INTRODUCTION
The Age of Perpetual Learning

FOR MANY OF US, living as we do in this fast-paced high-tech era, life is like trying to change a tire on a car while the car is still moving. It is a bizarre image, like something from a recurring dream—you can’t possibly do what is expected, but you know your life depends on it. This is no dream. This is twenty-first-century reality. The only constant is change. Our only hope is perpetual learning.

Everyone today is either trying to get ahead, catch up, or keep from falling behind. Many people are trying to learn something just to survive—but learning is not fundamentally about survival, even though it often helps us to get through tough situations. Learning is the key to flourishing and prospering in this new era. Learning awakens our sensibilities, enables us to actualize our aspirations, and takes us places we never dreamed of going.

This book is for people who would like to improve the way they manage their learning. The key to doing that is learning more about learning so that you can get the most out of any learning you undertake. The goal is to become proficient at the process of learning itself.

Managing Your Own Learning is a book for a broad audience of learners:

• Workforce learners who have opportunities to participate in training and development programs in business, government, or not-for-profit organizations

• Formal learners enrolled in graduate or professional degree programs in colleges and universities or in continuing education programs

• Part-time learners in certificate or occupational programs in community colleges, proprietary trade schools, or the armed services

• Independent learners who are moving ahead on their own to learn what they want or need to know

• Emerging learners who may not even think of themselves as learners at this moment, but who have tremendous potential for learning

• Awakening learners who thought they had learned all they needed to know until they got that middle-of-the-night wakeup call

• Recovering learners who are trying to get beyond their previous bad experiences with learning so they can prosper in the new era

A NEW ERA
Not Just a New Millennium

The year 2000! We knew Y2K was coming. We read about it, heard about it, and got sick of hearing about it. Then it came. Is anything different? A lot of things are different, but they started being different long before the year 2000.

The cultural artifacts of a new era are now familiar and everywhere present: computers, lasers, robots, scanners, jet planes, bullet trains, color xerography, digital cameras, the Net, the Web. We are surrounded by high-order-of-magnitude change. Technological innovation drives much of the change, but we also experience other kinds of change: new organizational structures and management techniques, new means of production and service delivery, and a new global economy and communications network.

Call it what you will—the Information Age, the learning society, the cybernated world—this new era puts us all in a new situation with regard to our learning. It is the new era that is significant, not the new century or the new millennium. Time is arbitrary; events are real. The year 2000 on the Muslim calendar was 1420 A.H. On the traditional Chinese calendar it was 4690. What is different? Not the date, but the times and what the times demand of us—continuous learning.

The world we grew up in no longer exists. Everything is changing. Rapid change is a fact of life for people all over the world, in developed as well as developing nations. The entire globe has plunged into a new era of accelerated change with enormous consequences for learning. Older people in the workforce certainly feel this, but so do recent graduates. Whatever level of education they have just completed, they soon see that they were not exposed to learning they really need and learned many things that are already obsolete. Today, learning has a short shelf life.

Most of us today are under great pressure to learn new things. That pressure comes partly from the organizations where we work, but the broader source is the society in which we live. Furthermore, the new era demands of us real learning—not just going through the motions, seat time in a workshop, a diploma in hand or a certificate that says we were there. Credentials are still important, but what really counts is the learning behind and beyond the credentials. The bottom line is performance, and high-quality performance depends on perpetual learning.

PREDICTIONS THAT CAME TRUE
Looking Back on the Futurists

When was this new era born? Scholars began thinking about the new era long before it arrived. They read the signs of the times and began to predict a radically new future. Some people laughed at these predictions and made fun of the predictors, who came to be called futurists. In general, the predictions of the futurists have come true; if they were wrong, perhaps it was in underestimating both the rate and the scope of the changes.

According to an article in Fortune Magazine, the world passed from the Industrial Age to the Information Age in 1991, the year that corporate spending on information technology surpassed corporate investment in manufacturing technologies (Stewart and Furth, 1994). One of the leading futurists, Alvin Toffler, gives the new era a much earlier date: 1955, the beginning of a decade “that saw white-collar service workers outnumber blue-collar workers for the first time” (1980, 20). Toffler was able to see that this new era was going to be upsetting. In an earlier work he called it future shock, “a time phenomenon, a product of the greatly accelerated rate of change in society” (1970, 13). He compared it to the culture shock one experiences in traveling to another country, but with one important difference: you can’t return home. It is not just change that causes future shock but the rate of change, what Toffler calls “the accelerative thrust” of change (1970, 20–34).

The future described by the futurists (Toffler, 1972) is not coming; it has arrived with full force. It doesn’t matter when it began or what we call it; what we know for certain is that the new era is here. However much we may want to turn the clock back to another era, or slow the rate of change, we can’t. Besides, there are many things most people like about the new era. We have no choice but to adapt. This is the Age of Perpetual Learning.

