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JP Rangaswami - Learning by doing, not by listening
JP Rangaswami is chairman of the social enterprise School of Everything. He thinks the educational institutions of the past have overlooked our human urge to feel free and to participate. In social networks and the open source movement he sees the potential for a whole new approach to learning.
Extract from JP Rangaswami on Learning by doing, not by listening
JP Rangaswami: JP Rangaswami
JP Rangaswami: I do not think education is about teaching people. I think it is about people learning. There is a big difference. One of JP Rangswami's first maths teachers said he would respect us not for answers we gave, but for questions we asked. He turned my learning world upside down. How I have to listen in order to ask an intelligent question is a lot more than how I have to listen to give an intelligent answer. Because an intelligent answer you can do half asleep. An intelligent question, you need at least one eye open. When my kids started playing with Wikipedia, they were accused of... That is not the way to do your homework. Now, what am I expecting to see? We are already at the stage where an enlightened teacher will tell their students, Your job is to write a Wikipedia article. And the power of saying. I want to put something up that 300 million people will read. I had better get this right. Human beings like participating and doing things. They like a level of variety and freedom in what they do. We have lost all this. You will suddenly find that the idea of a school having walls disappears. Parents and friends are part of the school. That is why JP Rangaswami says learning is a philosophy, a state of mind. We are going back to something we used to do: Learning by doing, rather than learning by listening. The opportunities for that are growing every day because of movements like the open source movement and the way social networks operate. Part of learning is sharing feedback. Tools to help provide feedback will become more important. Words like success and failure are wasting time. Words like learning just say, I tried that. That did not work. How can I share that information to other people so that someone else does not have to make the same mistake? When I talk about education... What is the goal of it? To learn. Why am I learning? For a better life. Why a better life, for my generation and for generations to come? JP Rangaswami thinks with lower costs of travel higher migration, easier access to communication more persistent communication and better access to information we enter a world where we can make a difference in health, education, welfare, even government, like never before.
JP Rangaswami: JP Rangaswami