The second question is who is the best teacher in the information age. I don't know who is the best teacher. In the information society, there is no teacher to guide us to learn. That is the reality. No one can say that I am a teacher in the information society. I can teach you all the knowledge you meet in the information society, only the explorer. So I say that the concept of teacher has changed a lot in the information age, and teachers are relative. The teacher who used to be absolute for life really didn't exist. So now I often say the other way around, all teachers are.
How to learn in the information age (full text)
Today, I am glad to have such an opportunity to talk to you about how to study in the information age. It should be said that this problem is a very big one. I think 2 1 century is the century of learning. Learning is everyone's business. 1300 million citizens, there are1300 million learning subjects. The learner has a problem. Every learner has a question about how to learn. Then learning is also a human society, and since there has been a human society, there has been a problem of learning. So what is the practical significance of how to study today? It is precisely because we are in the information society that new problems appear in our study. In the past, we had a set of mature learning concepts and methods, but this set of methods and concepts may not be suitable today, so what we want to discuss is how we learn in the information age and in the 2 1 century.
So before I say these questions, let me tell a personal story: I 199 1 graduated from Beijing Normal University. I studied in Beijing Normal University for ten years. 199 1 After graduation, there were some problems. What are the problems? It is in my ten years of school that I have studied the basic principles of pedagogy, and there are probably only a few books. I spent ten years eating these books, six or seven, and I'm sure I can chew them down. I use the method of intensive reading, which means that I have to chew every word and paragraph from beginning to end, which means that I have chewed very solidly and worked very hard to understand it carefully, so I adopted this method of intensive reading and made ten years of academic achievements. But 199 1 year later, I graduated and got my doctorate, but I can't read. What can I say? Because in the 1990s, I felt that there was obviously a process of knowledge economy and information explosion in China, so in the field of pedagogy principles, many books were published at once, some books were so big and thick, and some books were series books. I am a book lover. I bought a lot of books at once, and I was a little worried. Why? Because according to my previous study habits, it takes about three or four months or six months to read a book. Because I picked it up word by word and bought so many books at once, I think it will be more troublesome. I have to read so many books for years. Then I think the problem I am facing is not only my personal problem, nor the problem of college students and graduate students, but the problem of the whole society or, more bluntly, the problem of the whole era. So today we will discuss and communicate with such a question.
Then my topic is how to learn in the information age. In other words, if we want to discuss learning, we must first understand several premises, because if we don't understand these premises, we can't talk clearly just about learning itself. I want to tell you one thing: First, what happened in the information society? What is the information society; Second, what changes have taken place in contemporary education? The first premise is what happened in the information society. We all say that it is an information society now, or that we have entered the information age, and 2 1 century is an information society, and we all have such a concept. But what does the information age mean? Or is the information age different from the previous society, with different characteristics and laws?
First of all, we should know what society was before the information society. The first is the agricultural society, which has a history of thousands of years and is very mature. Following the agricultural society, mankind entered the industrial society, which has a history of only a few hundred years. About fifty years ago, we humans began to use computers, that is to say, from that moment on, we gradually entered the information society, which is probably the case. Three societies have three different civilized norms, that is to say, under different civilized norms, the laws and characteristics of their social development are different. Then we won't discuss the agricultural society. Let's talk about industrial society first. Industrial society has a history of hundreds of years. What are the basic characteristics of industrial society? First, the practical object of industrial society is mainly the material world other than human beings. The main problem to be solved in industrial society is that we human beings must create living conditions and means of production for our survival and development, which is the fundamental problem we have to solve in industrial society for hundreds of years. Now, it seems that human beings have developed well in the industrial society, we have solved the problems well, we have greatly created social productive forces and created a series of social wealth for our human survival and development. It can be said that we have achieved great glory in the industrial society.
The second characteristic of industrial society is called mold manufacturing and mass production. What is mold manufacturing and mass production? Because in the industrial society, it should pay attention to the efficiency of production and must mass-produce what we need, so this kind of production cannot be individualized and personalized, but must be unified mass production and mass production. It should be said that this has been done very well in our industrial society, which is a mass production society. Because the main body of our whole society is still in the industrial age, such a deep-rooted concept of industrial society, which has lasted for hundreds of years, is still affecting us, not only in general, but also in many aspects, which have been integrated into our minds and blood and become the basic basis for us to judge things. We believe in education and learning.
