Learning Across Sites

New Tools, Infrastructures and Practices

Sten Ludvigsen, Andreas Lund, Ingvill Rasmussen, Roger Säljö

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136943911
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The ever evolving, technology-intensive nature of the twenty-first century workplace has caused an acceleration in the division of labour, whereby work practices are becoming highly specialised and learning and the communication of knowledge is in a constant state of flux. This poses a challenge for education and learning: as knowledge and expertise increasingly evolve, how can individuals be prepared through education to participate in specific industries and organisations, both as newcomers and throughout their careers?

Learning Across Sites brings together a diverse range of contributions from leading international researchers to examine the impacts and roles which evolving digital technologies have on our navigation of education and professional work environments. Viewing learning as a socially organised activity, the contributors explore the evolution of learning technologies and knowledge acquisition in networked societies through empirical research in a range of industries and workplaces. The areas of study include public administration, engineering, production, and healthcare and the contributions address the following questions:

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• How are learning activities organised?

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• How are tools and infrastructures used?

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• What competences are needed to participate in specialised activities?

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• What counts as knowledge in multiple and diverse settings?

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• Where can parallels be drawn between workplaces?

Addressing an emerging problem of adaptation in contemporary education, this book is essential reading for all those undertaking postgraduate study and research in the fields of educational psychology, informatics and applied information technology.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Learning across sites; new tools, infrastructures and practices

Sten Ludvigsen, Andreas Lund, Ingvill Rasmussen and Roger Säljö

Existing and emerging practices

At the beginning of the 21st century we have seen how educational activities and work practices increasingly take place in networks and across multiple and diverse settings and contexts. One could say that society has become increasingly particularized into sectors and sub-sectors with an increasing division of labor. In each sector and sub-sector, the development of knowledge results in increasingly specialized work practices, which represent a particular configuration of professional languages, technologies and organizational arrangements. The consequence is that expertise and knowledge increasingly appear as in-depth specialization within local contexts. Such specialization creates obvious challenges for knowledge integration. Domain-specific knowledge is not always easy to translate into general insights, since the parallels to other settings and activities are not obvious. The implication is that knowledge does not travel easily between different settings, such as schools, workplaces, and leisure actives. This creates additional challenges when problems in society and its different institutions require solutions that go beyond the local context.

In this book the focus is how learning takes place in specific practices and under specific institutional conditions, but the ambition is also to probe into how what is specific and what is general relate to each other. Through the various contributions we aim to add to the understanding of what is unique about the many and diverse learning environments analyzed, and what may, potentially, emerge as more general features and dimensions in and across such contexts and settings. Specifically, we link this approach to emerging practices in the wake of the increased impact of digital and networked technologies. Such technologies represent both new contextual affordances and challenges, and they require an increased repertoire of collaborative capacity by professionals. Consequently, there is a need to unpack, concretize and, thus, increase our understanding of some of the many forms of collaboration as types of social practices. The title of this volume seeks to capture this intention. Through a number of (mostly) empirical and theoretical contributions, we seek to reveal how learning as a socially organized activity is enacted in and across sites, settings, and contexts.

The pace of the societal differentiation and advancement in knowledge production, both within and between our institutions, creates a set of dilemmas for the educational sector. There is a high degree of uncertainty about how to prepare people for new work practices, for what counts as knowledge, and what 21st century literacy and numeracy amount to. The problem can be stated as follows: In education the historical and social practices have been concerned with how learners accumulate knowledge. This knowledge has been seen as given in the sense that it has been developed in the humanities, the natural and social sciences and in other fields. We can talk about this pattern as a canon of representation (Wartofsky, 1979) that has emerged over millennia, and that sets the agenda for schooling. The students are expected to acquire this knowledge. This is understood as if knowledge is given. The problem with this historical canon is that students do not become socialized into asking questions and problematizing what has become accepted as the current knowledge, nor do they develop insights into the methods and procedures through which this knowledge is continually produced.

John Dewey formulated this dilemma almost a hundred years ago in his critical analysis of teaching and learning in traditional schooling. He argued that the problem is that the “statements, the propositions, in which knowledge, the issue of active concern with problems, is deposited, are taken to be themselves knowledge” (1966, p. 187). In other words, the products of inquiry and learning become the objects of learning, which implies that students seldom become familiar with the procedures through which knowledge emerges and is accounted for. One can argue that there are two competing historical scripts which are acted out as practices in educational settings. One is primarily concerned with existing knowledge and its acquisition and reproduction; the other is concerned with knowledge advancement and increasing learners’ capacities to expand and go beyond what they already know, i.e. the focus is on making students able to understand and produce new and situationally relevant knowledge.

The consequence of this situation is an emerging gap between what counts as future-oriented practices and the practices historically developed in educational institutions (for recent discussions, see Hakkarainen et al., 2004; Säljö, 2005; Sternberg & Preiss, 2005). Recent reports about the new challenges for the educational sector, such as the widely quoted volume How People Learn from the National Science Foundation in the US (Bransford et al., 2000), and the OECD report Innovation in the Knowledge Economy: Implications for education and learning (2004), give some directions. However, the learning principles that have emerged from such reports appear as ideal descriptions. They hardly discuss what Olson (2003) has described as the deep tensions between, on the one hand, findings in educational psychology and the learning sciences, and, on the other, how one should understand the educational sector and schools as institutional phenomena.

With a high division of labor and specialization, learning and the development of competence is not something straightforward. On the one hand, we can make very general claims about robust principles for productive learning (see for example Sawyer, 2006). On the other hand, we know that these abstractions and general principles do not give much insight into how learning takes place in situ in the many kinds of very diverse settings where teaching and learning take place. Hence, we need studies and theoretical perspectives that make it possible to connect the abstractions to learning as forms of particularization. How individuals participate and interact in social settings need to be accounted for on the basis of a multilevel analysis perspective (Engeström, 1987; Säljö, 2000; Edwards, this volume; Ludvigsen, in press). One could argue that we need to study in depth how individuals meet, interpret, navigate around and engage with other participants, and how these activities are structured.

