Peter Giger

At lunch, a large, loud American man leaned over and asked Masse and me “He, what are you guys here to learn”. I instantly felt the word “learn” somewhat strange in this conference. I’m not sure why. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that the word ‘learn’ is connected with the task of acquiring facts in the traditional western education system. And that’s how I interpreted his question s:”What facts are you here to acquire?”. As John Maeda said in his talk yesterday:

‘Eduction’ is a dysfunctional concept.

Traditional learning is tightly connected with traditional education. I’m at this conference (Web 2.0 Expo) to acquire viewpoints of things more or less familiar to me, I am not here to acquire facts. I think some programming freaks might pick up a factual tip or two, but the sessions I’m looking for are about viewpoints about the interface between technology and ideology. This is learning too of course, but does the western educational system aknowledge this? No, not generally. Perhaps that’s what’s making it dysfunctional.