a project rather than a startup, although the formative idea came as “I want to start a university” from Dougald Hine, a serial entrepreneur (School of Everything and Dark Mountain). Participants in the project are still exploring the notion that “new sociable spaces of collaboration — from hacker and maker spaces, to social centres, to coworking spaces and media labs — might offer an alternative home for the spirit of the university.” They have an unconference planned in London for the weekend of October 14-16, 2011 that features a diverse set of themes. Like GA, the physical space used by the University Project sounds extraordinary … 12,000 sq ft in Hub Westminster in the heart of London. Please follow the links listed below for more information.

Three quick observations.

  1. With BioCurious and General Assembly, we’re talking about brick-and-mortar learning. There may be online components but the need for face-to-face collaborative spaces trumps virtual or digitally remote spaces. For the University Project, physical space at Hub Westminster also plays a prominent role.
  2. The University Project may want to reconsider the use of the word “university.” In a profound sense, “education” and “school” and “university” all fall into a category of backward-compatible terms used to refer to yesterday’s learning.
  3. I’m troubled by the scale, or maybe the aspirations for scale, evident in learning at General Assembly. I continue to believe that the truly creative and difficult work will involve imagining and birthing learning that is cheap, simple, and accessible to all.

 
 
Related Links

categories Business Models | Gary Lewis, October 13, 2011 7:02 am