Our interest in learning ecologies has developed from our commitment to supporting and exploring the idea and practice of lifewide learning. Over the last three years we have published several issues of Lifewide Magazine, produced two book chapters, several posts and made numerous contributions to university conferences and other professional development activities. These bits and bobs have now been brought together in a book and we would appreciate greatly any feedback and suggestions for  further development.

Exploring Learning Ecologies draft chapters

In the next issue of Lifewide Magazine we want to explore the idea from the perspective of the ecologies we create to learn and develop in the work environment or in any other context that is relevant to professional development.

We invite you to share a story about a developmental process you have been involved in to develop yourself for an existing role or project in your work environment or to develop yourself for a new role or just to develop your knowledge or expertise in a field. Your story should be between 500-1000 words and include a reflective analysis using this simple tool. In this way we hope to apply and continue to develop the idea of learning ecologies.

If you are willing to share a story please email me - the Commissioning Editor [email protected] or Executive Editor Jenny Willis [email protected]

Norman Jackson
​
Download my draft introduction to find out more

The June Issue of Lifewide Magazine is exploring the idea and practice of Personal Learning Networks. A PLN is a way of describing the group of people that each of us connects with to learn from, and sometimes with. It's personal because we choose the people we want to involve ie we see advantages of being connected to them, and forming and sustaining a relationship with them in order to develop our thinking and capabilities. We also participate in networks of connected people in order to be involved in something and/or to achieve something and learning then becomes a bi-product of our involvement.

Connectivity - is the defining property of the Social Age, and it is central to the idea of PLN's. Forming connections and relationships with people who can help us learn and or achieve something, is part and parcel of being the social animals we are. But the idea of networking for learning has become more important as a result of the new affordances provided by the internet, smart phones and other mobile communication devices, and Web 2.0 and social media technologies. Our PLN is not limited to online interactions, but it is the ability to connect easily with many people from all over the world, in a sustained manner, that makes the social practice of a PLN so powerful. In a world of just-in-time learning the affordances provided by the internet means it is also possible to find people quickly at the point that a problem has to be solved. Such possibilities were simply not available ten years ago.

When we give something a name it defines the way we view it. The words PERSONAL (meaningful to me), LEARNING (the act of gaining new, or modifying existing knowledge, behaviours, skills, values or beliefs) and NETWORK(S) (a group of people we connect to or who are connected to us), clearly emphasise these three ideas but this definition encourages us to ignore other aspects of the concept.

Our PLN’s often assist and enable us to involve ourselves in something, often to accomplish something we value. PLNs and the relationships we build within them are also a way of involving people in our own life projects and for disseminating the results of our learning. In other words they provide a vehicle for participation and for influencing the thinking and actions of others. These dimensions of activity are camouflaged within the PLN concept.

Our PLN's change through time as we move from formal education, into a career, we change jobs, roles and careers or engage in new projects, and perhaps move to new cities or new countries. Because of this our PLN's have both lifelong and lifewide dimensions. Our development through life, it might be argued, is the result of a constellation of PLN's we have created and been a part of tracking the sorts of changes in our circumstances outlined above.

Our PLN’s vary according to types of knowledge we want to access. If we need to learn complex things like ways of thinking, communicating and behaving in a specific field of social practice, we create networks for learning that will enable us to participate in such social practices and gain access to the embodied knowledge of others who are more experienced and expert than ourselves. To some extent we can engage in conversations through which tacit knowledge can be shared through on-line forum’s but such forms of communication will not allow us to observe people in action and appreciate the nuances of their actions in the particularities of the contexts and situations they inhabit. But there is a world of networking through which people share their personal knowledge, insights and experiences through the medium of the internet. It is these computer-mediated networks for personal learning that have extended our scope for PLN’s.

Our PLN's are central to the idea of learning ecologies  'the complex set of relationships we create in a particular context for a particular purpose that provide us with opportunities and resources for learning, development and achievement'. PLNs are like the blood vessels in our body or the roots and capillary vessels of a tree. They provide the relational structure and means of connecting to others and the means of tapping into the medium and nutrients for learning - the flow of information, knowledge and wisdom  within our learning ecology. They connect our ecology for learning with the ecologies developed by others for their learning. So gaining deeper understandings of our PLN's will also help us understand our own ecologies for learning better.

