The importance of people as creators and carriers of knowledge is
forcing organizations to realize that knowledge lies less in its
databases than in its people.
Learning to be requires more than just information.
It requires the ability to engage in the practice in question.
Indeed, Bruner's distinction highlights another, made by the
philosopher Gilbert Ryle. He distinguishes "know that" from "know
how".
This claim of Polanyi's resembles Ryle's
argument that "know that" doesn't produce "know how," and Bruner's
that learning about doesn't, on its own, allow you to learn to be.
Information, all these arguments suggest, is on its own not enough
to produce actionable knowledge. Practice too is required.
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.
kulturelle Muster, die qua Sozialisation erworben werden, und die in Bildungsprozessen verändert werden.
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.