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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.

it is not clear that an outcomes driven system is what students require; many valuable skills and aptitudes – art appreciation, for example – are not identifiable as an outcome. This becomes evident when we consider how learning is to be measured. In traditional learning, success is achieved not merely by passing the test but in some way being recognized as having achieved expertise. A test-only system is a coarse system of measurement for a complex achievement.

The products of our conversations are as concrete as test scores and grades. (Ryan, 2007) But, as the result of a complex and interactive process, they are much more complex, allowing not only for the measurement of learning, but also for the recognition of learning. As it becomes easier to simply see what a student can accomplish, the idea of a coarse-grained proxy, such as grades, will fade to the background.

Most educators, and most educational institutions, have not yet embraced the idea of flow and syndication in learning. They will – reluctantly – because it provides the learner with the means to manage and control his or her learning. They can keep unwanted content to a minimum (and this includes unwanted content from an institution). And they can manage many more sources – or content streams – using feed reader technology.RSS and related specifications will be one of the primary ways Personal Learning Environments connect with remote systems. To use a PLE will be essentially to immerse oneself in the flow of communications that constitutes a community of practice in some discipline or domain on the internet.

In the end, what will be evaluated is a complex portfolio of a student’s online activities. (Syverson & Slatin, 2006)

place independence means that real learning will occur in real environments, with the contributions of the students not being some artifice designed strictly for practice, but an actual contribution to the business or enterprise in question.

As it becomes more and more possible to teach oneself online, and even to demonstrate one’s achievement through productive membership in a community of practice, there will be greater demand for a formalized system of recognition, a way for people to demonstrate their competence in an area without having to go through a formal program of study in the area.

the major shift in instructional technology will be from systems centered on the educational institution to systems centered on the individual learner.

rather than the employment of a single system to accomplish all educational tasks, both instructors and learners will use a variety of different tools in combination with each other.

Automation allows us to more easily create and present content, to more easily form groups and collaborate, to more easily give tests and take surveys. This frees instructors to perform tasks that have been traditionally more difficult and time consuming – to relate to students on a personal basis, to offer coaching and moral support, to learn about and analyze a student’s inclinations and understandings.