Given that they are so important it is surprising that higher education does little to encourage students to develop and practice the skills of networking for learning: preferring instead to rely on learners assimilating knowledge that has been codified in books. But for most students their future lies in mastering the ability to discover, create and co-create new knowledge to solve their everyday problems in particular situations and contexts. They need to become adept at creating, maintaining and making effective use of the resources contained within their PLN's.

So what might universities do to help students develop this important capability for learning and achieving? There are at least three possible strategies.

1) The professional route - universities might emulate the ways in which professionals  working in business and industry develop and maintain their links. A starting point might be to utilise their network of alumni, and involve students in using professional networking platforms like LinkedIn and Academia.edu

2) The subject route - within the programme and the broader social/cultural environment of a department, students could be encouraged to network around social activities, study groups, and projects and assignments that deliberately encourage learners to discover things not only through books but through finding people who can help them.

3) The lifewide route - universities might recognise that students are active networks in other parts of their lives outside the academic programme through which they form PLNs. Perhaps these experiences can be used to explore the idea and practice of networking perhaps in the context of personal development planning?

How important do you feel it is for students to develop their understandings and capabilities for networking and what sort of strategies might or are being used?

Norman Jackson
Founder Lifewide Education

Further reading
LIfewide Magazine June 2015 Exploring Personal Learning Networks (to be published 28/06)


I conclude that Harold Jarche's SEEK SENSE SHARE conceptual tool for visualising the flow of information to, through and from a learning ecology seems to work very well in these contexts.


References
1 Stodd J Exploring the Social Age and the New Culture of Learning Lifewide Magazine Issue 11 September 2014 http://www.lifewidemagazine.co.uk/2014.html
2 Jarche H, (2014) The Seek > Sense > Share Framework Inside Learning Technologies January 2014, Posted Monday, 10 February 22 014  http://jarche.com/2014/02/the-seek-sense-share-framework/
3  Hart J (2013) My daily PKM routine (practices and toolset)
http://www.c4lpt.co.uk/blog/2013/11/30/my-daily-pkm-routine-practices-and-toolset/             
4 Jackson, N. J. (2013b) Learning Ecology Narratives, in N. J. Jackson and G. B. Cooper (eds) Lifewide Learning, Education and Personal Development E-book Chapter C4 available on line at: http://www.lifewideebook.co.uk/research.html


Norman Jackson
Founder Lifewide Education

Some thoughts on reflection in the Social Age

Most people reflect on experiences and events in their lives but they do so privately, informally and without a record. This general tendency carries over into the use of social media - even active users of social media typically do not use these media for recording self-reflection. So being an active user of such media does not in itself mean that people will use their affordances for reflection and recording reflective thinking. People who voluntarily record their reflective thoughts, in a diary, letters, blogs and through other means, do so because of the intrinsic value and meaning they derive from the process. For them reflection is a part of who they are and an outlet for their creative self-expression. They will search for and use the medium(s) that enable them to best express their reflective thoughts in words, drawings, paintings, photographs, making things. If they use social media then they will consider the affordances they offer.

Generally,  people spend time and effort recording their reflective thoughts only when they are expected or required to do so. For example, in work reports, training and development activities or appraisal procedures, or in formal educational processes. They might also reflect and record their thinking at important transitions in their life for example when they are considering leaving a company or applying for a job and they have to update their CV or write a letter of application. In other words reflection is fulfilling a particular purpose and the parameters are usually externally defined. People engage in reflection when they are involved in learning projects, CPD activities or a new and rich informal learning experience, such as travelling or living in a new country. They might also engage in reflection and recording their thinking for therapeutic reasons for example following trauma.

