MSc in Technology Enhanced Learning, Innovation and Change

TEL2: Essay

Discuss, in relation to learning environments that are enhanced via technology, and with

reference to appropriate literature, the statement: 'learning always takes place in social

contexts but is inevitably an individual achievement'.

By Chris Thomson

Tutors: Prof. Guy Merchant and Richard Pountney

Submitted 3rd February 2011

This work by Chris Thomson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-

NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License

Page | 2 Chris Thomson

Discuss, in relation to learning environments that are enhanced via technology, and with

reference to appropriate literature, the statement: 'learning always takes place in social

contexts but is inevitably an individual achievement

Context

The question of whether or not learning is inevitably an individual achievement is an important

one for those interested in innovative practice in education. A practitioner's standpoint on the

issue will influence their pedagogical approach, the activities that they design, the tools they use

to support their learners and how they measure the outcomes.

Understanding the question is crucial also for learners. It will affect how they choose to

undertake their learning and the types and qualities of relationships they have with communities

of other learners.

Technology is developing in a way that supports learning in a social context. Since the advent of

tools that have allowed people with little or no programming ability to become online publishers,

work collaboratively and build relationships with large networks of people, the spaces where

learning occurs have changed in nature. The use of managed learning environments, blogging,

podcasting, eportfolios and social networking are common place in many areas of education.

These technologies are also helping to facilitate learning in informal settings as people are able

to access large amounts of information from sites such as Wikipedia as well as resources made

available by formal institutions, and can share their own experiences and ideas with a wide

audience.

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But just because learning happens within these social contexts, does that mean that it is no

longer an individual achievement? And what does it mean if it is not; if the achievement is

actually a social one.

In this essay I want to look at learning in action in a particular context and to ask how confidently

we can say that the learning that happens here is an achievement for individuals or for the

group as a whole.

The example I will focus on centres around the development of a collaborative online resource

for teachers, the “Interesting Ways...” series of guides hosted by Tom Barrett, a primary school

teacher in England (Barrett 2010). I will discuss why I see this as an example of a technology

enhanced learning environment in action and how it fits into a broader network of other learning

environments. I will explore how the nature of this sort of environment brings with it challenges

for observing learning in action.

I then hope to draw some conclusions that could inform my own practice.

Defining Key Terms

In order to frame the discussion it is important to define clearly what I think is meant by the key

terms in the question;

What do we mean by learning?

What is the social context?

How do we identify an “individual achievement”?

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How can we identify “learning environments that are enhanced via technology”?

What is learning?

There are many definitions of what learning is and choosing any one of these as the ultimate

definition would have implications on how to answer the question this essay is addressing.

The behaviourist approach focuses on changes in individual behaviour. It states that learning

itself is an internal, psychological process that cannot be observed so instead we have to rely

on empirical changes in behaviour. Learning is about acquiring new knowledge and skills so

that through repeated use and practice a person’s behaviour changes. It is a theory of habit

forming. Taking this viewpoint would strongly suggest that learning is an individual achievement.

For many this approach was seen as too simplistic and dealt with only a small part of the

learning experience. The cognitivist standpoint turned its attention to how a learner builds

structures of knowledge internally. Learners, as they acquire new knowledge, create

connections between key concepts and incorporate it into prior knowledge so over time these

structures become more coherent and more complex. Again, this is about an individual’s

relationship with knowledge and the social context is part of the background.

Later theories have looked more closely at learning and social relationships. In the Vygotskian

view, people in a cultural setting create shared meanings and learn collaboratively. Reality is

something that is constructed by a society rather than something more objective that is

“discovered”. This has led to developments in this theory that focus on learning that is takes

place through observation and the process of “social becoming” into a community of practice

(Lave 1996, Lave & wenger 1991 & Wenger 1998). Lave and Wenger talk about situational

learning within communities. When people join these communities they are initially peripheral

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participants but over time, through observing the behaviour of others come to take a more

central place within that community.

