40,000 hours to create a robot gardening business and other futures for education and training. An interview with Dr Bror Saxberg, VP Learning Sciences, Chan Zuckerberg initiative

Abstract

ALT’s editors Christopher Harris and Jürgen Rudolph spoke to Bror Saxberg, who is currently the Vice-President Learning Sciences of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), a not-for-profit organisation founded by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan (a medical doctor). Amongst other things, CZI has the audacious goal of curing, preventing, or managing all diseases “in our children’s lifetime” (Farr, 2018). In a wide-ranging interview, we began with Dr Saxberg’s lifelong learning journey from pure research to being a ‘learning engineer’. Other topics include: the promises and pitfalls of e-learning (including m-learning); the ‘undead’ lecture as an enabler for ‘learning tourism’ and the importance of practice; the importance of metacognition (that we know how to learn) in mastering multiple, difficult-to-automate skills and competencies in a lifetime of continuous learning in a world that changes at breakneck speed; how we can create top performers and maximise corporate potential via evidence-based training programmes; the paradox of knowledge (our ignorance increases with more knowledge); and key teaching strategies for a personalised learning approach and promises of neuroscience. We have divided the interview into ten parts.