The people who do spend time and effort recording their thinking, including their reflective thoughts, over sustained periods of time, are people who are interested in and committed to their own learning and development. Typically such people are involved in the development of others - teachers, trainers, coaches, educators, developers and one of their purposes is to lead by example by showing the value of recording their reflections.

In addition to people who are directly involved in education, there are groups, such as Professional Bodies, that have a particular interest in promoting formal reflection through their role in professional recognition and the maintenance of  good standing through self-managed CPD. This connects reflective practice in education with reflective practice in the professional world.

Yet another group of people who record their thinking in a publicly accessible way are the thought leaders and writers, who want to influence others, build their reputation and promote themselves in the process.

You have to be an active user of social media in order to make use of its affordances for supporting reflection. Personal blogs using web 2.0 platforms like wordpress, tumblr and weebly, are the preferred social media tools for making reflective thinking publicly available - often supported by Twitter. But people who are highly involved in social media make use of many different tools in their reflective processes, curation and sharing practices. It's also clear that some people have tried to use social media to encourage reflection and have been disappointed with the results. These tools did not help them reflect deeply and meaningfully.

Virtually, all the contributors to Issue 13 of the Magazine maintain a blog through which they publish, amongst other things, their reflective thoughts. Their blogs are connected to their purposes - usually their role, specific aspects of their work or other enterprises they are involved in or perhaps their passions.

So on balance, it would appear that social media provide a medium for recording and presenting reflective thinking for those people who want to reflect and are interested in using such media to accomplish this. But it probably has little impact on people who do not see the value in recording their reflective thoughts.

But we must also be aware that reflective thinking that is publicly shared through social media reveals only part of an individual's reflective story and its purpose is primarily not to codify the learning of the individual for themselves but to present such codification to others.

In providing me with some useful feedback on my article, John Cowan highlighted the fact that people rarely admit mistakes/failure or messing up in their blogs preferring to present themselves in a more successful light. Whilst  I agree with this generalisation I don't think its all that different to reflective writing in an assessed portfolio be it for claims of student or professional learning. Unless of course people deliberately set out to focus on critical incidents and mistakes.

I don't encounter many blogs or diaries or social media postings that record mistakes, weaknesses or causes for worry, except when they also record that the writer has these in hand.  When I read such entries, I find myself asking myself, "What is this writer trying to sell me about himself or herself? And why?" Me, I reflect for me.  On the many occasions when I make these efforts available to others, I am simply trying to share with them that this man can and has found it useful to be personally probing in frank reflections. Professor John Cowan (pers comm)

Regardless of whether we perceive social media to be of use in personal reflection, social media are good at helping us share our reflective stories and insights. When I start researching a new topic I will often search for blogs where people have shared their own thinking and ideas. By sharing their creative contributions people help other people to think: people they will never know unless they make a comment on their blog. Seeing someone else make use of your thinking and creative products can be highly motivating and encourage you to share even more - but all too often people do not leave comments so we do not know what effect our sharing has.

But to be brutally honest I rarely receive any comments on blog posts and my most successful engagements which foster reflective dialogue have been through email, where I have invited someone I trust to provide me wi h their perspectives on thoughts I have shared.

(I think I will leave the last word to Clive James who was on breakfast TV this morning.  He has been fighting terminal cancer for the last five years. He has written a series of poems reflecting on his life including 'Sentenced to Life' in which he looks back on his life and candidly reveals his failures and regrets.  He said, 'The mistakes are the only things we learn from, nobody learns from success, but your failures are a real subject'.  The interviewer read a verse from one of his poems..

Leçons De Ténèbres
But are they lessons, all these things I learn
Through being so far gone in my decline?
The wages of experience I learn
Would service well a younger life than mine.
I should have been more kind. It is my fate
To find this out, but find it out too late.

In the conversation that followed, Clive James admitted, 'I wish I had been wiser earlier,  but now that I am being as wise and comprehending as I can be about my life. I have something to go on, to be grateful for.' Through sharing his thoughts he provides us with a glimpse of how reflection features in the later stages of our life as we look back and think about what might have been, but are thankful for what has been. This is one reflective process the Social Age will not change.

