As Dean of Digital Learning at MIT, Sanjay Sarma has been tasked with spearheading an initiative to help educate the world. A lofty aim, but one which has never been more achievable, thanks to the current convergence of technology, neuroscience and experimentation which has fundamentally transformed the act of learning from a craft, to a science and, ultimately, to something that we engineer into ever greater outcomes for ourselves, our children, our students, our colleagues and humanity at large.
In The Learning Revolution, Sarma argues that emphasising 'learning' over ineffectually just 'educating' is essential to our future. In a networked and digitised world, our ability to learn over the course of a lifetime has never been greater. But as a result, the demands for a dynamic, adaptive and enduring approach to knowledge acquisition and application have increased - we can't just 'do our learning in school' and then settle in for the long haul of a narrowly defined, static work life.
Through vivid storytelling and cutting-edge science, Sarma shows why the pace of learning is far more important than the kind of learning; why cramming is a really poor way to actually retain information; how we can prime curiosity to maximize information absorption and storage; and how our knowledge develops through stages of recognition, fluency and creative application.