When we speak of learning, we often associate it with a process of information acquisition and retainment. Or a cognitive function of knowledge and understanding.

This is why we find ourselves having to re-think the term now in light of our technological capacity to engage with retained factual based knowledge. However, if we turn to pedagogical approaches of instruction in which the student’s ability to self-reflect and self-assess are placed at the forefront of our definition, then ‘learning’ shifts instead into a space in which flexibility of thought and the ability to synthesize are essential to cognitive growth. Moreover, within this approach, we begin to understand the significance of bodily knowledge in a phenomenological sense. Understanding in a self-reflective way how our cognition observes itself leads us to the awareness of our being in the world and experience of it.

For this reason learning in the future should concern itself with our self-cognition, to better understand the separation and synthesis between of these two modes of understanding the world around us.

Learning then is less centered around production and more interested in investigative processes to enhance personal and social awareness of being in and experiencing the world we are creating. It will be vital to understanding the difference between purely cognitive knowledge acquisition and bodily knowledge acquisition as we move forward in engaging with both Virtual Reality and Augmented Realities, as the mind and body’s mode of interaction becomes skewed by this experience. These technologies have the ability though to place boldly involvement back into our explorative processes and ought to, for the future, make this a priority. Learning in the future should mean and imply a high knowledge of self (cognitively and physically), so that we can better apply the tools technology provides to serve more sustainable projects and an acute engagement with empathy for self and other, enabling us all to take a higher stake in the capital we produce.