Lave in discussion with Martin Packer (Lave 1996) has proposed that all theories of learning

have 3 main components. She says, and I quote:

1. Telos: that is, a direction of movement or change of learning (not the same as goal

directed activity),

2. Subject-world relation: a general specification of relations between subjects and the

social world (not necessarily to be constructed as learners and things to be learned),

3. Learning Mechanisms: ways by which learning comes about.

(Lave 1996, page 156)

This is helpful if we are observing learning environments as it helps us define more closely how

learning is taking place and what sort of learning it is. Especially in the context that we are going

to examine below, it is helpful to think of learning through the idea of “telos”, that it is a

description of a trajectory rather than an defined outcome. To describe the trajectory of a

canonball is not to think solely about where it lands but the shape of the parabola it traces as it

flies through the air (although, in reality a learning trajectory is rarely so predictable). It is

tempting to view learning (and education) as a series of outcomes when many people

experience it as a set of events and activities which culminate in an exam and a grade. This

mark is then seen as an objective, or at least calibrated, measure of capacity to learn and

perform.

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So, in summary, for learning to have taken place we need to be able to see change occurring in

some form. This could be to do with a simple change in behaviour (utilisation of a new skill, for

example), a development of a world view or identity. As Wenger (1998) puts it:

“Because learning transforms who we are and what we can do, it is an experience of

identity...We accumulate skills and information, not in the abstract as ends in

themselves, but in the service of an identity” (Wenger 1998 p215)

What do we mean by Social Context?

The essay question asks us to consider the assumption that “learning always takes place in

social contexts”. At its most basic, this suggests that learning never happens in personal

isolation, that social relationships play some part in the process; that a range of people take on

a variety of roles. The most obvious role relationship to determine here would be that between

learner and teacher but there are others. What about the relationship with other learners or with

the broader society? If learning is happening within a community than how important are the

relationships with other participants?

We also need to consider another dimension in addition to the “here and now”. As Barron

(2006) has described, personal and group histories are an integral part of social context. Our

previous experiences and those of the people around us shape our behaviours, identities and

choices. A proper understanding of learning needs to take this time dimension into account.

How do we identify an “individual achievement”?

Certainly, in the formal education setting there is great emphasis on the individual. The

Department of Education White Paper, "The Importance of Teaching" (2010) repeatedly refers

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to the importance of achievement as defined by exam results. In this case achievement is seen

as individual students undergoing effective teaching so that they are able to retain knowledge

and skills and demonstrate these through testing and measurement.

For the purposes of this essay, this approach is too simplistic and carries with it two major

problems:

Not all learning happens in formal contexts such as school or university. These environments

can be configured so that some form of testing and measurement is part of the overall teaching

process where “achievement” can be more easily indentified and attributed to the performance

of one individual. This doesn’t reflect learning that takes place in informal or non-institutional

situations. Here, there is no easily identifiable “end point”; a place where the cannonball lands. It

is much more a world of “telos”. It may be possible for a researcher to choose an outcome to

measure but it will be no more than a snapshot of process of continual and varying movement.

Outside institutional walls “achievement” is harder to quantify. The process of learning as seen

by Lave and Wenger is much more open-ended with no fixed point of arrival. They state that

people are peripheral participants in situated learning but that does not mean there is a mythical

“central” point (Lave and Wenger 1991, p35) – people remain peripheral participants, going

through a constant process of change as long as they are part of that community. Therefore,

“achievement” if it is there at all is a constant process, rather than an outcome.

The second issue is one that Lave identifies (1999). With theories of learning that focus on

individual psychological processes place the responsibility of not only achievement but also

failure onto individuals. She writes:

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“Theories that reduce learning to individual mental capacity/activity in the last instance blame

marginalized people for being marginalised.” (1999:p149)

This is backed up by work by Dincer and Uysal (2010) on achievement of school-age students

studying science in Turkey. They found that the socio-economic status of students in a given

school “affects student achievement positively” and that the Turkish education system, at least,

is reproducing the disadvantages stemming from socio-economic background rather than

erasing them.” (2010: p598)

So, to socio-economic background, what other social factors beyond the immediate control of

the learner can have a positive or detrimental effect on their “individual achievement? Gender,

age, or special needs, perhaps?

What is a learning environment?

For the purposes of this essay I want to keep the definition of a learning environment as broad

as possible.