A society is transformed by and through new technologies, new types of artifacts, new forms of division of labor, and new arenas and institutions will create new conditions for learning. It is important to understand processes of development by studying specific institutions in education as well as in working life (Engeström, 1987; 2004), but also by studying new arenas such as CSCL (Computer Supported Collaborative Learning) settings and/or virtual/distributed environments and games (Crook, 1994; Gee, 2003; 2005; Stahl, 2006; Arnseth & Ludvigsen, 2006).

The trends referred to above call for a perspective on learning which takes learning as a socially organized activity as foundational (Säljö, 2000; 2005). This means that what people learn in specific settings is dependent on how activities are socially organized and how they have emerged as institutional practices. Such dependency does not imply that how and what we learn is given; such matters are, in principle, open to negotiation. But historical aspects of the current local practices create constraints as well as affordances. The implication of this argument is that we need to understand learning as genuine interdependence between human agency, socially organized activities and technologies. When we take learning as socially organized activities as a premise, this gives the analysts possibilities to describe and analyze learning on multiple levels.

Sociocultural perspectives

In discussions about learning in the 21st century, there is a need for a better understanding of learning processes at the individual as well as at the collective level. At the same time, the theoretical framework for learning has undergone several paradigm shifts. Behaviorist or associationist positions have been weakened through the impact of the “cognitive revolution” which came to dominate many scientific disciplines. However, during recent decades various socio cultural approaches to learning have made an increasingly greater impact in research and in the wider discussion. In particular this shift has been noticeable in research focusing on the interplay between ICT and learning in several settings. The unit of analysis has shifted from a focus on the individual, and/or on the isolated cognitive event, to a focus that includes attention to interactive, institutional and contextual features of human practices. As part of the more general social transformation that takes place through the digital technologies, the development within the specific field of ICT creates new conditions for learning and communication. Consequently, it seems reasonable to argue that a sociocultural theory of learning is a vital tool for understanding change and innovation in various sectors and practices in society.

The knowledge or information society can be analyzed and understood from many different perspectives. One major difference in research perspectives can be found between those in the social sciences who analyze society from above, and those who do it from below. Engeström and Middleton (1996, p. 2) formulate these positions as follows:

Contrasting the studies of human agency in work with those primarily concerned with transformation of work over time can be characterized as comparisons between agency-driven microsociology-without-history and historically relevant macrosociology-without-agency.

This may be stating the argument in its extreme, but it does crystallize the differences between various positions that can be taken and the problems involved in this conflict between perspectives and their view on human agency and social structure. However, we think that the sociocultural perspective can represent a different approach to such problems. In sociocultural studies, human agency is obviously the basic premise (Wertsch et al., 1993). Thus, by taking human agency as a starting point, we include cultural and historical aspects that become relevant for understanding the activities that participants perform in situ and over time. The implication of this scientific position is that social structures, patterns or milieus are not taken for granted, but studied as phenomena that are emerging within practices.

As agents in society we face ICT in several ways. It is through communication and interaction with fellow human beings and with technologies that we act and learn. New types of semiotic mediation are – and will become increasingly more – important. Convergence between different technologies and media brings about changes in conditions for meaning-making, which are important to understand when researchers intend to examine and explain what is meant by expressions such as digital competence or media literacy, and also when attempting to understand how such technological resources co-determine and even transform human interaction (Kress 2000; Erstad, this volume). Of particular importance in this context are studies of the interplay between communication, learning and ICT in different institutional settings. Changes in norms, division of labor and competences take place within all institutional settings in and across education as well as working life, but also in other sites and activities characterized by networking and gaming. One important aspect of this development is that institutional boundaries are challenged and appear as more blurred.

Learning as socially organized activity

We think that it is important in this introduction to elaborate what we mean by learning as socially organized activity. From new research in biology, we find that in terms of genetics humans are very similar to our biological relatives, the primates. About 98 or 99 per cent of the genetic material is said to be shared. This means that the significant difference between humans and primates is our capacity to create and share experiences, and to pass these experiences on to the next generation. We argue that if we do not understand how learning as specific activities are enacted, we simply cannot understand why and how people learn in different settings. We argue that the sociogenesis of human practices needs to be the core focus if we want to create further advancement in the learning sciences.

We build knowledge in different ways, through language and material artifacts and tools. It is in these socially organized activities knowledge is developed, organized, accumulated and passed on, or forgotten. Donald (1991) argues that the co-evolution of humans, technologies and societies resulted in the emergence of what he refers to as a theoretical culture in which the human brain functions in collaboration with an increasingly complex environment of symbolic representations and mechanisms for communicating. In this theoretical, or technology-supported, culture, we as a species continuously produce new types of representations, which are abstract and which may not be directly linked to any material objects. Such representational practices are essential features of how we work and learn in most areas of society.

However, the implication of this argument is that we need to study learning at multiple levels. We will now look at two key issues in this context: the unit of analysis and levels of descriptions. The notions of the unit of analysis and levels of descriptions imply that learning evolves along different timescales and across different settings (Lemke, 2000). It is common to differentiate between four levels in the sociocultural approach. These a...

Table of contents

• New Perspectives on Learning and Instruction
• Contents
• Foreword
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Section 1 Developing professional expertise
• Section 2 Unpacking collaboration and trajectories of participation
• Section 3 Institutional development
• Section 4 Design environments and new tools and representations
• Index