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Benjamin Jörissen

rre : Message: [RRE]The Social Life of Information - 0 views

  • 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.
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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.
    • Benjamin Jörissen
       
      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.
Paul Beaufait

braz2010vance [licensed for non-commercial use only] / PLN - 4 views

  • Etienne Wenger (2007) asked Cristina Costa when she knew she was in a community of practice and she said, when she noticed her practice had changed. And this is the correct answer.  When your practice changes, you know you have truly learned. The next step as a teacher is to model what you did for your students so that some will follow in your footsteps. So how can you do it?  Your change in practice probably won't be from this one encounter, unless I can convince you or nudge you, if you were heading that way already, into taking the next step in your journey.  The goal is to move from being just a consumer of networked content, which you in essence hoard, to a creator of content, which you share with the network that shares with you.
  • language teachers need to look beyond what it appears on the surface is happening between them and the learner and consider the bigger picture, such as ways in which technology fosters connections with communities and networks that humanize rather than isolate to strengthen individuals as an integral part of modern society and how that society acculturates, or learns together.
  • I encourage colleagues to think SMALL because in my view the computer is no longer the salient aspect of technology. The salient aspect is the use to which technology is put, and the salient use is to re-wire and expand how we are able to learn by enabling us to nurture and participate in always-on PLNs, or Personal Learning Networks.
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  • In order for teachers to grasp the fundamentals of applying technology to transformative learning outcomes, practice with peers is necessary, where teachers themselves become mentors for one another while sharing with one another their discoveries and experiences with their own learning.
  • Teachers who drive their own professional development through participation in PLNs constantly express and assess each other's needs, and promote professional development on an as-needed basis, from where it is only a short leap to applying it to students.
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    PLN: The paradigm shift in teacher and learner autonomy
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