A simple search on Google brings up a handful of explanations from a few sources:

“The place and setting where learning occurs; it is not limited to a physical

classroom and includes the characteristics of the setting.”

www.teach-nology.com/glossary/terms/l/

“Environment that instigates the education of involved learners involved in it.”

www.erudium.polymtl.ca/html-eng/glossaire.php

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At its broadest, a learning environment is a place where learning occurs. This could be some

physical space like a library, school, business premises or university campus although it is not

limited to this.

We are interested in environments that are enhanced by technology. A school that is running a

Virtual Learning Platform such as Blackboard or Moodle can be described as a learning

environment enhanced by technology: learning takes place in traditional contexts such as the

classroom or science lab but that experience is augmented by having learning objects and

resources available in a virtual space, accessible from any web-enabled device regardless of

physical location.

Technology allows us to have environments where the learning is mediated through websites

and applications and no physical presence in a given space is required. There is even a growth

in the number of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) that are learning events that despite

having hundreds of learners enrolled are not attached to any institution and are based around a

series of individual and community activities.

The second definition above says that the environment “instigates” the learning. It may be to do

with the translation from the French but it is hard to see how an environment can take such an

deterministic part in someone's learning. LaTour (1998) encourages us to look at the role played

by non-human participants in human activities. He describes how certain technologies can be

applied to transform “a major effort into a minor one” or, as he puts it, “delegation” (p299).

Environments are created as a way of shifting certain activities, often routine or troublesome

ones, onto “lieutenants” (p309), so called because they “hold the place” of a human actor.

Using this perspective, I am hesitant to see technology-enhanced learning environments as

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machines that create opportunities for learning but as “proxies” that are deployed by people to

facilitate their learning.

So, we can identify a technology enhanced learning environment by looking at the people that

are participating in it and identifying the change that they are going through to their skills,

knowledge or identity. It's not enough to just look at the technology along with its potential uses

and call it a learning environment.

Examples of Technology Enhanced Learning Environments

I want to try to address this question by looking at it in relation to a particular collaborative online

activity; the “Interesting Ways” series of collection of resources hosted by Tom Barrett, Deputy

Head Teacher at John Davies Primary School in Nottingham. These are publicly available and

can be found at http://edte.ch/interesting-ways.

The Interesting Ways resources are “crowd-sourced” guides created using the Google Docs

online application where educators are invited to contribute ideas on the “interesting ways” to

use various forms of technology in the classroom, mainly with school-age students. Topics are

started either by the curator or are suggested by others in the education community. There is no

formal approval or vetting process for which topics are selected but seem to follow emerging

technologies that are becoming accessible to school teachers although some cover topics about

classroom practice. A recent example has been around the use of Quick Response (QR) codes,

mobile-device readable graphical tabs that can be included in websites, on posters or stuck on

objects that, when scanned using an internet-enabled device such as a smartphone which then

links to additional information on the web (Wikipedia 2011). Educators who have ideas to

contribute contact the curator who gives access to the online document and they then create a

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slide in a presentation with their idea and their name, usually in the form of their Twitter account

name. The number of contributions grows until a resource of up to a few dozen ideas

accumulates into an extensive slideshow.

Figure 1: "Interesting Ways" QR code example

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Figure 2: "Interesting Ways" QR code example

Figure 3: "Interesting Ways" final slide showing procedure for contributing

Figures 1 to 3 show a number of examples from different “Interesting Ways” slideshows as well

as the final slide which outlines to anyone who might be interested how to contribute.

If we look at the product on its own it would be debatable whether this example could be defined

as a learning environment. What would the difference be if the curator had decided to create a

set of resources from his own ideas and make them available online or publish them as a book?

If we look at the tool that was used to produce the resources, Google Docs, it could be argued

that we are looking at a learning environment in action. One person can create a document, in

this case a slideshow, that is stored online then the document owner can invite others to

contribute (or others can request access). In this virtual space each person can then create their

own slides, edit them and add comments giving reaction to other users and making

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suggestions. There is a live chat feature so people that are online at the same time can

exchange written messages synchronously.

So it is certainly a technology-enhanced environment. How, then, is it a learning environment?

