Passive into active: fostering deep changes in learning, working and life

A pioneer voice in the field of Knowledge Management, John Seely Brown wrote an enlightening paper published six years ago, which still shed light on many actual approaches on the use of the Internet as a platform for learning processes and deep transformations in work, education and life.

“Growing up digital” (2000) was written when JSB was the chief scientist of Xerox and director of Palo Alto Research Center (California, U.S.). In this work, JSB announced underpinning ideas of KM and networks-based communication and learning processes, some of them are about:

- Learning to be something, beyond learning about something. More palpable today, as the Net is allowing people a significant interactive participation in building knowledge together and putting it on practice. For example, "thousands of kids learn what it means to be a computer programmer by joining an open-source community such as Linux" -JSB mentions. Another example we can find: thousands of people learn to be agents for social change by building together a virtual community (wiki pages, forums, etc.) for demanding fair housing policies and conditions (e.g. www.viviendadigna.es; www.housepricecrash.co.uk), or even for creating world wide movements such as the World Social Forum (the first one at Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 2001, had strong roots on an Internet based movement).

- The concept of digital bricoleur learner, beyond the abstract logic learner. Based on an former concept studied by Claude Lévi-Strauss almost a century ago, "it has to do with abilities to find something -an object, tool, document, a piece of code, etc.- and to use it to build something you deem important" (Idem). JSB says judgement is inherently critical to becoming an effective digital bricoleur. We do good judgements from a social-based learning process. The Internet tools (Web 2.0) have the potential to foster users' own pathways of learning and social elaboration.

- Two dimensions of knowledge: explicit and tacit (additional fundamental idea on this paper, which is still prevalent in KM). The first dimension is about understanding abstract concepts (at an individual level) and sharing best practices by storytelling (at a group's level). The second one is about intuitive skills and know how (at individual level), and learning styles of work and practices (at group level). JSB talked about the "knowing communities of practice" as a social "fabric" emerging from sharing tasks and knowledge, but mainly, from the shared concern about how to learn.

- Learning ecology, as a consequence of diversity and adaptation in a system such as the Internet, mainly featured by openness and equity: many authors interweaving different "knowledge niches".

What prevails in these ideas is the power of the Internet for allowing users to have a more participative social role: they are shifting -or combining- passive into active, readers into writers, learners into knowledge creators, consumers into producers as well.

What has all this stuff to do with management + ethics? Maybe nothing, maybe everything.

[Tags]: Growing up digital, John Seely Brown web page, New Learning Environments for the 21st Century