The chief characteristic of the Age of Perpetual Learning is rapid change. The real meaning of the year 2000 is that no one can survive without learning. Learning is driven both by necessity and passion. The key is to learn how to manage your own learning so that you can not only survive but thrive.

LEARNING ABOUT LEARNING
Using This Book

Although researchers know a great amount about learning processes after a fruitful century of investigation, most people remain relatively in the dark about how learning takes place. This is not the result of a conspiracy on the part of those who have provided our formal schooling; it is, rather, a matter of neglect. Few teachers or trainers believe their role includes sitting down with us to discuss the learning processes we are experiencing—even if they themselves had words to describe these processes, which they may not. Ironically, even after years of formal learning few people have a clear idea of what learning is or the many ways learning takes place.

Learning about learning is the organizing theme of this book. If you are able to learn the basics about learning, you should be able to maximize your learning in almost any setting. The structure of the book is simple and straightforward. In Part One you will learn how to assess your previous learning and build an action plan for further learning. You will also learn how to understand yourself as a learner and reframe your concept of learning. In Part Two you will find seven ways of learning presented, each in a separate chapter. At the end of each of those chapters you will find “Lessons Learned: Ten Things You Can Do to Maximize Your Learning.” In Part Three you will find suggestions for how to use the seven ways of learning most effectively, how to use information sources such as bookstores, publishers, libraries, and the Internet, and how to find resources for continuing your learning.

Throughout this book there is an emphasis on taking responsibility for your learning, and maximizing your learning, in different settings. We call this overall process managing your own learning. Why did we pick the word managing? Definitions of management found in the classic textbooks include four interrelated functions: planning, organizing, motivating, and controlling. These four functions parallel what effective learners do.

• Effective learners plan for learning. They don’t wait for learning opportunities to appear. They analyze carefully their needs for learning and aggressively seek out experiences that will meet those needs.

• Effective learners organize their participation in learning. They know how learning takes place and they think carefully about how they can best participate in order to maximize their own learning.

• Effective learners motivate themselves to learn. They understand themselves as learners and they know what they need to do to sustain their involvement long enough and strong enough to produce results.

• Effective learners control their learning. They seek feedback on how well they have learned. They know how to use information resources and how to find additional opportunities for learning.

In the factory model of mass education, the teacher was the manager. Although teachers and trainers still play important roles in facilitating learning, the ultimate responsibility for managing learning in this new era rests directly on the shoulders of the learner.

Most readers today skip around as they read. Recognizing this, we would like to provide some suggestions. If you already have a plan for learning and a good understanding of yourself as a learner, you may wish to plunge directly into the seven ways of learning in Part Two. These chapters can be read in any order, but we hope you will read enough of them to become knowledgeable about several ways of learning and to recognize that there are indeed different ways to learn. If you need help in locating resources for further learning after reading Chapter 1, you may want to turn directly to Chapter 13; you can read about using information resources, Chapter 12, at any time, and so forth. Although the arrangement of the chapters is intended to be logical, you can random access each chapter or special topic as you would with software, by using those old-fashioned search mechanisms called the Index and Table of Contents.

Most works of fiction have a central character. In this book you are the main character. We have provided headings, bulleted lists, and sections in italic to help you find important points. We want you to be an active learner as you read, and we encourage you to interact with the subject matter, look for main ideas, underline key points, and jot down reactions. Note especially the sections marked Time Out.

This book has been written as a companion to our earlier work, Effective Training Strategies: A Comprehensive Guide to Maximizing Learning in Organizations (Davis and Davis, 1998). That book was developed for trainers, teachers, consultants, and others who facilitate learning in organizational settings. If you are a learning facilitator, or if you want examples from organizations and more technical detail on each of the seven ways of learning presented in this book, you should read Effective Training Strategies: A Comprehensive Guide to Maximizing Learning in Organizations. It is available in bookstores or through Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

Managing Your Own Learning provides you with a language you can use to describe your own efforts at learning and to discuss your learning experiences with others: students, colleagues, significant others, and those who serve as your teachers and facilitators. We believe there is an urgent need for dialogue about learning in this new era so that learning can be more focused and efficient and less happenstance and superficial. We invite you to help initiate and sustain this dialogue by sharing with others what you have learned from this book. If you wish to communicate with other readers around the world you can do so through the Consortium for Business Literacy, a group of publishers with whom Berrett-Koehler cooperates to facilitate dialogue among readers. You can also get from Berrett-Koehler a guide to use for group discussions about this book. See www.bkconnection.com or call (415) 288-0260. You can reach the authors through the publisher or at the University of Denver.