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Despite the tendency to shut ourselves away and sit in Rodinesque isolation when we have to learn, learning is a remarkably social process. Social groups provide the resources for their members to learn.

Learning and Identity Shape One Another

Bruner, with his idea of learning to be, and Lave and Wenger, in their discussion of communities of practice, both stress how learning needs to be understood in relation to the development of human identity.

In learning to be, in becoming a member of a community of practice, an individual is developing a social identity.

So, even when people are learning about, in Bruner's terms, the identity they are developing determines what they pay attention to and what they learn. What people learn about, then, is always refracted through who they are and what they are learning to be.

In either case, the result, as the anthropologist Gregory Bateson puts it neatly, is "a difference that makes a difference". 29 The importance of disturbance or change makes it almost inevitable that we focus on these.

So to understand the whole interaction, it is as important to ask how the lake is formed as to ask how the pebble got there. It's this formation rather than information that we want to draw attention to, though the development is almost imperceptible and the forces invisible in comparison to the drama and immediacy of the pebble. It's not, to repeat once more, the information that creates that background. The background has to be in place for the information to register.

The forces that shape the background are, rather, the tectonic social forces, always at work, within which and against which individuals configure their identity. These create not only grounds for reception, but grounds for interpretation, judgment, and understanding.

A Brief Note on the "Social"

It took Karl Marx to point out, however, that Crusoe is not a universal. On his island (and in Defoe's mind), he is deeply rooted in the society from which he came

Jean-Paul Sartre

We need not watch long before we can explain it: he is playing at being a waiter in a cafe . . . . [T]he waiter plays with his condition in order to realize it

So while people do indeed learn alone, even when they are not stranded on desert islands or in small cafes, they are nonetheless always enmeshed in society, which saturates our environment, however much we might wish to escape it at times.

For the same reason, however, members of these networks are to some degree divided or separated from people with different practices. It is not the different information they have that divides them.

Rather, it is their different attitudes or dispositions toward that information -- attitudes and dispositions shaped by practice and identity -- that divide. Consequently, despite much in common, physicians are different from nurses, accountants from financial planners.

two types of work-related networks

First, there are the networks that link people to others whom they may never get to know but who work on similar practices. We call these "networks of practice"

Second, there are the more tight-knit groups formed, again through practice, by people working together on the same or similar tasks. These are what, following Lave and Wenger, we call "communities of practice".

Networks of Practice

The 25,000 reps working for Xerox make up, in theory, such a network.