Large-scale Social Learning Systems and Individual Identity

We live in unusual times. The world is rapidly growing smaller, interdependent, and unpredictable. We are facing daunting challenges-the establishment of a global yet diverse society, a fragile environment, economic imbalances, and regional conflicts to name a few. These challenges are neither simply local nor abstractly global. They require accelerated learning at various levels of scale at once, from individuals, to communities, to organizations, to regions, to worldwide learning systems. Understanding how to enhance our learning capabilities in this multi-dimensional nexus is taking increasing urgency. This seminar outlines a broad research agenda to produce a social learning theory for our times.

A theoretical discourse is not an abstraction. It is a set of conceptual tools that enable us to see, think, and act in new ways. The learning theory to be developed in this project is intended to inform not only research, but also the work of practitioners in a variety of fields and sectors, for instance:

• Executives in the private and public sectors who need to figure out how to enhance the learning capability of organizations
• Educators who reflect on the role of education in a learning society, on the learning needs of their students, and on the relationships of their institutions to broader social learning systems
• Government officials who struggle to rethink their role as conveners of learning systems that include multiple government levels, private industry, and citizen groups (e.g., terrorism preparedness, health, education)
• Policy-makers and non-governmental activists who need to understand the learning implications of their positions
• Community leaders and social workers who need to consider the identities as learners that enable citizens to participate in society

To this end, the proposed agenda places theory building in the context of a broader research framework. The project consists of five components:

•  Theory . This project furthers the convergence of learning theory and social theory started with the work on communities of practice. Building on this earlier work, it focuses on

•  large-scale social learning systems involving complex constellations of communities of practice

•  individual identity, constructed as a learning trajectory through these complex systems

I argue that these two elements provide the foundation for a robust social theory of learning. Each one is, I claim, a useful perspective for looking at learning in today's complex and globalizing society. But the two are inextricably linked and considering learning in one inevitably leads the other. Together, they provide a framework for theorizing learning capability.

 

•  Trends . Building on the theory, the project will hypothesize and document a number of trends in learning. This proposal describes four examples of such trends, for instance, an observation that learning seems increasingly organized as a horizontal process of mutual negotiation, as opposed to the more traditional view of a vertical relationship between a producer and a recipient of knowledge. The ultimate goal is to combine a set of broad trends like this one into an emerging and dynamic portrait of learning in the world today.

•  Implications . Combining the trends and the theory should produce interesting practical implications, which the project will explore. In particular, the combination can be used to frame a rethinking of social institutions from the perspective of their contribution to our overall learning capability. This proposal takes an initial look at such institutions as

•  organizations in the private and public sectors, where knowledge strategies entail an integration of identity-based communities with hierarchical structures

•  civil society , where learning calls for increasingly complex community structures

•  governance , where the role of convening a learning system broadens the traditional notions of government and management

•  education , where the theory helps reposition schooling and frame the principles of an identity-oriented curriculum

•  Cases . The empirical base of the project will be a systematic collection of stories and case studies to make the theory, the trends, and the implications concrete. Cases might include organizational initiatives, school experiments, interesting communities, large-scale learning systems, as well as biographical narratives of individual learning trajectories. Through ongoing analysis of this growing corpus of cases, the project will look for patterns to confirm or reject hypotheses. These concrete examples also help practitioners see how they can put the framework into practice.

•  Methodology . The fifth element of the project is an ongoing process of methodological reflection necessary to ensure that there is a systematic rigor to the development of the framework and its application.

All five components work together. The theory suggests trends and design implications. These in turn suggest cases to study, which feed back into the theory, the trends, and the implications. The methodological component adds a reflexive learning loop to the process. This reflection also focuses on walking the talk and building a learning system around the project. Not only are practitioners expected to benefit from the results of the research, they are welcome to contribute their own stories, requirements, and insights.