Network of Practice

I came across an interesting set of concepts that quite predate the Learning 2.0 proclamation. Building upon Lave and Wenger's communities of practice, Brown and Duguid developed the concept of Network of Practice. Ranging from communities of practice to electronic or virtual communities, and differentiated from formal work teams, it focuses on how individuals come together...

Part 5: Learning 2.0 Formal Methodologies

Discussion Thread: This post << Part 4 << Part 3 << Part 2 << Part 1 (Also a contribution to the May Working/Learning blog carnival hosted by Rupa Rajagopalan) In the last few posts, I have tried to identify what I think are the pillars of the learning process/experience and tried to establish that they...

Learning 2.0 Formal Methodologies – More thoughts

I thought that this was an interesting attempt, even if I would not subscribe to it wholeheartedly. The author takes the formal dimensions of traditional learning - objectives, time, measurement, improvement and content or knowledge - and maps them to Learning 2.0, defined loosely as a combination of social networks, collaboration, and the rest. I...

Sugar – an operating system for learners

Now this is really very exciting. Let me start with explaining how I got here. The first thing is there are groups such as the One Laptop per child (OLPC) and those within Intel, HP and many companies that are trying to create laptops for the classroom in the K12 segment. These are small form...

Learning 2.0 formal methodologies?

Jane Hart, in response to my comment on Manish's blog post, was wondering what I meant by structured construction and tracking models for teaching-learning in a Learning 2.0 world. I guess this is as good a time as any to start throwing some ideas around for discussion. Thanks Jane, for forcing me to think harder!...

Learn@Work and Work@Learn

Part of the Work at Learning/Learning at Work blog carnival hosted by Manish Mohan. A few months back, I started two collaborative multi-author blogs for my company (one for my software development team and one for my e-learning development team) and helped a couple of other individuals at work to start their own. I also...

The strategic inflection point

Only the paranoid survive. Andrew Grove's 2003 book by the same name reflects on the strategic inflection point when something in the environment changes in a fundamental way that is not so apparent in our daily chaos of survival. Andrew writes of how a 10X change in any one force (following Porter’s classical competitive strategy...

Social Learning

Lev Vygotsky, a Soviet developmental psychologist (1896-1934), also known as the founder of cultural historical psychology, believed that our learning depends heavily on the social and cultural context within which we exist and the role of interpersonal communication. Theories such as cognitive apprenticeship, activity theory, situated learning and distributed cognition have been reportedly influenced by Vygotsky's...