If facing change, expanding our horizon, and dealing with complexity are all social learning challenges, we live in demanding times. In the context of rapid globalization and incerasing interdependence, we face a threatened environment, economic precariousness and imbalances, the need for better education, ideological conflicts – to name a few of our challenges.
These challenges are neither simply personal nor abstractly global. They require accelerated learning at various levels of scale at once, from individuals, to communities, to organizations, to regions, to nations, to worldwide learning systems.
Learning capability – or the ability to learn – is a paradoxical aspiration because learning by itself does not guarantee learning capability. Sometimes being successful at learning is precisely what prevents you from learning the next thing. When applied to social systems, learning capability depends on the learning capability of individuals, but in the context of the structure of the system in which they live. Networking, convening new social learning spaces, brokering across boundaries, acting as learning citizens and social artists – these are the kinds of interventions that have the potential to increase social learning capability at a systemic level.
Taking such a systemic view is especially critical at a time when global challenges are placing unprecedented demands on our ability to learn together. Developing social learning capability across sectors may be urgent, but it is still an elusive aspiration. We need a social discipline of learning.
Making sense of social learning capability is the great challenge of learning theory in the 21st century. Learning how to enhance it, accelerate it, and evaluate it is the challenge of the practitioner. Both undertakings are interrelated – and contributing to both is our personal and professional aspiration.
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Read more about social learning capability in this collection of essays by Etienne. |
Thank you for this post that got me commenting, even that I have already been doing too much computer work today.
I can echo what the doctor at WHO said. We know many things but clearly we don’t have the thing that would move us. Let me give an example:
If we say that the most well educated men (well, usually men), their chalice of cognitive domain full of knowledge, have been in charge of the global monetary functions, how was the global breakdown even possible? Was it just that it was impossible to predict some things that might happen or was it so that the people weren’t that smart after all?
I do not think it is because of the aforementioned reasons. It has to be because of the whole system what the current educational sector stands for, and also what it doesn’t. It doesn’t guide well the construction of affective or conative domains, or building up the emotional intelligence. Social learning might be one tool for this, but many more things from assessment to curriculum and teacher training should be changed all together at the same time. And the culture that lies in the middle of this is the hardest part.
From individual assessment through numbers, to collaboration and reflection. When you have people who are merely ‘smart’ and full of substance knowledge, they are effective. We should try what kind of citizens we could get with addressing the affective and conative domains more effectively as well. Many things might be prevented doing this. At least we should try and find out.
Hello Marko… thanks for being one of the first to write a comment on our newly launched blog.
Your suggestions for the whole educational sector are quite ambitious – are you referring to the sector as a whole or in any particular country? Our experience is that there are pockets in the educational sector who are embracing ideas in their practice about how we learn and therefore how we assess and design the curriculum. Some of these are very dynamic.
And yes, finding out about learning citizenship is certainly the direction we want to move in.