Acknowledgements
My thinking greatly benefited from conversations with Professor John Cowan, Chrissi Nerantzi and Sue Beckingham. You can access Lifewide Magazine at http://www.lifewidemagazine.co.uk/

Reference
1 James, A. and Brookfield, S. D. (2014)   Engaging Imagination: Helping students become creative and reflective thinkers Jossey Bass
2 Stodd, J. (2014a) Exploring the world of social learning. Smashwords Available at:
     https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/204432
3 Stodd, J. (ed) (2014b) Lifewide Magazine September 2014 Exploring the Social Age and the New Culture of Learning Available on line at:  http://www.lifewidemagazine.co.uk/
4 Bernstein M (2014) Knowing Yourself: There's No App for That. Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marsha-lebedev-bernstein/knowing-yourself-theres-no-app-for-that_b_6057042.html

Interview
BBC Breakfast TV interview with Clive James 31/03/15 06.53am
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/live/bbcone

APPLYING THESE IDEAS TO MY OWN LIFE 
Like most people, I have experienced many more inflections in my life than disruptions.  I came up with a list of 14 inflection points and 4 significant disruptions.

Inflection points occurred three times during my secondary schooling and on each occasion there was a circumstance in which a teacher believed in me sufficiently to give me a chance and help create opportunity for me which took me on a new pathway without feeling any sense of loss for the past. Inflection points in my life also determined my pathway to a PhD and to my first professional role and 8 years of living in Saudi Arabia. At a personal level, inflection points occurred when I met the first girl who I decided to marry, and also, after her untimely death at the age of 48, when I met and married my second wife and entered her family. Inflections also occurred as each of my children were born and we grew from a couple into a family since becoming a parent and caring for children has a significant impact on our experiences, identity and behaviours.

"Very few people see inflection points as the opportunities they often are: catalysts for changing their lives; moments when a person can modify the trajectory he or she is on and redirect it in a more desirable direction.  Whether it's a new job, a change in a relationship, or something else, an inflection point is one of those periodic windows of opportunity when a person can pause, reflect, and ask: '... do I want to continue on this path or is now the moment to change direction?"(2)

It's hard to remember what you thought as a child, but now I think I did realise at the time (aged 12) when I was in my first inflection point, that I was at crossroads and that the decision I was making would alter the course of my life. I could see that there were opportunities for me to take although I could only appreciate the true significance of the change I made when I look back years later. As Soren Kierkgaard once said 'Life can only be understood backwards [after it has been] lived forwards'

Turning to the disruptions in my life I have experienced several of my own making. The first occurred when my family and I left Saudi Arabia and I gave up a job I enjoyed, many good friends and a lifestyle we had grown accustomed to come back to a period of great uncertainty. The second, when I was 40, and I fundamentally changed my career. The first 12 months were the hardest of my professional life. I had to give up being the professional geologist I had invested heavily in becoming and there were enormous feelings of loss alongside the stress, uncertainty and at times exhaustion I was experiencing. But the biggest disruption I have so far had to cope with was the loss of my first wife to cancer in 1999. When she died, a significant part of me died with her and I know that I became a different person to the person I was when she was alive. While outwardly it might have looked as if I had coped well with my loss, I mostly kept how I felt to myself. I lost my enthusiasm for life for a while and within a few months I had decided to move on to another role in another organisation - I think, in part, to escape the past.

Looking back now, I can now see how all these inflection points and disruptions were the triggers for new pathways and experiences through life. Many of these points required me to go through a transition that was not enjoyable or comfortable and was sometimes full of anxiety and stress. All of them changed me to varying degrees and in various ways. All required me to learn, develop and change as a person. Many required me to develop myself professionally for new roles and to relinquish an identity and begin to form a new identity. 

THE IDEA OF LOSING YOURSELF
As I was completing this post I came across a post by Maria Popova (3) on Rebecca Solnit's book A Field Guide to Getting Lost (4). Maria tells a story in which a student came into a workshop with  a quote from what she said was the pre-Socratic philosopher Meno. It read, “How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?” The idea of using disruptions and inflection points in life to discover how to 'go about finding that thing, the nature of which is totally unknown to you', seemed like a revelation to me.

