Clay Shirky, the insightful writer and consultant on social and economic effects of technologies, has many things right in his most recent article, “A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy.” But he’s very wrong about the value of experience in learning.

In an online presentation of a keynote on Social Software at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in Santa Clara on April 24, 2003, Clay Shirky does a masterful job characterizing how individual members and groups operate as social networks, and provides important design principles to anyone hoping to build effective social software to support “large and long-lived groups.”

But while describing a recurring pattern of how online communities are susceptible to dysfunctional behaviors that ultimately destroy the community, Shirky laments how organizers of such online communities fail to “learn from reading,” and instead end up “learning from experience.” Says Shirky,

The most charitable description of this repeated pattern is “learning from experience.” But learning from experience is the worst possible way to learn something. Learning from experience is one up from remembering. That’s not great. The best way to learn something is when someone else figures it out and tells you: “Don’t go in that swamp. There are alligators in there.” …Learning from experience about the alligators is lousy, compared to learning from reading, say.

While the comment is not at all central to the article’s main theme(and I’d bet that Shirky himself does not portend to be an educational theorist), I nonetheless can’t let Clay off the hook on this one. After all, the past twenty years of socio-constructivism research have done nothing if not shown the importance of experiential learning. One of the most prominent advocates of experiential learning, Roger Shank, describes it this way (from Engines for Education, by Roger Shank and the Institute for Learning Sciences at Northwestern University):

In a graduate class of mine, in which there were a few undergraduates, we were discussing learning. The students were making a variety of assertions about learning that caused me to wonder whether we were all talking about the same phenomenon. People learn every day, but these students had managed to make learning into an entirely academic affair. They were failing to see themselves as the best examples of learners and learning that they could possibly know.

To get them to see this point, I asked various members of the class what they had learned recently. One told me he had learned that a wok will rust if left overnight with the cooking residue in it. Another told me she had learned that cheap paint doesn’t work as well as expensive paint. Another told me she had learned that she could buy cough medicine across the street and didn’t have to walk a long way for it as she had thought. Another told me he had learned that I liked to sit in a certain place in the classroom. Another said he had learned how to handle himself better in certain social situations. These learners were all graduate students.

The undergraduates, on the other hand, noted that they had learned various facts such as certain events in history or certain methods of calculation in mathematics.

Why the difference? The graduate students were much older than the undergraduates. Their environment was not as sheltered as the undergraduates. In addition, the undergraduates were engaged in the process of getting “A’s” by learning what they were told. The graduate students were trying to find out about their new environment, living in new houses, cooking for themselves, trying to understand what was expected of them in graduate school. The graduate students were being forced, both in school and in life, to think for themselves.

What method were the undergraduates using for learning? Basically, they were copying what they were told. They learned by studying. The graduate students were experimenting, hoping to find out what was true by trying things out and attempting to make generalizations about what might hold true in the future. And though the undergraduate who learned how to perform symbolic integration will likely soon forget it, the graduate who rusted his wok will never make that mistake again.

Tell me I forget, Show me I may remember, involve me and I’ll understand: we all have a natural and deep understanding of experiential learning. Clay Shirky should too.

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