A7 – Mycorrhizae metaphor of learning!

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Engeström 2007 From communities of practice to mycorrhizae

Reading a chapter by Engeström that discusses several metaphors in relation to learning.

The article begins with a critical review of the idea of communities of practice, and the metaphor of participation as being a key mechanism for learning. In the first section Engeström identifies and deals with the limits to the idea of community of practice, in particular its ahistorical nature.

The article then goes on to introduce ideas about user generation of value and the term knotworking.

In the final sections of the reading, Engeström discusses the idea of ‘runaway objects’ and the metaphor of mycorrhizae.

The introduction outlines the communities of practice notion (Lave and Wenger 1991) which moved learning from acquisition to participation as a metaphor and mechanism for learning. The COP notion sits within situated learning and the apprenticeship.

What criticisms does Engeström make?

Engeström doesn’t think that the Communities of Practice (CoP) notion is relevant anymore because CoPs are based on apprenticeships and situated learning so they are bounded with membership criteria, have a single centre of supreme skill and authority,and is characterised the novice moving towards becoming the master, (one way).  Engeström says that this does not reflect the true developments that have happening in the way organisations work.

What changes does Engeström identify; e.g. open source?

The changes towards a knowledge society, where knowledge empowers organisations and not hierarchies or markets. Knowledge creates a collaborative community and collaborative interdependence which coordinates interactions, requires a wide range of competencies and shifts as the knowledge and services change which cannot be met through traditional team structures. The challenges to the organisation is that teams need to have more fluid boundaries and individuals a diversity of skills and knowledge, authority is based on knowledge and values are important in motivating the individuals.

(b) What does he mean by negotiated knotworking?

Negotiated knotworking– an emerging way of organising work for co-configuration. Collaboration between partners is vital but takes shape without rigid predetermined rules or central authority.

Social Production or peer production – open source movement. New forms of community based work and knowledge creation. No single permanent centre, every can be a centre momentarily, importance of a shared goal.

(a) What are mycorrhizae?

The invisible organic texture underneath visible fungi. Fungi feed on absorbing nutrients from the environment around them. They do this by growing through and within the substrate on which they are feeding. Fungus is always in contact with its surroundings. Large surface area compared to volume.  In return the plant provides sugars for photosynthesis of other plants.

(b) How does this organic metaphor relate to networks?

1. Difficult to bound and close
2. Hard to kill but also vulnerable
3. Lie dormant for lengthy periods but generate again when the conditions are right
4. Heterogeneous participants working symbiotically
5. Thriving on mutually beneficial partnerships with other plants and organisms

The mycorrhizae depend on other plants and produce mushrooms, without these plants and mushrooms it will not take shape so the careful analysis of structures and dynamics of an activity system is needed.

(c) What are wildfire activities?

Engeström uses the examples of bird watching and skateboarding to explain these and compare them to networks of learning.  – activities that disappear or die in a given location, but reappear and develop vigorously in a different location

(d) How do you think these metaphors assist or hinder your understanding?

I liked the mycorrhizae explanation. I liked the idea of me being a small entity in social learning, but I spread my wings and cover a wide surface area of other people learning the same stuff by using the internet. Without the internet and web 2.0 I wouldn’t be able to absorb these elearning nutrients from others.  The community continues to exist as conditions allow it, and sometimes dies back and yes it is at risk. This also reminds me of Learning III where we need to find people who believe or want to investigate/learn the same things as us so we aren’t seen as weird.

Week 18, Activity 6c – Social Objects and the success of Social Networking Sites

zengestrom.com: Why some social network services work and others don’t Or: the case for object-centered sociality

This blog is about the future of SNServices when people start back tracking – or don’t want to be linked to other people anymore. Beattie is quoted as saying that he just switched off his account rather than offend people. I’ve done this in the past too. Face book now has a function where you can link to someone but hide their posts in your wall. This is useful for those people who so far haven’t done anything that does interest me, but some people do write interesting “tweets” on facebook. Now, thisnis where I can see an advantage to Twitter over FB, it takes away the chafe from the wheat. But it requires people to use them all, but this is where Tweetdeck is good. You can post to both Twitter and FB at the same time. But this requires end users to do it.

