What binds people to collective learning?

This week in Change MOOC, we see in Littlejohn's position paper that one of the things that one of the things that binds people together in collective learning is the creation of a social object. The example given is a group of scientists coming together to produce some sort of report. Littlejohn asks us, the MOOC participants, to share our view of what binds people in collective learning.

While the creation of a social object is indeed something to think about - take for example my (and possibly your) many, many, many group experiences where you needed to come together to produce something - in my case it was homework and school presentations during my Masters programs and various projects at work.

I think that this work-based view of what binds us is limiting and I think it's incorrect. I don't think that as a species our imperative, our raison d'être, is to produce stuff. I think that this is potentially a sign of our consumption-based society; and you can't consume something if there isn't something to consume (well, you could consume time to make that "something" but then you might be getting into a circular argument). In any case - I don't see a shared object as something that binds us. The shared object may be something in the workplace but it's not something in the overall field of learning.

In the US we tend to view education as a way of getting a job, so we've "jobified" inquiry and curiosity and massacred it with standardized testing. So one could see education as an social object based outcome which necessitated collective learning, but this is the wrong way to frame education.

So what does bind us to collective learning?  I think that it is our social nature that predisposes us to collective learning. We are naturally curious as a species (even if it does get beaten out of us by poor educational practices which stifle this inquiry). We are also (generally) social. If we find other people who are interested in the same things we are we light up, we become more talkative and we share more information. This is shared enterprise (satisfying our curiosities) is the basis for our collective learning in such communities of practice.  Physical (or virtual/digital) objects may come out of this shared scratching of the curiosity itch, but it's not a necessary reason why we come together to learn.

Comments

Apostolos K. ("AK") said…
Does a social object necessarily have to be material? Talking, meeting, or writing with others around something can also be seen as participating in the creation of a social object. Littlejohn's paper draws upon later models of activity theory. To my knowledge, these models are not based on concepts of consumption-based society. #change11
October 7, 2011 at 2:55 PM
Apostolos K. ("AK") said…
I guess it's how one chooses to define "object" :-)
I am working off a definition of object as something tangible - something that can be touched (as in a physical object) or read/heard/seen (as in a virtual object). Talking, meeting and writing seem to me to be interactions. Talking and meeting being interactions with other beings, while writing being an interaction with an object (and potentially other human beings if something like Google Docs is used).
October 11, 2011 at 10:43 AM
Apostolos K. ("AK") said…
Thanks for this post. Although the example Allison used may imply that we think of the social object as something tangible, we do have a broader view. We have been exploring the idea of a learning goal as being the social object which brings people together (much like the a photograph is the social object which acts as the social glue in a site like flickr). While goals in general may be product focused (teams coming together to prodcue a report), learning goals are not necessarily product focused.  Our thinking was influenced by sites such as 43things.com which encourage users to articulate goals such as 'I want to learn how to play guitar' and then encourage people to share tips and reflections on how they have go about achieving these goals.
October 13, 2011 at 5:58 AM
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