Dynamic Learning Communities

Learning communities

In truth, all communities learn. One of the lessons of postmodernism and situated cognition is that learning cannot be separated from action. We are learning every day, in everything we do. We add the qualifying term to our defin ition to suggest a community sharing a consensual goal to support each other in learning. Everybody expects to learn and is prepared to engage in activities at least partly for that reason. This would distinguish learning communities from those solely concerned with entertainment, political action, or the performance of an immediate task. We would note, however, that groups can have complex agendas, and that a group may have multiple goals that are commonly shared throughout the membership, such as sup porting both work performance and learning among its members.

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Heretofore, instructional designers have thought they were in the business of designing instructional systems to meet prespecified learning objectives. But first the constructivist movement--and now communication technologies themselves--seem to be thre atening this conception as the sole way to support learning. People are learning without help from designed instruction! In many settings, in fact, "natural" learning is more prevalent than "designed" learning (Resnick, 1987). We believe that the situation requires a reexaminination of our core roles. Are we in the business of designing instruction or are we in the business of supporting valuable learning, wherever it may happen? The answer to this question will result in either a narrow or broad interpretation of our role and its relationship to non-instructional forms of learning.

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Our own belief is that dynamic learning communities are proper objects of study. We should seek to understand how such communities function, how they grow, how they can be nurtured, and how they can be replicated across diverse settings. But nurturing is different than designing. We must respect the integrity of the community. In time, we may come to think of ourselves more as learning technologists than as instructional technologists, and learning support specialists more than instructional designers.

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