But there is a danger here. If there is no qualitative change in society, our way of thinking is still effective, but once the society has undergone fundamental changes, it challenges us, so this is a problem we have to face in the information society. So what changes have taken place in the information society? I have summarized several points here: first, the information society; first, the information explosion, and information has become something of value. We didn't see it that way before. We are in an industrial society, which is a very real society. We must see, touch, use, facilitate, eat, feed and wear, so that I can judge its value. And information is not for this, information can neither be eaten nor worn, but has become a valuable thing in the information society, with no general value and great value, so this is a phenomenon different from the previous society.
Second, the Internet has built instant messaging, changed the time pattern of human activities, and formed a marine culture that gathers knowledge, wisdom and emotion. What is instant messaging? That is, communication can happen in an instant, and the cycle of communication and information transmission is very fast, which is called instant communication. Internet not only builds instant communication, but also changes the time pattern of human culture. The previous long period has now become a short period, and the previous slow rhythm has now become a fast rhythm. Many things make our time for thinking and making decisions very short. So it can be said that in the Internet age, there are no secrets, and we can learn what is happening in any corner of the world in a very short time, which is instant messaging. I tell you, instant messaging has brought us great problems. Because we rely on time to think and deal with problems, and now there is no time, everyone will know in an instant. What shall we do? In the past, we could have a meeting. A few people will hold a meeting first, set a tone and make a decision, then mobilize the masses and make arrangements at different levels. Now, this is not the case. Everyone knows at once, but we just can't wait for your meeting. This has had a great impact on the way we used to deal with and think about problems. Moreover, the internet brings together the knowledge and wisdom of all mankind and its personality world, making it an ocean of knowledge and wisdom. On the Internet, everything has merged into an ocean of knowledge. What is the ocean? Have you ever seen the feeling of the sea? Suddenly, it comes to you, and the Internet is such a feeling. All the creative spiritual products of human knowledge and wisdom come to you, which is such a kind of boldness.
Third, the main object of social practice has changed from transforming the material world to transforming the human world. Whether it is an agricultural society or an industrial society, our excitement is to develop nature and turn everything in nature into the material products we need. This is the fundamental task of society. But once the material production reaches a certain level of richness, when I don't need so many things, what should I do when I really can't eat? That society must have something to do. At this time, the focus of social practice has changed from developing nature to developing ourselves. We used to have an old saying, "While transforming the objective world, we should also transform our own subjective world". Is it known to all, but today this question seems to have changed a little? Where is the change? For every centimeter of improvement in the transformation of the subjective world, the transformation of the objective world can be improved by ten centimeters, which means that the transformation of the subjective world becomes more important than the development of the objective world. In fact, looking around, we can draw this conclusion from our real life. At present, our household expenditure, that is, the whole Engel coefficient is declining, and the proportion used for daily food and clothing consumption is declining. What is going up? Of course, buy big things, such as buying a house and a car. What is being improved now is the education of children and the construction of learning families. In our past, these things should not be so expensive. How can education cost so much money? We should spend more money on eating, drinking, wearing and building a learning family.
Then this feature can be seen from this year's SARS incident. Take SARS as an example. If there is no Internet, it should be said that this matter itself, this information will not spread so fast, so fantastic, and will not cause such a big panic, so the Internet has increased such a negative reaction to social adverse events. So I was scared. But the Internet also has its advantages. It spreads bad news and good news quickly, so the situation drops day by day, the number drops, and the whole society becomes stable. Therefore, because of the powerful communication tools of the Internet, social events come and go in a hurry. When they come, they will come in an avalanche, and when they leave, they will soon disappear. As you can see, there is a rule in the whole social events, that is, the intermittence increases and the jumping increases.
