I came across Tony O’Driscoll’s ideas around productive and generative learning via Robert Guidi’s LinkedIn post which seems to have stirred up quite a bit of debate in the comments about the future of AI learning & development. Anyhow, I was interested in the delineation which Tony makes:
- Productive Learning: Focuses on conveying existing knowledge to achieve specific, known outcomes, such as improving efficiency, customer satisfaction, or decision-making. It maintains the status quo by helping people finding out and apply what is already understood.
- Generative Learning: Centres on exploring the unknown, generating new insights, and addressing unforeseen challenges or opportunities. It’s about about figuring out something we do not yet understand. It drives innovation and growth by creating new knowledge and understanding beyond what is already known.
Productive learning is about efficiency and applying known information, while generative learning is about innovation and discovering the unknown.
In the context of applying AI to learning, an example of productive learning would be the chatbot that enables us real-time access to knowledge that already exists (so-called enterprise search for example). This is obviously fantastically useful for a certain type of learning – when we know what we want and we’re looking for a quick answer. AI can dramatically increase the efficiency of productive learning.
The risk with this ease of knowledge access, as is pointed out by Nick Shackleton-Jones in the comments on the LinkedIn post, is that we never bother to learn anything. When AI can serve up the answer immediately, why bother trying to remember it? Tony notes how most of us now don’t know any telephone numbers because of the ‘learned helplessness’ of being able to call anyone by clicking on their name on our phones. Nick notes how he’s used the underground map thousands of times but never memorised it: ‘it’s a cognitive trade-off (we are cognitive misers) – we may ‘learn at the point of need’ but ONLY if doing so is easier than looking the answer up’.
Clearly we’re going to get a lot more efficient at productive ‘find-it-out’ learning with AI. Somehow we also need to design learning that can use AI to augment generative ‘figure-it-out’ learning as well. I’ve written a fair bit about how AI can help us to explore topics – it feels as though this is going to become only more important.
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