Solnit writes (4): 'To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away.' As  Popova elaborates,'to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery. And one does not get lost but loses oneself, with the implication that it is a conscious choice, a chosen surrender, a psychic state achievable through geography. That thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually  what you need to find, and finding it is a matter of getting lost.' This beautifully expressed way of seeing the process of embarking on a new trajectory through life, seems to offer a deeper insight into the psychological process of life inflections and self-disruptions, by revealing why we are motivated to do it.  By changing the direction of our life. By voluntarily putting ourselves into new situations that will take us on a different path through the landscape that we have access to in our life - we are creating opportunity to lose something of ourselves (the life we used to lead and the person we used to be) while at the same time creating the potential to discover, 'that thing, the nature of which is totally unknown to you'.  Losing ourselves is the way we challenge ourselves to live a life in which we can discover for ourselves who we are.  'Never to get lost is not to live' (Popova).

NEW OPPORTUNITIES FOR CREATIVITY 
It seems to me that inflections with all the promise they hold, are also important points for creativity as we have to recreate ourselves and develop entirely new ecologies for learning and flourishing in response to the changing circumstances of our life. On the other hand disruptions are often periods when creativity may die within us as our desire to flourish is overwhelmed by our sense of loss and dislocation, and creativity serves only to help us survive, not flourish.

I conclude that the points of inflection and disruption in our life enable us to discover who we are at each stage and in each part of our life and they exert a profound influence on who we become. They are largely responsible for our uniquely personal learning and development trajectories and our accomplishments in the contexts we have inhabited. They demand and require us to develop our resilience and afford us new opportunities to exercise our creativity in both recreating ourselves and solving the problems and dilemmas of new circumstances in our life.

Sources
1) Exploring Disruption and Resilience Lifewide Magazine December 2014           
2) Taking Advantage of Life’s (Few and Far Between) Inflection Points  Howard's Gift: Uncommon Wisdom to Inspire Your Life's Work,  By Eric C. Sinoway http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/7041.html
3) Maria Popova (2014) A Field Guide to Getting Lost: Rebecca Solnit on How We Find Ourselves 
4) Rebecca Solnit (2006) A Field Guide to Getting Lost: Rebecca Solnit on How We Find Ourselves

Illustrations by Kiboko HachiYon

The editorial team is working on the next issue of Lifewide Magazine  which aims to explore the idea of disruption in life and how individuals cope with and overcome significant disruption and change, adapt and grow through their experiences. The human condition is to try to understand situations in order to make good decisions about how to act or not act. Some situations are easy to comprehend: they are familiar and we have dealt with them or something like them before and we are confident that we know what to do. Others are more difficult to understand and some are impossible to understand until we have engaged in them. The amount of stability will vary from one person's life to another. Instability leading to disruption is not something that can be controlled, and there are many things in life that we have little or no control over. But some aspects of our life we can control and we can actively seek stability by avoiding putting ourselves in situations that might lead to disruption. We might hypothesize that people who behave conservatively, who do not take risks or venture into situations of uncertainty, are less likely to encounter self-created disruption. But also perhaps, they are less likely to be able to deal with it when they encounter it. On the other hand, people who go looking for adventure and change, who are willing to take risks, are more likely to encounter self-created disruption in their life. And because they have experienced it before and dealt with it, they are better able to cope with it should it happen again.

This post is concerned with how we might understand stability, change and disruption in our personal life using complexity theory to help us appreciate what is happening and why it is happening. Complexity theory is 'a set of concepts that try to explain complex phenomenon not explainable by traditional cause and effect theories. It integrates ideas derived from chaos theory, cognitive psychology,computer science, evolutionary biology, general systems theory, fuzzy logic,information theory, and other related fields to deal with the natural and artificial systems as they are, and not by simplifying them (breaking them down into their constituent parts). It recognizes that complex behaviour emerges from a few simple rules, and that all complex systems are networks of many interdependent parts which interact according to those rules(1).