The learning may happen in a number of ways. The chat and comment function enables

exchange of ideas so there is potential for learning there. In the example we are looking at we

can see no direct evidence that this has happened within the environment. Individual

contributors have created a slide with a separate idea on and left their name or Twitter name by

way of crediting. The results are certainly an expression of prior learning; contributors with

experience of the technology and perhaps who have used it are passing on that experience by

recording it here. It's possible also that ideas written by one contributor may inspire an idea in

another but without detailed observation of how one of these resources is constructed it is

difficult to say for sure.

The reason for choosing "Interesting Ways" to help answer the essay question is not that it is a

great example of technology-enhanced learning environment in itself, more that it provides a

window on a much larger learning environment.

There are many educators who use Twitter. The list of UK teachers, educators and schools

using Twitter, a snapshot example curated by Futurelabs (Listorious 2011), contains 480 names

and is by no means exhaustive. Twitter plays an important role in the "Interesting Ways" site.

Ideas for new resources are suggested or requested and many of the contributors, as

mentioned, credit their ideas by leaving their Twitter names rather than their real ones. Also,

through sharing URL's in Twitter messages, the slideshows are shared between other Twitter

users.

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Many of the active Twitter users mentioned in the list above follow each other, building a web of

connections through which they can share ideas, partake in conversations and recommend

resources on the web. These educators themselves see Twitter as a learning environment as

indicated by modern foreign languages teacher, Laura Doggett. Doggett (2009) highlights a

number of ways that Twitter can positively impact on an individual's learning, comparing it to a

"virtual staffroom" where ideas can be exchanged.

With this in mind we are beginning to see a bigger picture with learning environments like

Twitter and "Interesting Ways" closely linked and enabling sharing of ideas and resources

between large numbers of people distributed round the globe.

But it doesn't end there. Add in to this network of environments the fact that these educators

use a number of different social networks such as LinkedIn and Facebook. Many have personal

blogs or support institutional ones and comments are exchanged by readers of these sites and

links to blog posts are routinely shared using social networks.

These linked networks also take form in the "real" world. Many conversations on Twitter are

continuations of ones that happen during coffee breaks at conferences or casual social

meetings. Teachers from particular regions will coordinate Teachmeets, informal gatherings

where teachers share their ideas and discuss successes and failures. Social events are

organised and friendships built.

Moreover, the main reason that these connections and events exist is to help these teachers

with their professional practice so the flow of ideas finds its ultimate expression when the

teachers are helping their students to learn.

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Trying to isolate one technological aspect of this complicated picture is therefore unhelpful.

Each element that I've described, both in the virtual and real worlds, works together to form a

learning ecosystem of different environments.

Not everyone who partakes in this ecosystem does so to the same extent. There are very active

members some of whom can be identified by how many followers they have on Twitter; over

10,000 (Listorious 2011). On the other hand, there are "lurkers"; those who take less of an

active role in certain environments and are mainly observers. I don't use this as a pejorative

term. It has entered common usage in relation to social networks and online conferences in

particular but one who doesn't contribute in one environment may be very active in others that

are perhaps less visible.

Although many participants in this ecosystem get much satisfaction and entertainment purely

from interacting with others (as is evident from spending even a short time observing

conversations on Twitter) I want to focus on the fact that the eventual outcome of these

interactions is learning that develops professional practice. The reason for choosing "Interesting

Ways" as the route in to this discussion is that it is a tangible product of this complex ecosystem

and trying to identify any learning that is happening by following the myriad conversations that

occur on Twitter for example, even though it is probably the most active element, would be very

difficult.

I want to examine this ecological view of learning environments from a number of theoretical

perspectives to help describe the social context in which this learning is happening and to what

extent the learning can be described as an individual achievement.

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Theoretical Perspectives

The idea of distributed cognition sets out to explain how cognitive processes do not happen

solely within an individual's mind. Hollan et al (2000) quote Clark (1997) in saying that there is

as much importance “in the complex interactions among body, world and brain as in the inner

processes bounded by skin and skull” (Hollan et al 2000 p. 178). Our understanding of the world

relies on processes that incorporate external factors, that could be interactions with other

people, environments and structures. Gomez et al (2010) explain that “[t]eaching and learning

have always been distributed across tools such as books, pencils, chalk and classroom spaces”

and in their paper they extend this to look at new digital spaces as well.