Engestrom introduces a new approach to SNS, not based on people but based on objects which he calls ‘object centered sociality’ which give the SNS a real purpose and glues people to them. Previous theories affiliate SNS with people, social networks, not with objects. SNS’ are made of people connected by a shared object. I wonder if that means that if object isn’t valuable, then the people will leave.

Engestrom offers an alterantive to the view that SNS success is based on linking people, he offers that SNSs that really work are the ones that are built around objects . eg Flickr is a SNS focused on photos as objects, Delicious with URLs as objects.

Some SNS are creating competition amongst it’s users on having the most followers: Funnily enough, so what if Ashton Kutcher has the most Twitter followers (there must be a term for this twitterees?) but this doesn’t mean that the object (his tweets/stream) keeps them actually reading. It could be part of the media hype that individuals want to be part of this bandwagon and be in this tribe.

Social objects helps us to understand better why some social networking services succeed while others don’t, LinkedIn until now was mostly focused on people not jobs, so people were leaving it. The object is the reason why people affiliate with each specific other.

We can use the notion of social objects to help us create new SNS. He states that when it becomes easy to create digital instances of an object, the online services for networking on, through and around will emerge too.

I agree mostly that the object is what brings value to the SNS. As a VERY busy person the SNS needs to add value to my life to take my time up. Facebook annoys me as I’m not interested in the object of knowing what Eastender’s character someone is most like so the object of Facebook isn’t sticky for me, I don’t really want to get in touch with old friends either – what on earth would we talk about. So far I’ve emailed a couple of people and that’s been in, hi, how are you, what are you doing now. A bit of rich tea and sympathy and that’s it.

Twitter on the other hand is useful in terms of dipping your toes in the stream as the H800 study guide put it and here the object might be more useful but as I follow more and more people/services it becomes less useful. Some people I follow Tweet far too often and I’ve in the past un-followed someone because of this. I’ve just signed up to the Wimbledon tweets, but there are so many of these too – it’s just as easy for me to go onto the Wimbledon website and find out results than read the tweets. But I’ve found also that Twitter isn’t sticky enough for me too. So the lack of a clear object is also missing, so supporting Engestrom’s argument. Some twitter streams are based on social objects, such as news feeds – and for example the Iranian elections and riots last week where journalists were blocked, but people could tweet what was going on to the outside world. But as someone else said, it’s easier for me to read a 2minute summary by the BBC of all these tweets, than to trawl through them myself, not knowing which are sound or not.

With Delicious the object for me is a place to store URLs, in my experience so far I’ve not really find the usefulness around social bookmarking as experience in an earlier activity. It’s kind of got it, but not quite yet.

The downside of a SNS linked to a specific social object is that people will end up being members of lots of different SNS for these different purposes whereas it would be really useful if you could have it all in one place as you have more places to write to, follow and log in to with your personal data all over the place.

Wk 4 A 5 -Social theories of learning

Compare the kind of learning that the two papers propose.

Where is the learning taking place?

In Situated learning, as the title suggests, learning should take place in the siutation that the knowledge will be used . An apprenticeship, learning from an expert within the community of practitioners in order to become enculturated into the community.

In Expansive learning, learning takes place outside activities, learning from communities and from activity.  He said that it’s like stepping back and getting a broader or different perspective on the activity system in order to gain a better understanding.

Both support the authentic activity and social view of learning, but expansive learning emphasises the point of questionning, deviance, contradictions and the environment changing the learning object.

At what level is the learning taking place? (Consider Engeström’s focus on organisations and contradictions in relation to an apprenticeship model.)

Using Bateson’s three levels of learning, Learning 1 and 2 are taking place in situated learning, but involves a specific learner and teacher/mentor.

Learning 3 is taking place in expansive learning, and involves anyone/think that has influence on the activity.

What is your view of social theories of learning?

My view, from just reading about situated and expansive learning is that social theories of learning vary in terms of foci on the individual, the group or the process.  Social theories are heaveily dependent on communities of practice and learning from and by experience.  I now understand the concept of enculturation better and feel that this has a very strong place in management education.  Social theories of learning reflect the participation metaphor.

What kinds of questions about learning would these accounts help you to understand?

How do we learn?

How does collaboration and community learning add value?

How does having practical experience of the community you’re going to practice in after the formal learning ends helps develop the learning you’re doing and develop your skills?

What weaknesses do these social accounts of learning have?

