Important Learning Must Occur in Groups
Spike Hall,
Sept 19, 2003
The link to this item is messed up, but you can get to it from the blog's main page, to which I link here. The principle, expressed in the title, is largely derived from observations about language. For example: "Shared meaning is the difference between personal knowing and acquired understanding or social knowledge." And for example: "Lasting knowledge is knowing more than definitions, concepts and relationships, it is feeling what is right in a particular situation, requires personal engagement, passion and a community to emerge. Learning and knowledge require an ecology to thrive and evolve." Now I have talked a lot recently about the social nature of language, the idea of meaning as derived from use, and the community nature of knowledge. But just because you have bathwater doesn't mean you have a baby. That fact that there are some irreducibly social elements to learning does not mean that the whole thing is social. You can learn some things, in some ways, on your own, without a social network. Specifically, you need a social network in order to teach others or to learn from others. But that is not the whole of learning. Universal generalizations as expressed in the title do more to confuse the social nature of learning than to clarify it.
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