This approach to looking at cognitive systems recognises the social context in which learning

happens. Once we start thinking of learning and cognition as occurring “beyond skin and skull” it

places an individual in “complex cultural environment” (Hollan et al, 2000 p.178). They also

argue “that the environment people are embedded in is, among other things, a reservoir or

resources for learning, problem solving and reasoning” (2000, p178).

On the face of it, the case study can be described fairly well in these terms. Cognitive processes

in the ecosystem occur distributed over a wide range of systems such as Twitter or blogs, in

various physical environments such as conferences and “TeachMeets” in interactions that

involve many separate individuals. As stated before, the “Interesting Ways” resources are an

outcome of these processes as well as a feature of them in that teachers collaborate to produce

them and teachers exploit them to inform their professional practice. If a new teacher was to join

the profession then they would certainly find they have access to “a reservoir of resources”

either in the sense of materials or the cumulative experience of potentially hundreds or

thousands of people distributed across the globe.

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There are aspects of the case study that distributed cognition does not give us insight into. What

is it that brings people into networks like this? Participation is entirely voluntary and some

individuals devote much of their time to it. The "Interesting Ways" example is a good one but is

not an isolated case. The motivation of many of the participants (we can't say all) is very high

and the responses to political developments show a high level of emotional engagement with

the issues as can be seen from the sample of views following the announcement of BECTA's

closure in my blog post from May 2010 (Thomson (2010)).

By looking at the idea that this extended environment is a community of practice as identified by

Lave and Wenger (1991) we can look more closely at the social context in which the learning is

taking place.

Wubbels (2007) summarises a community of practice as "a process of social learning that

occurs when people who have a common interest in some subject or problem collaborate over

an extended period to share ideas, find solutions and build innovations" (p226) which is a good

description of the processes involved in the "Interesting Ways" case. It is "situated learning

(Lave and Wenger 1991) in that it happens in context and not in an abstract sense; the learners

all have roles within education so what the information they exchange is either comes as a

result of their practice, or goes on to inform it. In out-of-context learning we are more used to a

set of roles where in most cases knowledge moves from a teacher to a student but this model

doesn't fit our example. Information and learning moves in a much less directed way and there

are no easily identifiable "teachers" or "students". There are individuals with very strong

reputations and a very crude measure of this might be to look at the Listorious page mentioned

before (2010) and note the number of "followers" an individual has. A better way is to look at

people's involvement in the networks as "legitimate peripheral participation" (Lave and Wenger,

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1991) where learners become increasingly active participants in the community. This relates

back to the idea of "telos" or trajectory that was mentioned earlier.

As well as participation being an integral part of a community of practice, Wenger describes the

complimentary aspect of "reification" (1998, p57). This is the way that the abstract meanings

that the participants place on the world are given some sort of form or "thingness". In some

respects the "Interesting Ways" resources are an example of "reification" in this community of

practice. They are instances where the knowledge of the group is recorded, but more

importantly, they are an outward example of the group's collaborative approach to working. Had

one individual produced the resource, however openly, I don't feel that the community would

have valued it the same way.

The idea of communities of practice still doesn't give much of an explanation for what motivates

the people involved in this community to give up so much of their time to this learning

endeavour. Barron in her work on Interest and Self-Sustained learning (2006) gives us a way of

looking at this. Her study of self-motivated learning in adolescents led her to look at the learning

ecology of individuals; their personal backgrounds, activities and social relationships. It is

through these that interest in learning is sparked and then sustained. She goes on to argue that

once this interest is sparked, "people not only choose but also develop and create learning

opportunities for themselves…assuming they have the time, freedom and resources." (p200).

Her final conjecture is that "interest-driven learning activities are boundary crossing and self-

sustaining" (p201). In other words, these are learning activities that will take place in formal

contexts like school or college but also perhaps at home or with friends.

Although without in-depth study we can't say exactly what it is in the individuals' experiences

has sparked an interest in learning, education and technology we can see that many

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participants are proactive in finding learning opportunities (such as giving up personal time to

attend TeachMeet gatherings) or instigating collaborative projects. Many also demonstrate the

fact that their learning crosses boundaries between work and personal life in ways such as

talking about their families, what they have come across in the media or even random day to

day experiences.

