How We Learn: A WIRED Investigation
That Johannes Gutenberg guy was on to something. He may not have been the first person to print texts on paper using movable type—systems in China and Korea predated his—but his printing press made it faster, and cheaper, to create a record of a thought. One by one, those thoughts spread across Europe, philosophy and science and poetry. They might have been a cause of the Renaissance, or simply a symptom, but ideas grew legs they'd never had before.
Nearly 600 years later, we don't have an easy analogue for that printing press. Or maybe we have too many. The web, and dial-up BBSes and Usenet before it, incubated and distributed knowledge and commentary; later, blogging platforms democratized the power of publication. Then Tumblr. Then YouTube. Then MOOCs and Masterclass and Skillshare, all of it allowing us to be both sensei and student. AR and VR are just beginning to show their worth in education, concretizing ideas like few technologies ever have. Everywhere you look and tap and scroll, there's a new source of instruction and analysis—spread in good faith, bad faith, and everything in between. For all the handwringing around the dumbening of civilization (that's a clinical term), we've never had so many ideas, so many ways to learn.
So here at WIRED Culture, we decided to take stock of those ways. How game streaming can lead to urgent discourse. How podcasts can make us care about things we never thought we might. How film history lurks on DVDs; how we reshape our social media selves to make ourselves better with a purpose. How genre fiction exposes our desperate hunger for study. Everyone has their own set of rabbit holes—we just wanted to share ours. Now go find some new ones of your own.
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