Episode 84: Join the Rebellion Through Experiential Learning with Alejandro Crawford, CEO at RebelBase and Eliza Edge, Head of Digital Learning Content and Communications at RebelBase
Alejandro Juárez Crawford is the co-founder & CEO of RebelBase and brings 20+ years of experience as a consultant, educator, and entrepreneur developing programs, tools, and methodology that bring bottom-up innovation to companies, schools, and communities.
Eliza Edge, is the Head of Learning Content and Communications at RebelBase she brings extensive experience enabling hundreds of early-stage startups’ strategy, marketing, and external communications, combined with teaching and facilitating social entrepreneurship.
Is the Concept of Lifelong Learning Real?
The key to this concept is that holy curiosity of inquiry. The key to learning is at every stage, do you accept being told to stay in your lane, learn how it is supposed to be done and try to imitate that, and maybe explore a little with some fixed parameters, or are you constantly peeling back what you hear one thing. Are you asking hard questions and do you have to test them in the real world? It is not just the room we learn in or the digital room we learn in, but it is whether that learning is stimulating that curiosity. Lifelong learning is one of the joys of being human. The most fulfilling moments of learning are those where you have autonomy over what you are learning. You are not being told to read a textbook or take an exam and study something that will not be clickable to your life or where you do not have a say in it. Lifelong learning is in part, being able to choose what it is you are building and growing, and being able to grow and build it yourself provides a learning opportunity as well as it providing you a lot of fulfillment too.
How Does Lifelong Learning Change in this New Model of Social Media?
When it comes to autonomy, we need to differentiate between the way most social media works today and the way it could work. Today, when using social media, you are the guinea pig and you are being experimented on. If we were to transition that, especially regarding today’s generation, and put the power in the hands of the user, then they become the ones who are conducting the experiment. They would now become the experimenter and not the guinea pig. It is every bit within our power to make social media do that. Right now when we use the major social media platforms, we are being analyzed and then our behavior is being used to exploit our weaknesses as consumers. Social media can also be a powerful tool to reach potential new customers or users or people like you whom maybe you want to collaborate with. It is more important than ever to learn how to critically think when dealing with social media. We are so focused on the media being used by the learner or by the experimenter if we make that transition. There is also a set of changes going on in the world outside that learner which have accelerated the rate at which industries communities and the planet change. Due to that acceleration, the half-life of a paradigm has shortened.
How Do We Teach Experience Learning?
If you want to try and learn something new, or if you want to build something innovative for which there is no blueprint, you not only need a mixture of YouTube videos and examples from the real world in order for you to understand the concept. You also need to go off and learn. For example, when talking about entrepreneurship, that might be creating a prototype and showing it in from of potential customers or if you are talking about launching a recycling program at your workspace, that might mean talking to a few internal stakeholders to see what their feelings. Use the tools that were given and gather feedback. After gathering the feedback and what else you have learned in the process and use it to synthesize the information. You should make it in a way that is presentable for your community and outsiders to understand. After that step, use the feedback from that and do the process all over again.
Contact Alejandro Crawford: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alejandrocrawford/
Contact Eliza Edge: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eliza-edge-35768789/
Learn more about RebelBase: https://www.linkedin.com/company/rebelbase
Twitter: https://twitter.com/RebelBaseco?s=20&t=wSjErx7yB00mHA_lmU8bKg
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