It is difficult to know where interest and motivation comes from in an individual. Barron as well

as Biesta and Tedder (2007) all describe the importance of a learner's prior history to what

drives them towards agency. Different experiences will shape outlook and sense of self which

will then influence how a person approaches learning.

I argued earlier that a full understanding of learning environments needs to look beyond what

goes on in particular technology-enhanced contexts at the other virtual and physical

environments people participate in as well as the social relationships involved. Now, we can add

the extra dimension of lifetimes' experience to each individual to build up a very complex picture

of what actually makes a learning environment.

In summary, the "Interesting Ways" collaborative resources in particular and the wider collection

of environments show that the social context in which the learning happens is of vital

importance to the people involved through the distributed cognitive processes and participation

in the community of practice. However, at the root of all this is the fact that individuals, thanks to

their particular learning ecologies and life histories, are motivated to take part in the first place

and to sustain that participation.

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Evaluating Learning Ecosystems

For those that participate in this particular ecosystem it can be a powerful and rewarding

experience. The temptation for providers of more formal types of learning to want to "bottle the

lightning" and capture elements of it to use in other contexts is very great. We can see an

example of this latest release of the Mahara, open source eportfolio platform, now on version

1.3 since it has now added the ability for users to create personal profiles with lists of "friends",

not a function commonly associated with more traditional forms of the technology (Mahara

(2010)).

Even for those that want to engage with this sort of learning on an informal basis, as it may

require the input of a lot of personal time and effort to maintain, it is important to be able to say

how effective it really is.

Anecdotally, there may be plenty of evidence to point to and say that these personalised

learning networks have a demonstrable effect on individual practice but it is very hard to

extricate these examples from learning that might have occurred anyway given that individuals

were motivated enough in the first place to participate in these learning environments. To what

extent would this motivation have driven them to learn from other more formal sources?

Before the advent of web 2.0 technologies, e-learning was much more of a didactic,

behaviourist affair. It was seen in some sectors as an alternative and cost-effective method of

delivering information to learners for them to absorb. Evaluating e-learning in this context is

relatively simple as, through testing, it is possible to compare what the learner is able to recall

and compare it against the objectives set for the particular activity. Whether success or

otherwise was down to the content, the learner of the presentation medium is open to analysis.

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Much of how we view success in formal learning settings such as school and university is based

on a model a little like this, too. A certain pre-determined points, learners (or cohorts of learners)

are required to demonstrate the extent of their knowledge or thinking on a topic which is then

compared against assessment criteria. This renders the learning measurable so that the learner

can be awarded some recognised indicator of their achievement; a grade B at GCSE, an MSc,

for example.

I don't want to critique that general approach here but it doesn't help us to understand

achievement in an informal, ongoing context like the one discussed in this essay.

It might be possible to undertake a social scientific study of a selected number of individuals and

try and objectively record what they had learnt as a result of participating in the community,

measure the effectiveness of their ability to put it into practice and compare the results with a

control group that had not been involved in the same community.

This approach would be unsatisfactory for a number of reasons.

1) It would not be able to capture the full complexity of the learning ecology. It reduces

learning to simple set of vectors where you can say that person A learned something

definitively though one particular source. Barron, Wenger and Lave have shown that it is

much more complex than that. Learning relies on the social context in which it happens

and also the previous experiences of the learner.

2) How do you determine effectiveness? What is the difference between one new idea

gained from the network that affects an individual's practice in a large number of areas

and dozen more trivial suggestions that change practice in smaller ways? Should you

look at achievements of the students that the teacher is educating? Those students will

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also have their own learning ecologies and experiences so separating those from the

teacher's would be impossible.

3) It disregards the fact that individuals shape their own engagement with these

ecosystems. Some are active participants, some "lurkers" and everyone else is placed

somewhere between the two. Also, this engagement changes over time as people

engage with and withdraw from the community at different stages.

4) It misses the point that this ecology of intermingled personal networks, actions and

narratives is informal and owned by the participants themselves. They partake, not

because of any objective measure of success, but because they perceive value in the

interactions.