Interpreting life disruptions using the Cynefin framework

The Cynefin sense making framework, developed by David Snowden (2&3) is a simple tool to help us explore and appreciate the nature and level of complexity in any situation. It was originally developed to aid understanding of organisational change, but the conceptual tool can also be used to evaluate personal situations. A life is after all made up of many situations of differing levels of complexity all being enacted in real time. Fortunately, for most of us, most of our life is made up of situations that are fairly stable and we can reliably predict what will happen within such a situation and we can behave accordingly. We are not challenged to invent new behaviours or learn new things in order to act appropriately and effectively.

Disruption occurs when events and circumstances cause the patterns, routines and relationships of everyday life to fundamentally change and we are forced to relinquish our existing life, or significantly adapt it, or invent an entirely new life for ourselves and perhaps reinvent ourselves in the process. In such situations we are we are challenged to invent new behaviours and learn new things in order to act appropriately and effectively.

Watch a youTube clip about the Cynefin framework developed by David Snowden https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7oz366X0-8

There are four domains within the Cynefin framework which we might equate with different types of situation in our life. In the simple domain things have a simple cause and effect – you do X and you are very likely to get Y. The environment - contexts and problems - are familiar and understood. You will probably have had many similar experiences that can be directly related to the situation. You know that ‘what you do’ is likely to have a particular result. And if you do the same thing in a similar situation the same result will happen. This is the situational domain we most commonly experience in our everyday life when life is not so troublesome. In this situation we know what to do, we know how to respond because we have been there many times before.

At the other extreme is the chaotic domain where there is no perceivable relationship between cause and effect. If this situation happens in your life, you feel totally out of control and overwhelmed physically, intellectually and emotionally. We encounter this out of our depth, never experienced before, situation in some life changing experiences. In these situations we sometimes do nothing, either because we do not want to exacerbate the situation or we feel so overwhelmed that we can't imagine anything we do will beneficially affect the situation. Alternatively, we may feel that we have to act, believing that it is better to do something than nothing. In fact it is only by doing something and seeing the results of what we do that we know whether what we did was effective. The feedback we get from our actions enables us to see what we need to do next. It's a trial and error suck and see, who can help me process. It won't get us out of chaos but it may well take us one step in the direction we need to go.

Between these two extremes there are two other types of situation depicted in the Cynefin framework.

Complicated situations are not single events but involve a stream of interconnected situations linked to achieving a goal, like solving a difficult problem or bringing about a change in one's life. An example might be the way someone searches for, finds, applies for and eventually, after a long recruitment process, manages to secure a new job which will bring about a significant change in their material circumstances. Searching for, finding and buying a house might also fall into this category of life challenge. In such situations there are cause-and-effect relationships but sometimes you have to invest effort into working out the relationships by gathering information about the situation and analysing it to see the patterns and look for possible explanations of what is happening. Engaging in these sorts of challenges is the way we become more expert in achieving difficult things, including finding a job and being a parent with teenage children who are trying to find a more independent life.

Complex situations are the most difficult to understand. They are not single events but involve multiple streams of variably connected situations linked to achieving a significant change or, in the context of life disruption, a collection of situations that have coalesced and conspired to make a situation very messy and difficult indeed. In their article Jan Gajeel and Keith Chandler (4) describe life scenarios where a severe illness, leads to depression, leads to loss of job, leads to economic problems and perhaps loss of home, leads to relational problems in the family or the loss of job leads to economic problems, leads to health and social problems like clinical depression and family problems; a divorce leads to loss of family identity, leads to a depression, leads to loss of job. These are complex and very messy situations that may tip people into chaos and without help, few people are able to create a new and better life for themselves. In such situations the cause-and-effect relationships are so intermingled that things only make sense in hindsight and sometimes well after events have taken place. The results of action will be unique to the particular situation and cannot be directly repeated. In these situations relationships are not straightforward and things are unpredictable in detail. People involved may not know the cause of the change that they have been involved in or ascribe the source of change to something that is quite removed from the trigger for change. The way you make progress in understanding what is happening is to sense the patterns of change and respond accordingly. This is exactly where the construction of narratives can help especially if the process is aided by a trusted empathetic facilitator.

