Networking the future #EDEN15

Audrey Watters and Maarten de Laat at EDEN

Maarten de Laat's keynote speech at EDEN 2015 contained all of the ingredients for thoughtful and reflective consideration of how we now teach and how students now learn in an increasingly networked society. A professor at the Dutch Open University, Maarten de Laat researches into networked learning and the use of digital media in education. He is particularly interested in knowledge creation and applies many of his findings in teacher development.

de Laat started his presentation with a humorous video about 'new learning' in which a Star Wars style conversations between a Jedi master and his young padwan explores the nature of knowledge and learning. The video showed how we overcomplicate education through complex language and not really delivering what we promise. Is education aligned to provide the new forms of learning our next generation of students expect to learn? Teachers need active networks of learning to make the leap to new forms of learning. They have to be open, responsive to change and in dialogue with fellow experts to keep pace with the new trends and technologies as they emerge.



He aligns his research in networks with open practices, arguing that collaboration is paramount as a means of understanding wider and more holistic knowledge. Solving problems together is increasingly a theme of networked learning said de Laat, but how can formal organisations deal with this new demand? How can they set up and maintain new and more informal spaces where this kind of learning can be nurtured and supported. Can traditional organisations stand back and allow students to be more autonomous and to network in informal ways to supplement their learning in authentic ways?

Traditionally, teams and groups think they own their knowledge, but increasingly we see that the knowledge generated is owned by the wider community, because the digital technology that provides the physical networks makes this possible, he said. He moved on to the idea of Open Practices, where participants log in with their own social media profile and this enables the network to identify the individual and then find others within the same geographical location who have similar interests, skill sets and proclivities. It's a kind of digital matchmaker that is being developed. de Laat showed The Crowd where a similar scenario can be achieved, where teachers can connect together through a common platform, and match their activities through key questions. Networks not only provide connections to peers, they are also energising and provide opportunities to work spontaneously, a big consideration in business learning and corporate training for example. Networks also make knowledge flow, provide easier access to a variety of relevant sources and develop friendships and communities relationships.

There is also a downside though, he warned, because networks can be volatile, are often invisible and difficult to discover, ad have an informal nature which does not always align to company or institutional policies. These can be referred to as 'wicked problems', and rely on individual accountability as well as centralised management and control - quite a dichotomy.  Networked learning though has more positive aspects, and de Laat and his team are developing a number of research programmes that will help networks to become more visible, and attempt to measure how they can add value to learning in the digital age. Networked learning should not be seen as a new project said de Laat, but an extension of what already exists, and it should be conducted transparently, and with better visualisation capability. Also, networks that are separate can be brought together, with specific indexing techniques, user analytics and topic clouds, methods that are elaborated on in de Laat's work such as this publication on networked learning.

The future is connected, the future is networked. Networked learning in open practices is all about openness, transparency, mobility and value.

Photo by Steve Wheeler


Networking the future #EDEN15 by Steve Wheeler was written in Barcelona, Spain and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.