I asked John Seely Brown in this earlier post, if he is ok with blogging these excerpts and to my joy he answered quickly and positively. He also told me that one can find the original article via his website (I hope this is the right link). He then goes on

I am also attaching another one that deeply relates to your latter points.

The article is STOLEN KNOWLEDGE by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid. The email from John continues:

At some point it might be worth noting that the shift from linear logic to bricolage is actually a very subversive move away from the Cartesian Frame to much more of a situated, action frame. It also paves the way for considering the 'Remix Culture' as being a new form of social learning, social capital formation and becoming a more central member of a community of practice/interest.

I couldn't agree more and I think blogging plays an important role in this.
Here are now some passages from STOLEN KNOWLEDGE:

One of the powerful implications of this view is that the best way to support learning is from the demand side rather than the supply side. That is, rather than deciding ahead of time what a learner needs to know and making this explicitly available to the exclusion of everything else, designers and instructors need to make available as much as possible of the whole rich web of practice—explicit and implicit—allowing the learner to call upon aspects of practice, latent in the periphery, as they are needed. This is certainly not a trivial challenge—particularly for schools.

[...]

He too saw conceptual change arising out of collaboration. The students he studied worked, like Goldman's, with a physics microworld. And their insights too came not so much through studying the simulation as through talking about it. In conversation—supported by the technology which allowed them to test their hypotheses, illustrate their inchoate thoughts, and review and revise their developing understanding—the students converged on a shared, articulated understanding.

The means to build connections between learners and to the world of full-blooded practice are essential. In the workplace, learners can, when they need, steal their knowledge from the social periphery made up of other, more experienced workers and ongoing, socially shared practice. The classroom, unfortunately, tends to be too well secured against theft. The actual practices under study can often neither be stolen nor constructively discussed. Only replicas and not the real thing are on display. The more educational technology is constrained to "essentials" and "individuals" the more it resembles a nugatory "delivery system," the more it risks becoming theft proof.

Here are some freewheeling thoughts...

Today I still see a lot of learning which is nothing more than a nugatory "delivery system". New learning forms - from the demand side rather than the supply side - are a big challenge for schools because this really is an inversion of what they are doing.

***

Doesn't one part of the problem lie in how we measure working and learning? Today we are measuring both activities in hours - at least for most people - meaning everybody from middle management down. But is learning measurable that way?

***

Let's say we can make learning mobile (my dada) by technological means. We could call that "context management" instead of "content management".

Context management would have two basic meanings:

• my context: whenever and wherever I am, I can learn - the demand side
• I can quickly get into a conversation with the community of this particular problem/context

From this it becomes immediately clear, that the technological means which should help me in this cannot be tied to a school or institution but must be tied to myself and that this technological means must give me easy access to communities of practice.

So I conclude that I need to possess this technological means personally (in the same manner I possess my mobile phone number) and that the predominant role of learning institutions should be to give me easy access to these communities of practice - in case I don't know someone in this community already. I would therefore need them to pass/navigate me through to the right persons to talk to quickly and effectively. The learning's institutions role would be to keep always in contact with these communities of practice and to identify people who would make great introducers.

Just a side thought: Great introducers would probably be people who searched for the same recently.

Question: Will any type of learning be possible like this? As an example, can problem-solving in IT and learning a language be learnt the same way?

See also:
Learning: communities vs. courses
Informal Learning - the other 80%
Community
Internet Time Blog
The Edublog Weblog Awards


CODA

Workflow Learning Gets Real

Workflow learning is networked electronic performance support systems (EPSS), operating in an environment where the worker is plugged into the job and learning is delivered in small chunks as it is needed. Workflow aggregates at the work-process level, while EPSS largely compensated for poor application design.
[...]
In the not-very-distant future, workers will:
•Have a unique, personalized view of their work, based on their role in the enterprise.
•Have learning snippets embedded in work.
•Be alerted when needed.
•Directly connect to experts as necessary.
•Have easy access to peers.
•Have smart FAQs and simulations for guidance.
•Be location aware (GPS).
•Always be online wirelessly (ambient computing).
•Have support for understanding work in its strategic context.

Educational Blogging

From time to time, we read about the potential of online learning to bring learning into life, to engender workplace learning or lifelong learning. When Jay Cross and others say that 90 percent of our learning is informal, this is the sort of thing they mean: that the lessons we might expect to find in the classroom work their way, through alternative means, into our day-to-day activities.

Blogging can and should reverse this flow. The process of reading online, engaging a community, and reflecting it online is a process of bringing life into learning. As Richardson comments, “This [the blogging process] just seems to me to be closer to the way we learn outside of school, and I don’t see those things happening anywhere in traditional education.” And he asks: “Could blogging be the needle that sews together what is now a lot of learning in isolation with no real connection among the disciplines? I mean ultimately, aren’t we trying to teach our kids how to learn, and isn’t that [what] blogging is all about?”