Learning for a Complex World

I like the idea of learning for a complex world (5) because it embraces learning and development needs for a lifetime of working with complexity rather than merely studying to pass exams.Traditional academic forms of higher education are founded on stability and certainty and seek to control learning and development within prescribed outcomes-based models of education. They work predominantly with abstract book knowledge and theoretical approaches to problem working. In terms of the Cynefin framework higher education tends to position learning in the simple and complicated domains. Consequently, these forms of education do little to prepare people for the really significant disruptions they will face in their life. Formal education can equip us with knowledge, understanding and ways of thinking that can assist us in particular contexts but it is limited in so far as it cannot offer us the experiences of actually dealing with complex situations as they emerge in the social world that is our life outside the classroom.

The real educational challenge for higher education is to help learners prepare themselves for the disruptions, some forced some chosen, that they will undoubtedly encounter in their lives. In helping learners develop the knowledge, capability, creativity, will and resilience to deal effectively with the full range of life situations we are developing their ability to comprehend and appraise situations of different levels of complexity, and act appropriately and effectively. We do this intuitively throughout our lives because that is what life is about. It stands to reason that a university that adopts a lifewide concept for learning and development (6) extends the opportunity to engage students with the situated and contextualised environments in which such complexity emerges. That is why institutions that seek to encourage learners to draw on their whole life experience for their own development are moving in the direction we need to go if we are to create an education system that will really help people prepare for their uncertain and unknowable futures.

Biographic Note: Norman is the founder and leader of Lifewide Education

Information sources

1http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/complexitytheory.html#ixzz3IvgHzpZ8

2 Snowden, D. (2000) Cynefin, A Sense of Time and Place: An Ecological Approach to Sense Making and Learning in Formal and Informal Communities. Conference proceedings of KMAC at the University of Aston, July 2000 and Snowden, D. (2000) Cynefin: A Sense of Time and Space, the Social Ecology of Knowledge Management. In C. Despres and D. Chauvel (eds) Knowledge Horizons: The Present and the Promise of Knowledge Management, Bost on: Butterworth Heinemann.

3 Snowden, D. J. and Boone, M. (2007) A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making. Harvard Business Review, November: 69–76.

4 Gajeel, J. and Chandler, K. (2014) Helping People to Fix their Broken-Life. Lifewide Magazine Issue 12 December 2014 available on line at:http://www.lifewidemagazine.co.uk/ to be published Dec 15th 2014

5 Jackson, N. J. (2011) Learning for a Complex World: A Lifewide Cocept of Learning, Education and Personal Development Authorhouse

6 Jackson, N.J. (2014) Lifewide Learning and Education in Universities & Colleges: Concepts and Conceptual Aids in N Jackson and J Willis (eds) Lifewide Learning and Education in Universities and Colleges Chapter 1 available at:http://www.learninglives.co.uk/e-book.html

This week I came across two blogs that provided me with new perspectives on social learning. The first was Julian Stodd's post on scaffolded social learning (1) in which he sets out to

balance the structure and defined outcomes of formal instructionally oriented learning with the collaborative, co-creative and 'sense making' functions of social contexts for learning in the manner depicted below.

Scaffolded social learning is built around two types of components: formal elements of learning shown as 'boxes' in which the learning is pre-planned and 'bubbles' of social activity in which learning is informal and emergent. At the boundary between each, there is a gateway.

The boxes embody experiences that are formally defined learning: maybe eLearning, classroom or open educational resources. The narrative in these spaces is defined by the designers and teachers who own the space. The bubbles are co-creative, community spaces, places where we can feed out questions, case studies, activities and exercises that are carried out over time and within communities or more participatory collectives(2). Here the narrative is created by the learner and co-created by the other active participants in the social space.

