Joi Ito's Deep Dive

For me, scuba diving in a lot of the hobbies that I have goes deep enough to be able to understand the nuance and to connect with the experts and the peers in that field. I think that, you know, the level that I have gone in diving is sufficient for me to connect the diving world to the other worlds that I'm involved in. Many of the students at the Media Lab have three or four disciplines that they are deep in; they're probably deeper than I am in my diving. Unlike me, they tend to have PhDs in every area of their interest.

The reason I became an instructor rather than just a scuba diver is that teaching scuba diving... they have more tools for scuba diving instructors than our teachers do in elementary schools. It's really almost sad. The way they teach you how to teach is incredibly well done. And, you know, scuba diving is also very experience-based. I love working with young kids, like junior high school kids.

You say, "You got to learn Boyle's law because in an hour, we'll be in the water and we'll be playing with stuff." Unless you understand what's going on, you could hurt yourself. Now, you have to understand, you know, the biology, and you have to understand fish ID because this fish is poisonous and this one isn't.

And you're teaching these kids physiology and chemistry and physics, and you know, and ecology. Every single lesson, you can say, "And because in an hour, we'll be in the water and you'll be doing this." It's really, for me, this kind of perfect interest-driven learning thing.

You find that a lot of the kids who are doing terribly in school are extremely engaged when they're doing scuba diving because they're so interested in learning this stuff. They get to play with it right away. For somebody like me who grew up frustrated because I wasn't sure why I was learning these things, scuba diving is great because you know exactly why you're learning everything that you're learning.

I'm thinking about the way we teach scuba diving and trying to see whether we can apply some of that in some of the more formal education that we do.