A New Culture of Learning

A New Culture of Learning is a book written by Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown that explores the new and forever-evolving world that we live in today. The book's main goal was to challenge our typical concept of what a culture really is, and, from my perspective, it succeeded. Rather than regarding culture as an entity that changes over a long period of time, this book suggests that today's "culture" is constantly adapting to it's surroundings. This new concept of culture is supported by various personal stories throughout the chapters. The book also takes a closer look at how this new culture affects our education system and our ability to learn by establishing play, innovation, and the cultivation of the imagination as the "cornerstones of learning."


Overall, I would say that I do agree with Thomas & Brown's theory of a constantly evolving culture. And I definitely agree with the idea that learning is no longer just taking place in classrooms, but that it is taking place everywhere, (often times through digital networking). I also really liked the fact that the evolution of our learning style was stressed continuously throughout the book. I think that one of the largest problems in our education system today is that some teachers still refuse to acknowledge that today's generation really does learn things differently than previous generations. The majority of us require a more integrated approach between technology and the basics than many teachers are willing to give. I love that people are starting to realize that and that some of them are doing something about it. 


For the most part, I genuinely liked the content of this book. However, I think that it could have been organized into a less repetitive prose and could've possibly been shortened a bit. Overall, the book went along very well with everything we've been learning about in class. Content-wise, it was a very good choice for Media Literacy.