In scaffolded social learning the overall arrangement is defined by an overarching narrative developed and maintained by one or more social leaders who act as brokers and guides. They identify the need or interest and create the purpose, visualise and maintain the structure and facilitate the process through which learning emerges. They are the creators of the ecology for collaborative learning - another important concept in social learning (3).

I connected Julian's concept of scaffolded social learning to Jane Hart's idea of 'learning flows' (3). Jane argues that 'in the age of Facebook and Twitter, and Enterprise Social Networks (ESNs) like Yammer and Jive (where at the heart lies an activity stream that is used for a continuous stream of knowledge exchange) – there is a place for a new learning framework; one that lies between the instructionally designed course and the unstructured knowledge sharing of teams, groups and communities. We call this a Learning Flow.'

A Learning Flow is a continuous steady stream of social micro-learning activities – accessible from the web and mobile devices. Its properties are:

·         continuous – ongoing (ie no end date)
·         steady – eg daily or weekly
·         micro-learning – short – ie taking no longer than 15-20 minutes to undertake
·         involve activity – like reading, watching or listening to something and doing something
·         social – that invite and encourage active participation and contribution
·         streams  –  that are organised and structured in the Flow in weekly themes
·         accessible from web and mobile devices – to ensure that  learning can take place anywhere and at
          anytime

For  individuals, being present in a Learning Flow means having some help to navigate the turbulent waters of a fast flowing constant stream of (new) information and knowledge, retaining control over how and when they get involved, and how they fit it into their daily workload – autonomy is a key element of participation. 

Learning Flows are suitable for:

• Enterprise use – to provide ongoing updating of teams or groups
• Educational use – to provide an extra dimension to academic subjects – probably alongside a 

          formal curriculum

• Professional use  - for generic topics of interest in areas like Marketing, Leadership, L&D, etc, where it is vital to keep up with new knowledge and practices.
• Personal development use - topics of interest that are not directly related to work but are relevant to leading a more fulfilled and meaningful life and indirectly might enhance professional performance can be

Jane describes three types of Learning Flow to encourage short social learning experiences.

(1) NEWS FLOW provides a daily social-micro learning activity based on current news and resources from the Social Web. This is a useful way of encouraging a group of people to reflect on and discuss up-to-the-minute news. This type of Learning Flow is closest to the unstructured learning that takes place in activity streams, but it has the advantage that the participants are only subjected to one piece of news daily  - so that the “signal has been separated from the noise” by the Learning Flow Guide.

(2) THEMED FLOW provides daily social micro-learning activities organized within weekly themes around a specific topic. This is a useful way for bringing together related activities in some logical sequence during the week, so that the Learning Guide can help the participants to “join the dots”  between new ideas and resources.  

(3) CIRCULAR FLOW is a rotating flow of a set of weekly themes (although activities within them may change). This Learning Flow is closest to the traditional course since it deals with a well defined body of knowledge, but it differs from a course in that content is used to support the social learning experience – rather than social interaction being added to content (as happens in many courses) there is a Guide rather than an Instructor, and there is more autonomy and choice for the user

It seems right that these ideas of scaffolded social learning and learning flows should be connected and integrated. What do you think?

Sources of ideas
1) Julian Stodd Scaffolded Social Learning posted 5 November 2014 http://julianstodd.wordpress.com/2014/11/05/scaffolded-social-learning/
2) Douglas Thomas and John Seeley Brown A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the imagination for a world of constant change
3) Norman Jackson 'The Concept of Learning Ecologies' in N. J. Jackson and G.B. Cooper (eds) Lifewide Learning, Education and Personal Development e-book  Chapter A5 available on-line at http://www.lifewideebook.co.uk/conceptual.html
4) Jane Hart 'Beyond the Course: The Learning Flow – a new framework for the social learning era' posted 19 February 2014,  http://www.c4lpt.co.uk/blog/2014/02/19/the-learning-flow/
5) Jane Hart 'Three Types of Learning Flow' posted 25 February 2014
http://www.c4lpt.co.uk/blog/2014/02/25/types-of-learning-flow/