They seem to say that that there is no place for didactic education at all, that the only way to learn is through social networks. I feel that learning is best served as appropraite to the subject (ie topic), the learner, the situation, the purpose of their learning. As we discussed in the tutorial, many subjects need the basic acquisition of learning to happen before higher level learning can take place.

Expansive learning and the activity theory are more applicable towards informal learning, where the object can change. Where the learning outcomes and assessment methods are limited, one has to be careful how outside influences affect one’s studies.

Wk 4, A4 – Activity Theory & Expansive learning – notes

Ok, so this was really annoying me – I wanted to grasp the concept, I couldn’t let it lie.

I watched video interview with Engström by Chris Jones for the University of Lancaster CSALT course from 2002 which helped explain Activity Theory and Expansive Learning very well. This video is here: http://csalt.lancs.ac.uk/alt/engestrom/.

I also read some of the other tutor groups to see if they could help, and I’d like to acknowledge Geertruida Duffy-Wigman and Diane Brown for helping me to understand this activity. The link to the video was also found in a few of the other forums, posted by other students.

Activity Theory (AT) was first developed by Soviet Russian theorists to revolutionise psychology of learning beyond behaviourism approaches. It brought culture into the understanding of human behaviour because it was deemed that humans actions/responses/etc are culturally mediated.

AT answers the question “who learns?” Answer: The activity system learns and therefore it is the whole system affects the learning. It helps us to understand how a wide range of factors work together to impact an activity.

Learning is understood as something that is distributed among individuals, colleagues, tools and symbolic resources.

AT enables us to “radically expand” our analyses of learning.

Expansive Learning

Learning has layers, and using Bateson’s theory of three layers of learning Engströmexplained that Learning I – is the curriculum, and learning through conditioning, reinforcement, punishment and is tacit and non-conscious.  Learning II – is the hidden curriculum, always exists when learning takes place, and that is where we learn the rules of the game, ie we learn how to be students, we learn how to be whatever community we’re in. This is implicit. The learner begins to learn to bend the rules and experiment with their role. Learning III is EXPANSIVE LEARNING, when learners question the sense and meaning of their learning. It’s where we go beyond the information given to construct a broader picture. It removes you from the constraints of that activity by constructing another activity, to help you achieve the goal of the other activity.

Learning by expanding. Learners distance themselves from the activity, in order to understand it better.

My understanding then is, for example, Action Learning Groups, where you have a problem (or activity) in your work/course whatever, and you go to another community to help you look at the problem from different viewpoints to help you reconstruct the activity to find the solution.

Engström explains that in Learning III people start to be aware of the demands and conflicting messages of what they’re doing and go into another “activity” to help them resolve those conflicts- distance oneself.

Learning I and II are happening all the time, and simultaneously in each activity. Learning III is rare because it’s basis is questioning and deviance, and deviance is often suppressed, though of as being weird and excluded.  Because of this, expansive learning, or learning III, requires a social network as it cannot exist as an individual process because it would be suppressed. It needs the nurturing and support of other people.

Technology Enhanced Learning

This video was from 2002, and the article we read is from 2001, so what Engström said about Technology and Expansive learning is a little bit out of date but from what he was implying and what I know about Web 2.0, I can say that because learning III require communities, Web 2.0 provides learners with those communities. He implies that Learning III is rare, so to find people comfortable with being deviant in this way is difficult, so web 2.0 enables this. Web 2.0 enables creating CoP (communities of practice), where objects are shared and you produce things together, rather than web “1.0″ which was very much a market place.

Engström uses the analogy of skateboarders to talk about how he thinks networked learning and AT/Ex Lg are linked, again 2002 so not enough information on Web 2.0 I suspect. He described the skateboarders as nomads, who don’t use the skate-park anymore, but travel around cities looking for new places to skate and send each other texts, photos, video by phone to invite others to that place. So in terms of Web 2.0 and networked learning, we are all nomads trawling the Internet, having our own experiences (activities) and web 2.0 is our platform for inviting others to share what we’ve found, which may then effect the recipients activity.

Engström warns networked learning developers to be aware of the boundaries between the closed virtual environment and the open physical life. He says it’s tempting to think of the virtual environment as a world in it’s own right – where you can have any identity, any role, share any information you wish. But the virtual worlds cannot exist alone, we still need to exist within the physical world with real people and real responsibilities and actions.

