Transforming with a Soft Touch: Comparing Four Learning Networks

Journal of Teacher Education, 2000

As technology transforms the institutions of society, changing the way that people work, communicate, and learn, schools must accommodate and adapt to these new conditions. Unfortunately, schools and school systems organized bureaucratically have difficulty changing. Educational reform networks are particularly well suited to making use of new technology and institutional arrangements. By their very nature, they are flexible, borderless, and innovative; they are able to create collaborative environments, focus their efforts, and develop agendas that grow and change with their participants. Studying reform networks, collaboratives, partnerships external to schools, and communities inside schools has taught a great deal about the organizational conditions and practices that support and sustain teacher learning over time. Teacher educators who collaborate with, learn from, and make use of the knowledge created by these networks are helping to recreate the meaning of scholarship itself,...

"Be careful or you will swallow us whole!" my mother said. My mouth was agape; I was staring at a tattered cardboard box with "AJ's stuff" scrawled on top in black magic maker. It was placed entirely too near the trash bin for my liking. In that well-worn box was what remained from my childhood. That's how I discovered that in my parent's house childhood has a shelf life-about 30 years. So in saying my goodbyes to the past I took one last look back.

Purpose -This paper aims to propose a framework which connects perspectives on knowledge and learning to various approaches of social networks studies. The purpose is twofold: providing input for the discourse in organizational studies about the way different views on knowledge and networks drive design choices and activities of researchers, policy makers, and practitioners; providing relevant questions which can support researchers, (human resource) managers, policy makers and practitioners to reflect on their views and their endeavors to study, understand and facilitate knowledge and learning processes in organizational networks. Design/methodology/approach -In exploring the conceptual connections the authors draw on distinctions made between views on knowledge and networked learning in the fields of organizational development, human resource development and social networks. The proposed framework is built from connections identified in the literature review. Findings -The paper proposes a framework which identifies four different ways of studying and understanding the outcomes of learning and knowledge processes in organizational networks. Practical implications -The framework supports researchers, policy makers, (human resource) managers and practitioners in their endeavor to study, understand and facilitate the relationship between knowledge, learning, networks and their outcomes. The four perspectives can be used in designing and evaluating interventions and policy which are intended to foster knowledge processes and learning in organizations. Originality/value -Studies on knowledge processes and learning in organisational networks are increasingly based on a variety of knowledge theories, which are not always based on a clear academic synthesis. Often these views of knowledge remain implicit and do not fit approaches adopted for understanding or evaluating knowledge processes and learning in organisations. This paper proposes a framework which integrates different concepts of knowledge and approaches to network studies.

suggest that a "Community of practice" may be a single organisation, or it may be a tight knit inter-organisational community, whereas a "Network of practice" is a loose knit network of physically dispersed agents. This paper proposes a model for conceptualising the knowledge development process in "Networks of practice". We will suggest that "Networks of practice" require projects with a modular architecture and that the development of knowledge in these dispersed networks involves not only the process of combination (Nonaka, Reinmoeller, & Senoo; 1998) but also the iterative processes of recombination facilitated by an integrating network centre. The theoretical considerations presented in this paper were occasioned by two case studies examined by two of the authors (Atkinson & Bowden) in part fulfillment of their MBA degrees at the University of Durham. The paper uses ideas from complexity theory to analyse the issue of knowledge creation and recombination in distributed networks.

Systems Research and Behavioral Science, 2008

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a form of analysis that is important in the development of inter-agency working and partnerships. Social network analysis is being seen as increasingly important in understanding inter-organizational life. The paper will introduce the idea of network learning, which is in principle a way of making social networks explicit and using an understanding of them as a part of a learning process for partnership development. The paper will also argue for a practice of network learning which integrates social network analysis with Soft Operational Research. This combination, it will be shown, provides further insights into understanding collaboration (a systems-level phenomena) in inter-agency networks or partnerships. These ideas will be described and reviewed in detail via a case study.

Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the ISSS - 2016 Boulder, CO, USA, 2016

In this paper, we consider how learning networks build capacity for system transformation. We define learning networks as inter-organizational voluntary collaboratives that nurture professional expertise, and describe their potential to catalyze systemic change by disrupting old habits, fostering new relationships, and providing freedom to experiment. We underscore the complexity of designing, facilitating, and sustaining learning networks, noting four distinct ways learning networks can foster systemic resilience, 1) social-psychological 2) engineering 3) social-ecological, and 4) emancipatory. We then describe our research methods and introduce four learning network case study analyses, in order of their age and relative progress towards transformation: • National Alliance for Broader Impacts (NABI) • 100 Resilient Cities Network (100RC) • Fire Adapted Community Learning Network (FAC Net) • START (Global Change SysTem for Analysis, Research & Training) After describing each network’s origins, approach to promoting transformative change, and structure, we apply three exploratory questions across our cases: • How do network facilitators “netweave” within and across participating sites? • Is there evidence of organizational learning taking place in each network over time? • What transformative capacity do we see developing in each network? We conclude by describing the contribution of this analysis to a framework we are developing to explore how learning networks foster resilience within, between, and across scales. Note: this paper will be published in the conference proceedings from the 60th annual meeting of the International Society for the Systems Sciences, held in Boulder, Colorado (USA), 23-30 July 2016.

Some first steps in the search for ‘hidden ’ Communities of Practice within electronic networks Copyright Intellect 2011 Do Not Distribute This article examines the problem of how to discover hidden Communities of Practice (CoPs) inside electronic networks and whether it is possible to nurture them into fully fledged Virtual Communities of Practice (VCoPs). It discusses the characteristics of hidden communities and the relationship between virtual communities, Distributed Communities of Practice (DCoPs) and VCoPs. It then examines some of the methods that might be used to search for hidden CoPs and the ways by which these might be transformed into full VCoPs. Finally, the article presents some findings from two early studies conducted in the Higher Education Academy Psychology Network in the United Kingdom.

Informatica (slovenia), 2001

As part of the Virtual University of Finland, the Connet framework offers undergraduate courses in Cognitive Science. The studies are mainly organized as web-based courses or collaborative student projects. In the basic studies component, a student completes four one credit methodology courses and chooses a related assignment worth three credits for one of them. One of the methodology courses is entitled Networks in Learning Organization. It will be delivered entirely on the web, and it also will serve as a pilot course to help design other methodology courses. This paper will first briefly discuss the theoretical foundations of learning organizations and organizational learning. Then, we will review the role of networks as the technological foundation of a learning organization and continue by discussing the use of educational technology to support organizational learning and learn about it. Finally, we will describe the structure and the methods of the course and present topics that form the starting point for the discourse within the course. 16 Supporting Change in Teaching and Learning

McGill Journal of Education, 2000

In an effort to intentionally create the level of deep learning necessary for practitioners to make meaningful changes in their classrooms, professional networks are increasingly being promoted as mechanisms for knowledge creation that can makes a difference for students. This paper explores the way networks function by testing a theory of action within the Network of Performance Based Schools (NPBS) in British Columbia, Canada. It presents networks as collaborative systems that support particular ways of working and find expression within two distinct organizational units -the network itself and its participant schools.

2006