In addition, the unpredictable factors of social events have increased. Unlike in the industrial society, we can plan and predict things calmly in the industrial society. Now we can't predict, we can't make plans, it's too fast. We used to make educational plans. We have made five-year plans, which are called five-year plans, the sixth five-year plan, the seventh five-year plan and the eighth five-year plan. Once we succeed, it will be five years. But now you have made a five-year plan, tried it, and will change it the next year. Why? The cycle of change has been accelerated and the time has been shortened. If you plan for another five years, it will have changed long ago, so this is the short cycle and fast speed of change, which poses the most severe challenge to our education and study. As we all know, we used to need textbooks for learning and education, but in the past, making a textbook was not that simple. You don't have more than ten years, and you can't produce a textbook for decades, but think about it. It took you ten years to produce a textbook for students, so how much has the society changed in the past ten years, and what you said in this textbook is still true? Are the data in your textbook reliable? Is the conclusion of your textbook still scientific? Not necessarily. It has changed. At present, half of human knowledge will be eliminated. This half-life is definitely less than five years. I estimate that it is three or four years now. In three or four years or even less, half of our existing knowledge will be outdated, eliminated and updated. It is in such a society that we receive education and study. You realize that this is a new change brought by the information society. When we talk about all problems, we must proceed from this reality, otherwise we can't talk clearly, so this is the first prerequisite for us to understand the discussion of learning problems.
So after we know the first premise, let's discuss the second premise, what changes have taken place in contemporary education. We said that social civilization is changing, and we also said that modern science is changing. The connotation, spirit, object and law of scientific discovery of scientific research have all undergone profound changes. So can education remain the same? It can't be the same What are the characteristics of traditional education? These are the three characteristics I am talking about here: first, traditional education pursues the certainty of content and process; Second, the pursuit of standardization of results; Third, the pursuit of mass production. When I say traditional education, I mean such an educational period since the emergence of modern schools. Why is this? Obviously, education is closely related to the society at that time. Industrial society must have industrialized education, which serves and adapts to the requirements of industrial society. As we said before, the production in the industrial age is mold manufacturing and mass production, so the education in the industrial society must also be mold manufacturing and mass production, that is, people are treated as things, produced, input from this end of the assembly line, and a standard part comes out from this assembly line. We don't need to think that this is a very inhuman process, because that society must do it, it must do it, it is right to do it, and it has completed its unique historical mission. But today is different. Today, our whole society, as I said just now, has changed its practice object and goal, so education should be changed accordingly. I won't go into details about how education has changed. I will briefly talk about several key words of contemporary education reform, that is, in what direction and what qualitative changes have taken place.
The first one is called service. We know that China's service industry is already a big industry. We used to call it the primary industry and the secondary industry. Now our service industry is the tertiary industry and a big industry. But what is the service industry? In the past, we planted crops and made steel. Does it exist or not? No service industry is needed. For the material world other than people, there is no problem of service. Who serves whom, not for things, but for things. So when it comes to service industry, it is an industry that serves people. It needs to serve talents, not things. For things, it is only a matter of development, mining and production. Then I think that in today's information society, our education will undergo a major change, that is, from shaping education to service-oriented education. Then I think the theme of education is to serve learning, so there is no problem of weakening the function of the school. There is no need to weaken the function of the school, but it needs to change from shaping to service. Let's think about it. The words we use to describe education and teachers have obvious traces of industrial society or manufacturing. We say that teachers are engineers of the human soul, and we say that teachers are gardeners, engineers or gardeners. They are all obvious concepts in industrial society, including what to give students a bowl of water and a teacher must have a bucket of water. These are the concepts of industrial society, and the information society is backward and outdated. We are in the information society, and we are.
