Bringing the Plaza into Focus

The balcony’s proprietor has put a variety of telescopes, binoculars, and lenses on the large wooden table to help us focus on what’s happening down below. These are magic spyglasses. Each lets us watch the people in the plaza through the eyes of a different discipline.

I pick up the marketing spyglass. The learners look like customers shopping for knowledge and abilities to add to their repertoire. They love to buy but they hate to be sold. No matter how good the price, relationships are more important. They trust word of mouth more than advertisements. The people are not really shopping for lessons. They "buy" learning based on their expectations of how it will make them feel. In the end, all purchase decisions are emotional.

Next I bring the motivation spyglass to my eye. Some learners are enthusiastic; others are wallflowers. The gung-ho learners know what’s in it for them and deem it relevant. They understand what’s expected. They enjoy doing things their own way. They learn from teaching others. They’re not afraid to screw up.

The lack-luster learners show up unprepared. They fear looking stupid and are afraid to experiment. They don’t seem to know how they’re doing. They feel that learning is being imposed upon them. They think the task is to memorize facts and procedures, not to undertand the broader context.

The anthropology telescope lets me watch how the folks in the plaza are behaving. Some are attending classes. Others are chatting by the fountain. Several old men tell jokes as they puff fat cigars. The scope filters out the static and I notice to my surprise that the people chatting by themselves are learning twice as much as those who are attending classes.

Several homeless people are camped out under the shrubbery, heads covered with tattered blankets. Watching them earlier, I saw that they were learning nothing at all. A small group huddled together at the far end of the plaza is holding an AA meeting; they’re not well off but the group is learning – together – how to recover from their addictions. 

The rough-hewn table on the balcony holds dozens of lenses. The Meta-Learning Lab is dedicated to looking through them all in order to capture the viewpoints that make the benefits of meta-learning most clear.

Current work focuses on:

If you have a viewpoint you think we should be looking at, please get in touch.

The Balcony: What is Meta-Learning?

Looking at the Learning Process

Improving the Learning Process

Leveraging the Learning Process

Meta-Learning Lab Helps Corporations

Engaging the Meta-Learning Lab