Learning and Communities of Practice (CoPs)

By David Hung
Learning Sciences and Technologies

Changing Paradignms
From

• "I think, therefore I am" (idividualistic in cognition to determine the capability of the person) to
• Social orientation (cognition distributed in social context, tools that are applicable in real life not necessary in an exam, not in the interaction in the mind or tool)

Changes are necessary

• less stability and more emergence
• changes in environment is happening at a much greater rate

Managing Emergence

• Deliberate Strategy
• Emergent Strategy

Differences in Strategies

• Presence of planned intention
• destination and env are quite predictable
• a plan exists
• plan is usu centrally formulated
• plan is implemented

Fresh Mindset

• human org are very adaptive
• leadership amd mgt philosophy must be more adaptive?
• flattened hierarchies and less linear authorities
• interdependencies

Change in Metaphor

• Machine (Central orchestrator that mg)
• Biological (Self organising and interdepending, it evolve and adapt)

How to foster a dynamic learning environment

• mindset that is highly adaptive & evolving
• connectivity
• responsive and updated milieuly iterconnected web
• distributed info and leadership

Behaviourism...

• B.F. Skinner

Objectivist Framework

• What's the story so far? Objectivist Worldview
• connectivity

Imagination is more important that knowledge (Albert Einstein)
Reality is just a very persistent imagination (Albert Einstein)

The Brain's CEO
Although all knowledge is (socially) constructed -- the knower is an intimate part of the known (Polanyi, 1964)

Evertime you remember sth, it reconstructs (revisualising) the memory when you first construct it (depending on how you do it - i.e. good/poor memory - it is NOT a retrieval but reconstructing amongst all other 'noise'. Use what you learn continuously)

Biological Brain

• Jungle Metaphor - ecology
• Self-organising
• brain-damage patients
• brain imaging techniques
• gap between neuroscience and education-pedagogy

Bright air, Brillant fire by Edelman (1989, 1992)

• Our brain come out of biology, not technology
• the immune system operates through 'selforganisation'

What you reap is what you sow

• Principle 1: Neurons that fire together wire together

Be careful what you see

• Principle 2: Use it or potentially lose it

Use the constructed neurons or lose it

From Maual to Automatic

• Principle 3: Rich constructions (pattern recognitions) lead to rich re-constructions (momory)

Why & How We remember

- the formation and recall of each memory are influenced by mood, surroundings at the time memory is formed or retrived

- that is why the same event can be remembered differently by different people.

Balancing the neuronal with the social-cultural or social-hisorical

Cultural Historical Theory
the child's hgher function of thought first appear in the collective life of children in the form of argument and only later lead to the development of reasoning in the child's own behaviour.
(Vygotsky, 1987, vol 3, p. 141)
automatic appropriation of behaviour

3 active processes
The educative process - student is active, teacher is active, environment active

Structural Coupling Between Mind-and-Environment as a whole "system"
Process interaction between the two

Social Constructivism - Situated Cognition
Contextualist worldview

• focus is interaction between man and environment
• relational view of meanings - interpretation
• participants' constructs
• knowg is an experienced realaion of thinngs (Dewey, 1910/1981)

Korzybski (1941)
The map is not the territory
representations Experience
descriptions Phenomena
narratives 1st person perspectives
accounts tacit
3rd person perspectives
explicit

Communities of Practice
Practice
- Scientific, Math, Engineering, Law, Accounting, etc
- A community of people who practice a certain profession

• code of conduct
• ethics
• history and culture

- identity

• way of seeing
• core values and beliefs

engaging the pupils in a simulation in strategies of project work prepares them (skills - presentation, teamwork...) in work, NOT the implementation of just the curriculum; Learning is most effective in a community - struggle through the process before reaching equilibrium)

Definition of CoPs

• people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowg and expertise in this area by interacting on an on-going basis (Wenger etal. 2002)

Sherman Oaks Community

Social Spaces

• copying from wall to web
• learning to use technology from and with others...learning and helping while waiting
• supporting the periphery...distributed CoP