The second is learning, how to become a keyword, and who to compare with when learning this keyword? I tell you, with education, there is a famous expression in the history of education in China, which is called teaching and learning, and half is half, that is, learning. In this ancient word, it is half of teaching, that is, the first half is learning, that is to say, teaching itself includes learning, which is called teaching, learning and half. For thousands of years, our human learning has been carried out under the care of education, or in terms of the relationship between education and learning, learning has always been in a secondary position, and education is the main one. But today, this little role, learning this role, has become a giant. This awareness tells everyone that it is hard to come by, and not everyone is so clear. We always think that education is very important. I don't deny the importance of education at all, but I want to say that learning is more important than education. We didn't study in the past. I study education. Take our education as an example. At least before the 1980s, there were few articles on research and study, but only a little more in recent years. But to what extent and where to put education and learning, everyone is not so clear. What I want to tell you is that 2 1 century is not an education century, but a learning century. It's a cliche to say that the education century. If we say that 2 1 century is the century of education, then we should say that 2 1 century is the century when education has changed from shaping education to serving education. For whom and for learning, the core of human development in 2 1 century is two words, called learning. How many people are studying? There are many teachers. Teachers are a huge team, but how many learners are there? A person is a learner. There are as many learners as there are people in China, and nothing can match this concept.
The fourth is personalization, that is, education will become more and more personalized, rather than the class teaching and mass production that we are used to now.
The fifth is to think positively. What is positive thinking? In the industrial age, almost all our teachers have developed a defect, that is, they are particularly fond of criticizing people. Our teachers, including our parents, are very critical of children. We have mastered this skill for hundreds of years, that is, the ability of our ancestors to criticize us from generation to generation. Why do we have this ability in the industrial age? This has something to do with that era, because in the industrial age, as I said just now, it should be standardized. Once we have standards, we can do things easily. We produce this cup cover, because we have a mold, so how simple is the problem? Anything that doesn't fit this mold is defective. You can only keep this mold and cut everything else off. It's as simple as that. This simple logic is determined by the nature of mold manufacturing and mass production in industrial society. However, in the information age, science is an open world of exploration. Science is a world with human emotion and humanistic care. Standardized science still exists. There is still more room and more fields for us to explore. It is an open system, that is to say, in many fields, we would rather explore together than ask for a standardized answer. This is an exploratory science. So, so what? In the information society, we must have a new way of thinking, that is, positive thinking. To put it bluntly, positive thinking means more encouragement, more praise, less attention to shortcomings, less attention to shortcomings, and more attention to children's advantages and highlights. Then this is also a question of changing ideas. Therefore, we often tell teachers to think positively, not criticize so much, and change their ideas. Many of our parents and teachers say that shortcomings cannot be changed and advantages cannot be run away. This is an old saying in industrial society, but today we want to change this and tell everyone that every child has two little people in his heart. One villain's name is a good boy, and the other villain's name is a bad boy, that is, he is a bad boy. In the past, we meant to talk about his shortcomings, then bring out his advantages and kill bad children and villains, just the opposite. We should call his good boy's name more often, bring out his good boy, dilute his bad boy and make him forget his bad boy gradually. On the other hand, there are two ways out, two roads, one reflecting the mode of industrial age and the other reflecting the way of thinking in the information age.
So I'm here, and I'm going to tell you a basic principle of pedagogy, which is called the Pico Marion effect. The original legend, I'm not sure, probably said that there was a sculptor named Pico Marion in ancient Greece. When he was doing sculpture, he always wanted to add his own emotion to the object of sculpture, carved with great care, and always fantasized that sculpture could become someone in his ideal, and then this miracle really appeared. His sculpture, this work has changed from a stone to a real person, which is later understood as such a meaning, that is to say, how you look at your educational object, this educational object will grow according to your expectations of him, and your expectations of him will become what he will become, which is extended to such a principle of pedagogy. In fact, the child itself is open, and he has everything. Now, let's see what kind of people we want our children to be. I think he is a genius, so he must be a genius. No problem, that is to say, this place should not be too real. I always say that the real culture formed in industrial society is seriously binding us. In the development of the information society, we humans are really too real in the industrial society. Only when we can see and feel it will we believe it. But in the information society, I tell you in another passage that it will only appear when I believe it.
