Abstract
Change has been a central focus for this book and in the conclusions I try to offer some of the analytic resources capable of providing a degree of provisional stability amid the constant process of change. The purpose of this focus on provisional stability is to enable systematic and informed interventions in the process of change and to provide some solid ground from which design and development can take place. This concluding chapter begins by focusing on three key concepts, the idea of affordance, the idea of agency and the idea of assemblages.
The conclusions return to the idea of affordance to set out what I believe to be a useful development of the idea for use in the context of networked learning. This is supplemented by a discussion of agency and structure which treats this complex and persistent problem as an epistemological question. The concern in networked learning is for the way that agency in networks involves emergent processes that cannot be predicted from an analysis of the parts of networks because they are dynamic, path-dependent outcomes of complex processes, and only partially understood by any one of the governing components. The term assemblage has been used throughout this book to discuss such complex systems. In this chapter, I offer a clarification of the concepts that lie behind this use of the term assemblage and a rationale for its continued use in networked learning research. The chapter ends with a consideration of the future for networked learning and a prospective research agenda.
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Jones, C. (2015). Networked Learning: A New Paradigm?. In: Networked Learning. Research in Networked Learning. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01934-5_9
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