Foundations of the Vision - 1996

Human beings are born learning-oriented (with nervous systems "wired" or oriented towards continuously learning) and the living core of this deep learning is a differentiation and dis-ambiguation (ambiguity reducing) process oriented towards extending an individual's presence more fully into their own living and experiencing.

Learning to extend our presence (exercising the extension of our participation) whether in the 3-dimensional space of walking or the n-dimensional space of physics, music or semantics, is, at root, the same core process, even though the environments we are exercising in are different. This difference in environment, however, is critical, and the difference that makes the difference is feedback.

Feedback whether from the environment outside our bodies or internally generated from within us - is what our natural learning processes are "wired" to be guided by. In the more somatic activities of manipulating physical objects, walking and, initially, talking, this wiring works well. These activities provide us with immediate feedback about what is actually happening during our interactions. For instance, the inner sense of falling is the immediate feedback necessary to walking. However, when we encounter the artificial information-mediated world of consensual agreement based knowledge, rules and systems (from classrooms and textbooks to methods, procedures and policies), our wiring gets confused. Precisely because the information is unable to provide us with coherent feedback at the moment we are interacting with it, our instinctual, natural, learning capacities can't directly engage. Here, in thousands (if not millions) of instances of being educated, trained or just interacting with the world, we are tacitly (unconsciously) conditioned to ignore our most authentic meaning need signals, our stutters. (Stutters -- spike-like involuntary drop-outs in the flow of our attention that underlie our meaning needs and guide our natural development and learning.) Consequently, we are educated, trained and paid to ignore all but our most powerful impulses (and stutters). As a result, we accumulate a substitute, and a much less efficient "inner interface" through which to learn and engage the world.

We wouldn't learn to swim in a desert or walk in outer space. Learning (our capacities to learn -- the skills to work) occurs best in environments that support us and give us the feedback we need to sense ourselves on the very edge of whatever it is that we are doing.

We believe that any person could learn anything if the people and/or materials resourcing their learning could feedback and unfold themselves in relation to that person’s dynamically arising learning/meaning needs. In other words, if the resources unfolded in response to the real-time differentiation and dis-ambiguation process of who is learning, while they are actually learning.

Heart of the Vision

Therefore the heart of this vision is of a new ethic of interface and a new general relationship between people and the systems that mediate their relationships. The vision represents a covenant between such systems and their human constituents that, in effect, says:

"Follow your stutters - clarify and distill them (dis-ambiguate them ) - articulate your most deeply authentic meaning needs - if we can’t help you now, tell us. The fact that we couldn’t help will inform our evolution so we better serve you and others like you in the future."

The vision represents a mutually learning-oriented and mutually intelligence-friendly approach toward facilitating each individual’s potential and toward mediating distributed human relationships and interactions.

Attributes of the Vision

• Illuminates a fulcrum - a point of maximally efficient leverage - that lies at the intersection between the needs of each individual child and adult and the needs of the organizations who benefit by educating, training, or providing goods and services that help them learn, perform and participate

• Provides a benchmark for assessing a system's capacity to mediate human intelligence

• Provides a new paradigm for re-visioning education and training

• Defines a new competitive distinction in hundreds of markets

• Defines "next step" value-added extensions to hundreds of existing products and services

• Defines a new class of products

Long-Term Mission

Our long-range mission is to create, or cause to be created, a parallel and, in some cases, alternative, commercial (but not-for-profit), on-line, education system.

The system would serve as a virtual multi-generational, multi-cultural, multi-lingual school system and university that begins in the US and grows over time to serve the entire (virtually) world. Available over the Internet, ultimately, it would be accessible via cable set-top boxes to millions of people. Built on the concepts and technologies of Distributed Dialogue Processing™ and the Learner Interface, Implicity™ would "grow itself" through a period of public education partnerships and, thereafter, through monthly subscriptions, as well as government contracts and corporate partner fees. Its primary customers will be parents (on behalf of their children), adults, and public education institutions.

Kind of Learning: Semnastics™- a different kind of education founded on the principle: 'above all else, steward the health of learning'. A way of educating that proceeds from the simple truth that how well learner's learn to participate, from the inside-out, in their learning is more generally relevant to their learning in life than any particular learning objective  (and is the optimal path for them to learn improve their learning about any particular learning objective).   Parents already choose among "kinds" of education systems, Montessori, Waldorf, Kindercare, Futurekids, Sylvan, Gymboree, etc., that represent ways of educating they prefer for their children. We believe that it is possible to create a "signature" identity for a WAY and KIND of learning that is ecological, ergonomic and aerobic for the mind’s core capacity to learn: We call it SEMNASTICS™ - learning to learn from the inside-out.

Implicity has a series of organizing principles that revolve around two primary intentions: 1) to model a new kind of mutually learning oriented education. 2) to model a new kind of dialogically distributed constituency, itself an alternative to representational politics as we now understand it. Here are some highlights:

Turn the whole idea of educating inside out. Instead of being fundamentally organized around teaching and deg/cree-ing - it is fundamentally organized around facilitating learning. By this we don't mean "band wagon" lip service to being superficially "learner-centric" - but rather a sophisticated organizational and technological heuristic serving a dialogue rich culture that is focused on continuously improving its faculty's and technology's capacity to resource the real-time learning needs of its subscribing/attending learners.

"Reinvent" the process of an educational system as if its "customers" are learners who are "buying" the means to:

a) Master their own capacity to learn. Operationalize in their being their recognition that the most important (generally leveragable) "subject" is how consciously self-extending they are of their personal capacity to "interface" and "learn" (generally).

b) Develop their knowledge, facility, competency and mastery of subject matter, but not necessarily in order to obtain orthodox degrees or certificates.

c) Order the unfolding of their education in relation to what is authentically (to them - in the moment and overall in their lives) emerging as "needs" and imperatives in their learning. Learning which is dialogically interfaced, "coached" and "resourced", but generally self-directed.

Develop an "ethic of interface" and a covenant of mutual learning that:

a) helps learners learn to dis-ambiguate and articulate what is most authentically necessary for sustaining the thrust of their own optimal learning, as it is happening, and to use this process as their primary "compass" and "orientation" to learning and interfacing.

b) provides everyone involved (faculty and learners) the technological means to efficiently express their needs, further dis-ambiguate them in the field of the resources unfolding before them, and to either have their needs met or contribute to the "feedback" dialogue that informs how resource allocations are prioritized towards meeting the actual needs of the school's constituency.

Develop and model a virtual political process that radically redefines a representative as one who is responsible for refining the fidelity of their representation by having an ongoing, ever more extended and inclusive person-to-person, and technologically distributed, dialogue with their constituents.

Distinctions and Benefits for Parents

• A parallel system for the remedial, supplemental, or special (disadvantaged or talented) educational needs of their children.

• A 21st Century curriculum for global learning -- critical skills for the next generation

Distinctions and Benefits for Adults

• Semnastics™ (all the above), and

• Vocational, continuing education and company reimbursed skills development.

Project Implicity™is the future goal of a Vision Learning To Happen.
 

The role of Feedback in Learning Oriented Systems 

Miraculous Intersections - Learning to Learn

Distributed Dialogue Processing

Self Esteem and Learning

Ethics