Personal Notes
The four dimensions, identified by Wenger, for design of learning
Participation and reification: participation and reification come as a pair. As a result, design cannot simply involve a choice between the two. One cannot assume that reification is unproblematically translated into practice, and participation is not necessarily coordinated enough to constitute a design.
Design for practice is always distributed between participation and reification – and its realization depends on how these two sides fit together.
The process of design involves decisions about how to distribute a design between participation and reification – what to reify, when, and with respect to what forms of participation; whom to involve, when, and with respect to what forms of reification.
The designed and the emergent: In a world that is not predictable, improvisation and innovation are more than desirable, they are essential.
Practice cannot be the result of design, but instead constitutes a response to design.
As a consequence, the challenge of design is not a matter of getting rid of the emergent, but rather of including it and making it an opportunity. It is to balance the benefits and costs of prescription and understand the trade-offs involved in specifying in advance.
When it comes to design for learning, more is not necessarily better. In this regard, a robust design always has an opportunistic side: it is always – in a sense to be defined carefully for each case – a minimalist design.
The local and the global: no practice is itself global. From this standpoint design will create relations, not between the global and the local, but among localities in their constitution of the global.
Designing for learning, therefore, cannot be based on a division of labor between learners and non-learners, between those who organize learning and those who realize it, or between those who create meaning and those who execute. It cannot be fully assumed by a separate management, educational, or training community. Communities of practice are already involved in the design of their own learning because ultimately they will decide what they need to learn, what it takes to be a full participant, and how newcomers should be introduced into the community (no matter what other training these newcomers receive elsewhere). Whenever a process, course, or system is being designed, it is thus essential to involve the affected communities of practice.
Every practice is hostage to its own past and its own locality. In the process of organizing its learning, a community must have access to other practices. Designing for learning always requires new connections among localities, connections that do justice to the inherent knowledgeability of engagement in practice while at the same time recognizing its inherent locality.
This complex relation between the local and the global can be expressed by the following paradox of design:
No community can fully design the learning of another. And at the same time: No community can fully design its own learning.
Design for learning must aim to combine different kinds of knowledgeability so they inform each other.
Identification and negotiability: design requires the power to influence the negotiation of meaning.
It must shape (or form) communities and economies of meaning.
Design is a stake in the ground, something on which to take a stand. In this regard, it is a proposal of identity:
1) it creates a focus for identification – and possibly for non-identification
2) it is a bid for ownership of meaning – and possibly for sharing this ownership.
Dilemma: Design creates fields of identification and negotiability that orient the practices and identities of those involved to various forms of participation and non-participation.
As a consequence, design can:
- invite allegiance or be satisfied with mere compliance;
- it can thrive on participation or impose itself through non-participation.
- It can seek enough identification to focus energy on its realization;
- it may prefer to be less dependent on widely shared in-spiration.
- It may seek a realization by restricting negotiability and re-fusing to share the ownership of its meaning;
- or, on the contrary, it may endeavour to share this ownership and endow all involved with enough negotiability to decide how to participate in the process meaningfully.