A Moment of Intersection

This is a moment on of intersection. Perhaps it always is. But the moment about which we write here comes from the confluence of developments in modern neuroscience in revealing the inner workings of the brain and the implications of how we think people may learn in an experiential way, in addition to classic “ivory-tower” education. To this, we would add the recent phenomena of Social Media and Web 2.0, which has unleashed the latent power of connectedness between people (think “wisdom of crowds”) as never before, and the implications that it has for higher education, which may be akin to what many have already written about for business. One of us (Shwen) already writes a blog (www.med20.com) about social media and the medical/pharmaceutical industry.

The Brain

Our realization that the world was changing on the neuroscience side began years ago with the reading of a now 15 year-old book by Antonio Damasio, “Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain” (Penguin Books, 1994). It emphasized a kind of logic of the “gut instinct,” the emotions, or what Damasio calls the “body wellness sense.”

On the one hand this was nothing new. Paul McLean had written many years ago that the brain has 3 major levels (the triune brain) with a middle or core area between the higher cognitive/cortical structures and above the primitive lower brainstem control over bodily reflexes. This core area supposedly integrated reflexes, motivation, and emotions — it was Papez’s limbic system. But as Damaiso writes, there is a lot of logical computation in these circuits, a body-wellness sense of computation that goes well beyond just feeling and the emotions that Papez and his followers said that the limbic system mediated.

On the other hand, this was revolutionary. Damasio’s patient was smart in the intellectual sense, but could not solve many practical problems; could not make reasonable investments of money or social capital. Similarly, Herrnstein (at Harvard) and others showed that a rat’s behavior would follow precisely the changes in reinforcement density between two levers in an operant box. He called it the “matching law” — the mathematical relationship that underlies optimal foraging theory, which in turn underlies rational choice theory, which is a foundation of the ultra modern field of neuroeconomics.

Scientists now study the limbic system to see if positive states influence the calculation of risk in making investments. And they do! Stocks sold in a panic or bought in a rush of enthusiasm may be seen as reflections of the summary judgments of the limbic system, hopefully based on information duly analyzed in the cortical layers of the brain. The idea of a cortical mind as a “computer” programmed with facts and theories can now be joined by the idea of a more limbic mind as a meaning-maker connected to intuition.

We are back to another kind of reason that affected many thinkers, from Ralph Waldo Emerson (read Christopher Lydon’s blog) to the Walt Whitman (read Proust was a Neuroscientist by Lehrer and watch his 2006 Inspiration Festival presentation) to Searching for Spinoza (read Damasio’s later books). These are the “heart reasons” from Pascal that we feature in the quote on the “About” page of this blog. The key here is to see how this point-of-view informs higher education and to explore what experiences make up experiential education.

The Web

Now, fast forward to the recent rise of the Internet, particularly the Web 2.0 movement… While there are many books, articles, and particularly blogs written about Social Media, one of our favorite publications is the book “Groundswell” by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff (Harvard Business School Press, 2008). We like it not just because it describes the way in which these technology platforms facilitate and engender a vox populi, but also because it repeatedly leads back to the notion that the result of joining voices can lead to a groundswell of opinion which can ultimately drive a business to success (or on the flip side, drive it out of business). The authors celebrate the democratization of the Internet and democracy-in-action (of the peoples’ voice). Discovering and detecting trends is such a human business and a primary reason we want to connect, social media or not. There is much written about the social psychology of group behavior and not all of it is about individual-robbing conformity or diffusion of social responsibility which seems to permit groups to do things that individuals will not.

Who was it that said, “Everybody likes a good thing?” And how do we know what thing it is that everyone likes? Today, for the vast online community around the world, social media informs us of this in rapid fashion. They did for Barak Obama’s campaign, enabling him to raise $150 million in small gifts, confounding the idea behind money corrupting politics and, ironically, undermining the McCaine-Fingold campaign finance law. What this groundswell is all about, we submit, is passion. It is no wonder that some have compared Web 2.0 to group therapy (see Creating Passionate Users blog by Kathy Sierra). And ask yourself, which brain area handles, calculates, and makes meaning and reason out of passion…? It is the limbic and related systems.

Experiential Education

We would apply this moment of intersection to the idea that significant value can be added to a classic education — based on the teaching of facts and theories in more formal settings — by judicious learning from experience and informal interaction, where a different kind of knowledge is created by the student through their own experience and discovery – one that inflames passion and makes meaning.

Think of the student who does an internship in the law firm and finds their passion. They return to campus seeing the law as “the code of social justice” and lawyers as the way that justice is brought to bear on individuals. They might conclude that the reason we have human trafficking of women and children is because the rule of law does not apply to sovereign nations the way it applies to states within a nation. They might decide they need to work harder in their classes, add a component of language mastery and international affairs so they can go to law school and then get a position with the United Nations or an international law firm.

True, a student could get the same reaction from an academic class. But it seems more likely that they would make this meaning in their own lives from entering what Etienne Wenger calls a Community of Practice. This judgment is from people, it is from the body-wellness-sense of career choice. It is what is produced by experiential education, whether it is work-related, or immersion in a foreign culture, or profound service, or even from crossing over to the research side of the professor-teacher’s life to join them in scholarship as an undergraduate.

There is already deep interest in these operations in higher education and its customers, the students. When did it become a virtual (or actual) high school graduation requirement that a student have an internship? When did cooperative education move from the professional schools to Arts and Sciences Colleges as we saw at Northeastern University? When did the world get interested in what they call Work Integrated Learning (WIL)? And a more important question may be: When will the groundswell in experiential education reach higher education? Or will it?

What kind of learning happens from experience and how can education – particularly higher education – leverage it? Is there a role for social media and social learning? These are the kinds of questions we hope to address here in this blog. We hope to publish blog posts together other guests, particularly those who practice, receive, and manage experiential education and/or social media. Some may be personal. Others may read more like academic papers. We will try to organize and manage all of this because a key aim is not just to post, but to engage in a conversation from which we and others can share and learn.

We’re looking forward to where this may lead us and hope you join this conversation too.