Edited by Arwen Bailey, Monday, 19 Mar 2012, 05:19
now i am pulling it all together and trying to find other people's research that supports the kind of picture i have in my mind of how my research fits in with the world.
The research was the coming together of a practical need to explore a nascent fellowship alumni community and my own interest in social learning for change, or societal learning as Irene Guijt prefers to call it and i agree.
So i have been reading around the subject - particularly the book Social Learning: Towards a sustainable world - but have not had time to write my thoughts up and link them explicitly to AWARD. And if i don't type my thoughts only develop 80%!
Note that it is of course talking about sustainability in an environmental sense and I am talking about sustainability in a project outcome sense. But there is a lot about the concept of sustaining and the role of learning in that can be shared.
Introduction
Wals and van der Leij explore the meaning of sustainability and of social learning. They say (p18) that it takes place at the level of individuals, groups and networks. It would be interesting to use that to expand the neat matrix from De Laat and Simon (2002):
Especially if you add in a dose of this next definition: social learning is "the collective action and reflection that occurs among different individuals and groups as they work to improve the management of human and environmental interrelations" (Keen et al. 2005). Obviously in my situation it would be improving something else but what intrigues me is the collective action part. Glasser (chapter 2) does not see action as necessarily in there. And this has been a source of discussion on the STiP forum.
social learning notes
now i am pulling it all together and trying to find other people's research that supports the kind of picture i have in my mind of how my research fits in with the world.
The research was the coming together of a practical need to explore a nascent fellowship alumni community and my own interest in social learning for change, or societal learning as Irene Guijt prefers to call it and i agree.
So i have been reading around the subject - particularly the book Social Learning: Towards a sustainable world - but have not had time to write my thoughts up and link them explicitly to AWARD. And if i don't type my thoughts only develop 80%!
Note that it is of course talking about sustainability in an environmental sense and I am talking about sustainability in a project outcome sense. But there is a lot about the concept of sustaining and the role of learning in that can be shared.
Introduction
Wals and van der Leij explore the meaning of sustainability and of social learning. They say (p18) that it takes place at the level of individuals, groups and networks. It would be interesting to use that to expand the neat matrix from De Laat and Simon (2002):
Especially if you add in a dose of this next definition: social learning is "the collective action and reflection that occurs among different individuals and groups as they work to improve the management of human and environmental interrelations" (Keen et al. 2005). Obviously in my situation it would be improving something else but what intrigues me is the collective action part. Glasser (chapter 2) does not see action as necessarily in there. And this has been a source of discussion on the STiP forum.