To better evaluate these informal learning ecologies I think it is necessary to take a more

ethnographic, immersive approach. Hine outlines this approach in her book "Virtual

Ethnography" *(2000). She argues that traditional anthropological approaches aren't adapted to

analysing relationships and interaction in online communities and so developed a technique that

enabled her to partake in "virtual communities". It is also an idea put forward by Hollan et al.

(2000) as they describe an “ethnography of distributed cognitive systems”. This approach

“retains an interest in the individual mind, but adds to that a focus on the material and social

means of the construction of action and meaning.” (p.179)

An ethnographic method would entail a researcher being an active participant in the online

community which would allow for close observation of activities, interaction and events as well

as building relationships with the participants. This seems a much better way of establishing the

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processes involved in a wide, informal and social network and opens up the possibility of

understanding the motivations of people for getting involved.

By immersing themselves in a learning ecosystem, an ethnographic researcher would be able to

describe the community through active participation in it. This way it would be possible to

observe the crucial elements of the community such as key events, the roles and relationships

adopted by participants, the language developed by insiders and how the virtual and real

spaces interact with each other. As an ethnographer would seek to build relationships with

individuals it would be possible to observe how the individual is affected by the social context of

the learning environments

The resulting narrative description would, I feel, be a more satisfactory reflection of the learning

ecosystem than an approach that tries to transfer the approach to evaluation of more formal

learning contexts.

Lessons Learned

As this essay has included discussion of “telos” and trajectory it feels a little out of place to state

a final conclusion about whether learning is something that always “takes place in social context

but is inevitably an individual achievement”. I find that I cannot take a completely opposite view

and say that learning is inevitably a social achievement and the individual has only a peripheral

role in it. The social context of the case study is certainly powerful and unavoidable but to say

that it is the only thing worth examining ignores the huge number of personal trajectories,

identities and practices that are shared through the various networks that part of this ecology. I

am fairly certain that the participants in this ecology do not see their hard work, ingenuity,

motivation and generosity of time and experience as only of value when seen in a social

Page | 24 Chris Thomson

context. The ecosystem thrives because of the range of personal experiences and perspectives

that are present within it.

As a Consultant Trainer, my job is to support learners by designing effective learning

experiences. Much of our organisations work is increasing moving away from a solely traditional

approach to training in which learners attend training courses in a physical venue for a day and

that being the extent of our official involvement in their learning. Other environments are

becoming available so that we can experiment with new ways of involving learners and trying

facilitating learning in different ways.

As we saw before with the Mahara example, many in the field of learning professionals are

cottoning on to the possibilities of personal networking and online collaboration. It's certainly

very tempting to want to replicate what is going on in informal learning networks like the ones

described in the case study.

But I wonder if the majority of attempts to do this will be doomed to failure. If so, I think there are

2 main reasons why it might be so:

As I've discussed, trying to determine what is going on in these environments is difficult. They

have a very public face in some senses but are so extensive and made up of individuals who

choose to reveal certain aspects of their identities and conceal others that describing them

adequately is not a simple task but needs an immersive, ethnographic approach to research.

Which elements do you try and replicate? The risk is that we take those areas that are easiest

to identify and adopt and focus on them, in this case the technology. This would fail to take into

account the fact that the technology is only part of a much larger distributed cognitive system.

Page | 25 Chris Thomson

The second reason has to do with taking an informal, participant-owned learning environment,

turning it into an institution-owned one and expecting the same results.

In their paper “Seeking Pedagogical Spaces”, Foran and Olson (2008) examine how physical

location affects learning. They talk about teaching children but what they say can also be

applied to adults learning as well.

“Teaching away from the dominance of the classroom space enables learning away from

the...confines of the institution. Outside learning is free to get caught up in the power of

doing...For students, and for the teacher outside the classroom, their excitement was the

excitement of the unexplored and an uncharted way to experience learning.” (p. 45)

There is plenty of excitement and enthusiasm within the participants of these large informal

learning networks. Perhaps that thrill comes from the fact that it occurs “outside the classroom”

where creativity and innovation are not restricted as they might be when conducted officially. An

organisation attempting to force their way into these networks may well be greeted with

suspicion or even hostility. An organisation must wait to be invited in. The best it can hope to do

is provide individual learners with opportunities and encouragement to incorporate their learning

into their personal network, stand back and let them get on with it.

Page | 26 Chris Thomson

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