Abstract
This book is about networked learning, and it offers a different way of thinking about the relationship between digital and network technologies and learning. In the author’s lifetime, digital and networked technologies have developed from large-scale technologies marginal to everyday lives, deployed in sizeable organisations, to items the public carry in our pockets and use routinely in our everyday lives. Networked learning is a critical research-based approach which casts a cold hard eye on the evidence, informed by a set of flexible but robust values that I claim should inform education. Research in networked learning is interested in praxis, action in the world informed by theory and also an engagement in practice informed by a notion of what is good. This book sets out networked learning from a single perspective for the first time. Networked learning has grown strongly over the past 15 years into a robust and productive area of research, and it has informed some significant areas of successful design and development.
This chapter provides a broad outline of networked learning and introduces the key ideas that are developed in the main chapters of this book; in particular affordance, agency and assemblage. The main topics are:
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The relationships between technology, society and change and the relationships between technology, academic work and learning
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The concept affordance and its potential for use in networked learning
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Design for learning, the notion of indirect design
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The relationships between humans, artefacts and machines in networked learning
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Infrastructure and its role in networked learning
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The politics and policy options related to networked learning.
The chapter concludes by setting out how the book is structured in two parts and it outlines the contents of the following eight chapters.
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Notes
- 1.
Networked and digital is used throughout this volume to characterise current technologies in a general way. Networks exist independently of digital technologies and computing can take analogue and quantum forms. Digital and networked describes the contemporary form of ‘new’ technologies and tries to avoid over generalisation.
- 2.
Those younger than the author might need to know that a dumb terminal was a workstation that had no self-contained processing power, it preceded the personal computer. The terminal was local but the processing power was remote at the mainframe computer.
- 3.
Grey literature abounds in this area, often written by academics these are reports and publications that are not peer reviewed. They are important because they can be produced and spread quickly to keep up with a fast moving field, but they are not scientific literature because of the lack of peer review and their potential disconnect from a body of acknowledged literature. In current conditions blogs are a very good example of grey literature and its potential strengths and weaknesses.
- 4.
Networked Learning in Higher Education: http://csalt.lancs.ac.uk/jisc/definition.htm
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Jones, C. (2015). Introduction: The Long View—Technology, Learning and Social Life. In: Networked Learning. Research in Networked Learning. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01934-5_1
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