And Alan, I think that life tells us what we need to learn and then provides the teachers to learn it. The problem is that the learning doesn’t come with a credential. I got a PhD but it doesn’t come close to acknowledging what I learned in grad school. In the long run, I count those lessons more valuable.

For Nathan, this is all good for people who know what they want to learn. I’m still not sure how people develop the same self motivation to learn what they dont know they want/need to learn.

I love your idea of learning together, but it’s a very adult idea being had by a lifelong learner. And the guy who thinks he can kearn how to make bread in a day has a major surprise in store unless he thinks putting ingredients in a machine equals artisanal quality bread! I’ve been studying bread-making my whole life and am much humbled by the complexity of flour, water, salt and wild yeast.

If I want to learn about something — break baking, calculus, or maybe tap dancing — I want to know now. I don’t want to wait for X weeks until the course starts and spend 15 or 16 weeks slogging along at the pace established by somebody else. The internet means that any day is a day for learning and the appeal of joining my search for knowledge declines in direct proportion to the degree to which my own quest for knowledge gets short circuited by somebody else’s agenda.

The scale and scope of what I want to learn has a direct bearing as well.

If I want to learn about bread baking, I can get what I need in an hour … spend a day or two trying out stuff … and then re-engage with the knowledge domain to enhance my skills or troubleshoot my difficulties.

Learning how to write novels took a lot longer and involved several steps including re-connecting unused knowledge on grammar, story-telling, and long form fiction to new technologies like podcasting, print-on-demand, ebooks, and the current state of the publishing industry. In this case, it’s less about “learning” as much as it is joining the community of practice — that is, participating in the culture of letters — to observe, participate, and hone over a long period of time.

The question that I’ve wrestled with as a graduate school teacher myself is how to incorporate this understanding about learning into an educational setting.

The answer for me was, “Write novels. Education can wait.”

I find it interesting that the list of things you want to learn at the end of the post sounds like a Doc Searls-inspired VRM-type call for fellow learners. Perhaps there’s some way to draw together ad hoc groups of learners who have common learning goals and time frames and match them with educators who can provide on-demand guidance/classes when a critical mass of learners is achieved.