I can find a lot of charts comparing passive vs active learning, and none of them favor passive learning. Wikipedia defines passive learning as “a method of learning or instruction where students receive information from the instructor and internalize it.” Elsewhere it is defined by the absence of student feedback or interaction.
Yet this traditional way of teaching dominates education, although good teachers have creative ways of making their material more interesting to students, and usually welcome questions. Passive learning depends on the compliance of teachers to the demands of the curriculum, and of students on doing what schools require of them. Passive learning is so much the status quo that it does not need to explain itself and mount a defense.
Generally speaking, when we talk about active learning, we mean that the student is engaged in hands-on activities, interacting with peers, and developing their own projects. Related to active learning is “self-directed learning” where students take control of what they learn and how they learn to produce their own work. (A student can do an activity that’s directed by the teacher, which is active learning on one level but not self-directed learning.)
What brought this to mind for me was an article, “Where Did TikTok Come From?” by Ted Gioia who writes about music and culture on Substack. He has a chart showing the “Evolution of the User Interface”, shown below. He makes the case that the technology we use everyday requires less and less that we do anything. It does things to us passively and we internalize it.
Gioia says that our attention, as evidenced by TikTok, is increasingly driven by algorithms, not interest. TikTok tells you what you should be interested in, perhaps because other people are interested. I was struck by the arrows on right Gioia’s chart, showing that the present and future of technology are characterized as passive. Our user experience in apps and online is increasing passive — you don’t have to make a choice. “The platform drives the process,” says Gioia. The goal of an application like TikTok is to keep you using it, almost unaware of how much you are using it. It’s like junk food that doesn’t offer much nourishment. Gioia characterizes it as creating a “dopamine addiction.” Just keep using. Binging is what is good for their business, even if it is not good for you.
I imagine that two forces are combining for teenagers: lots of time spent bored by lectures in in classes they are required to take and lots of time spent outside of class dominated by apps that make choices for them. That’s not good for developing autonomy or agency, or any other dozen or so traits that require intention and becoming your own person. Those two forces — the educational system and the social media platforms — are working against developing the capabilities that make us uniquely human.
When I started Make magazine, I was fascinated that makers see technology as a set of tools, something they can do something with. The more they learn about the tool, the more control they gain and the more they can do. (They equate what they can do with their own ability to take control of their own lives.) They ignore the false promise that technology should be easy. Instead, they try to understand how technology works so that they can do things themselves, even if they are hard — and perhaps realizing that real satisfaction comes from the work being hard.
I still believe in that view of “technology as tools” and that our goal in education is to teach students how to use these tools. The more people who know how to use those tools to benefit humanity the better. However, as Gioia points out, technology is also being used in ways to take control over people’s lives. This is true for AI — another powerful tool that in the right hands and with the right mindset can be a boon for creativity and problem-solving but also can be used without almost any thought as a replacement for thinking and creating — or having to do anything at all.
Social media and AI as a business want to create users and customers. In maker education, we want to create makers and doers. We have more ambitious goals than a business. We believe there is a way to create producers, to develop young people who have agency and autonomy, who are curious and have many interests, who know all the tools they can use to do things, and who are encouraged to do things that are difficult. As makers, they care about improving their own lives and those who live around them and they know how to use tools to do something about that.