Life is full of apprenticeship, eating, walking, talking, dealing with our social environment, reading, writing, counting, programming. We have learnt, discovered or invented anything we do. Pedagogy is everywhere and everybody is a teacher.
If anyone is both a trainee and a trainer, if learning is so common and widespread, why is pedagogy so controversial? Probably because learning is vital. Moreover, because we think that the way we think, the way we grasp our environment and the world strongly depends on the way we have learnt and what we know. Knowledge is power and many people in the Valley could sing "I've got the Power, I've got your Data, I'm gonna mimic your Brain, you'll be another clone of my computers :-)"
TMTOWTDI, training, learning, teaching, educating, discovering, inventing are a few verbs that describe very different ways to learn. A coach differs from a trainer, a trainer from a teacher. A school is not a research lab...
You may learn to do, to perform, to make, to build, to design, to invent or to understand, you may even learn to learn, and learn to teach. And learning is not confined to human beings. Animals learn too. And your computer will soon begin to learn too.
There are many lessons out of computers learning, possibly because computer scientists try to mimic the way we learn : program (acquire knowledge), test (assess and improve), supervised (mimetic), unsupervised (exploratory), reinforcement (learn by doing). But there are some caveats too. Take reinforcement learning. The computer is "punished" for wrong answers and "rewarded" for good answers. Have you ever seen a computer sulking a a corner? It's a grim perspective. I hope that, in the future, a global initiative will ban computer bullying. Well, computers are things. They don't care about bullying.
A recent article in ACM Communications magazine, that traces the intellectual itinerary of JH.Holland, gives me a better hint. Learning is all about exploration, selection and exploitation. No more punishing, we exploit things our ancesters tested. We explore new things. We select things that work and forget things that don't - well, we may store it somewhere to prevent us from trying again. After all, learning consists in forgetting your failures and magnifying your successes.
Sometimes, forgetting is not easy. My hobby includes restoring wooden boats. In shipyards, apprentices learn by doing. Doing is a great word for tidying up the shopfloor, gathering tools, sweeping sawdust. So why does the yard master punish apprentices before they try and fail? In a shipyard, you will find no version control system, no revert button, no rollback procedure and no backup and restoration tools. People do their best to prevent wrong cuts in expensive wood. And people do their best too to prevent injuries while working in a hazardous environment. Participating in peripheral tasks is a great way to accustom with the shop and to grasp the big picture of the trade. You gain confidence, trust and responsibilities as you get involved in the team.
If sweeping is not your cup of tea, I may suggest you alternatives. The first one is to learn the hard way by establishing your own shop. As long as you pay for the wood, you are free to cut. I followed this path and I definitely end up sweeping my own sawdust. Achievments are (sometimes) very rewarding ... and failures are quite punishing. The second one is to read Richard Feynman's book, "the pleasure of finding things out". I don't try to mislead you. Richard Feynman was probably a very hard worker and a very demanding teacher. But he put the stress on what really matters : the freedom to explore, and the wonder that we feel for sciences and natural world are more important than a few bad cuts in an oak timber.