Wk 4 A4: Expansive Learning and Activity Theory – Tasks

1. What kind of learning theory is offered by classic activity theory?

AT is basically a concept that shows us all the component parts and interactions of an activity/learning experience to help us to analyse and represent these processes.   It helps us to understand how a wide range of factors work together to impact an activity.

First generation AT is focused on the individual and the task and thus is task based learning, perhaps even the acquisition learning metaphor- maybe just doing enough to pass!  It consists of a subject (the learner), the object (-ive) and the tools which can be physical or symbolic.   Does the teacher come under the tools node?

Second generation is a social learning theory that helps us understand how learning takes place within culture. Second generation AT added the based of the triangle, adding rules – the limitations, strategies, systems; the community and the division of labour (who does what). The subject has to work towards an outcome and is effected by all these other things.

In 3^rd Gen. AT learning is seen as an activity that goes beyond the individual, their objective and the tools their using. It considers the effects of their environment in terms of rules, communities and who does what. It adds complexity to the interrelationships between the component parts of an activity system.

Third generation AT shows how 2 pyramids work alongside each other and affect each others’ outcomes.  The focus of 2^nd and 3^rd generation AT is that the organisation/environment is central, not the individual.

2. What are the five principles of current activity theory?

The five principles of the AT is that

1. The unit of analysis is the activity system

2. Activity system has multiple voices – because it deals with communities, not individuals. The teacher participates in the learning too (Opposite of apprenticeship where there is one voice, and the teaching is vertical; the teacher controls what is learned).

3. Activity systems develop and change over time which effect the processes within the system (historicity). Our lives and activities change over time with the success or failure of each activity. Teaching is horizontal.

4. Contradictions and conflicts are the sources of change – conflict creates innovation and that Activity systems are open systems.

5. Activity systems have the possibility of expansive transformation – outside of the system.

3.  What is the problem with the ‘standard’ theories of learning that expansive learning addresses?

Learning by expanding:  Learners distance themselves from the activity, in order to understand it better. Bateson’s Learning III. When learners question the sense and meaning of their learning. For example, Action Learning Groups, where you have a problem (or activity) in your work/course whatever, and you go to another community to help you look at the problem from different viewpoints to help you reconstruct the activity to find the solution. Engestrom claims that participants of Learning III are rare and often suppressed, and need a community to exist successfully.

Standard vertical theories of learning, assume that there is a teacher and a learner, the teacher has all the knowledge to impart onto the learner. It assumes that the knowledge is also well defined  but people and organisations are all the time learning something that it not stable, not defined and not understood ahead of time (think of the current economic situation, no one knows what to do, so we are all learning together, and every solution that is implemented will have an unknown effect which then requires another unknown action).

Daniels and Warmington state that it is differs from traditional types of learning in that:

“• Contents and outcomes of learning emerge as new forms of practical activity and artifacts constructed by both students and teachers in the process of tackling real life projects and during problem solving.

• Learning is driven by genuine developmental needs in human practices and institutions, manifested by means of disturbances, breakdowns, problems, and episodes of questioning the existing practice.
• Learning proceeds through complex cycles of learning actions in which new objects and motives are created and implemented, opening up wider possibilities for participants involved in that activity”

Daniels, H. And Warmington, P. (2007) Analysing third generation activity systems: labour-power, subject position and personal transformation Journal of Workplace Learning Vol 19 No 6 pp.377-391  http://www.emeraldinsight.com/Insight/viewPDF.jsp?contentType=Article&Filename=html/Output/Published/EmeraldFullTextArticle/Pdf/0860190604.pdf

“Engestrom suggests a horizontal / sideways learning and development which compliments the traditional learning view.” Keith Aquilina, H800 les6 09 W4 A2 4 5, 8 March 2009 09.21

4.  What is the criticism that Engeström makes of the apprenticeship model of learning?

The apprentice’s teacher cannot know everything as what there is to know is always changing.

“if the master does not have the answer, how can the apprentice learn from him apprenticeship model is vertical, presumes that humans are elevated to higher levels of competence; does not allow for horizontal/sideways learning and development” Frauke Constable, H800 les6 09 W4 A2 4 5, 6 March 2009 20:42