The second question is who is the best teacher in the information age. I don't know who is the best teacher, and I don't think I am the best teacher. At least I won't take the self-taught exam after I graduate from my Ph.D. I am also exploring and reflecting on this issue. Then what I want to say is that if we encounter agricultural problems in an agricultural society, then agricultural experts and old farmers are our best teachers. If you encounter problems in industrial construction, experts, workers, old workers, level 7 workers and level 8 workers are the best teachers. But if you want to ask questions about the information age, I can't find anyone. Why? Because the information society has only been a few years, more than ten or twenty years, and experts have not yet come out. There are no seven-level workers and eight-level workers, but now there are only first-level workers, second-level workers and apprentices. In the information society, everyone is a child and has no experience. Even I like to say that we have no elders in the information society. I believe that there is an eldest son in the information society. Who is the eldest son is the group of people who are best at studying and exploring the new situations and problems facing the information society. In a word, there are not many teachers, not only in China, but all over the world. Then what should I do? I'm in trouble if I can't find a teacher. Because when it comes to learning, how can you learn without a teacher? When it comes to learning, we have such a concept in our mind. We need a teacher, a book, a textbook, a classroom, an exam topic and homework. If you still want to study with such dogma, your study will be very difficult. No, the teacher can't find it, the textbook is gone, who will give you the exam, no, no homework, self-study. Therefore, in the information society, we should have such psychological preparation. I have to study without the teacher's guidance. That is the reality. There is no way. No one can say that I am a teacher in the information society. I can teach you everything that happens in the information society. No one dares to say that. It's just that the seeker had no idea about that teacher in the past. So I say that the concept of teacher has changed a lot in the information age, and teachers are relative. The teacher who used to be absolutely lifelong really doesn't exist. So now I often say that all teachers must be freshmen and all students must be their own teachers. There is no way.
Finally, let's briefly talk about what kind of learning concept we should establish in the information society. First, learn to enjoy learning. These words are different. We haven't said that before. "There is no limit to learning the sea." If you study hard, how can you enjoy studying? Fighting for a boat is the logic of industrial society. Today, we must study with different attitudes. Learning is not so pessimistic, not so negative, not so terrible. People who don't like to enjoy it love to enjoy it. But when we think of the word "enjoyment", we are very relaxed, so we treat learning with enjoyment. Second, learn to learn quickly. As I said at the beginning, 199 1 will not study after graduation. Why? Because I have to learn the last word from the first word, so a lot of books, how do I look at it, how many years will it take. That is to say, at that time, I only mastered the study of Excellence in industrial society, but did not master the fast, rough and superficial study facing the information society. In the information society, it is really difficult for you to master this learning method, so I don't want to deny that kind of intensive reading, but at the same time of intensive reading, you should learn to read quickly, when to use intensive reading and when to use intensive reading. Depending on the object of reading, some objects need our intensive reading. Read a book thoroughly in a year, sometimes many books don't need to be read like that. You can read 10 books, 20 books, 50 books, 100 books a year. It's different. It depends on the object of study and the purpose of study. Why did you read it? It is especially important for us to read a lot. In the information society, because there is too much information. Third, learning can be gradual, leaping and advanced. School education has come up with a system now, and we must do it step by step. Does this system make sense? It is reasonable to serve industrialization, and it is reasonable to master basic knowledge and skills, but it is not enough, so I say to walk on two legs. There are three ways to learn: parallel, step by step and non-step by step, jumping and leading, anything can come.
Fourth, in the past, we accepted the concept that learning is constantly adding things to our minds, so we are happy to accept the learning of addition and even multiplication. So I want to tell you today, because in the information society, the half-life of knowledge is very fast, and the speed of updating is also very fast, so don't be too obsessed with what you have got. You have to clean up the garbage at home, keep cleaning up the garbage, learn to subtract or even divide, and you can put down the whole book. You have to clean up the books at home every once in a while, except those reference books and authoritative books that you haven't read for three or five years.
Fifth, make full use of the Internet to learn. At the extreme, there is everything on the Internet, but we haven't found a good path yet. Internet is a sea of human knowledge and wisdom in Wang Yang. If you don't surf the Internet, you are behind the times. So now many parents and teachers are worried that their children have learned some bad things online, or are addicted to games and intoxicated with something. Of course, this is also a problem that needs to be studied and solved, but in general, the advantages of the Internet outweigh the disadvantages, which is much greater, so children should be encouraged to study online.
Finally, be the master of your own study. Our new curriculum reform also advocates autonomous learning, that is, to cultivate the awareness and ability of autonomous learning of primary and secondary school students, and to start from an early age.