The Wealth of Learning Networks
I have been working my way through Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks over the past month. It is one of those books that will sit on my desk and be called upon regularly as a reference, foundational text, and even a kind of bible of the age of the networked information economy.
In the book Benkler makes a case for the huge shift that is underway in economics, politics, media, development, and learning as a result of means of production enabled by radically decentralized communication networks. Here are some of the key ideas and how I think they apply to learning networks. Benkler says,
The networked information economy improves the practical capacities of individuals along three dimensions: (1) it improves their capacity to do more for and by themselves; (2) it enhances their capacity to do more in loose commonality with others, without being constrained to organization their relationships through a price system or in traditional hierarchical models of social and economic organization; and (3) it improves the capacity of individuals to do more in formal organizations that operate outside the market sphere. This enhanced autonomy is at the core of all of the other improvements (Benkler) describe(s). (page 8.)
Enhanced autonomy seems to me to be at the heart of how learning networks can deliver enormous improvements over what has been done in the past. In the first phase of technology-enabled learning on the Internet, we designed programs for learners to interact with information in databases in centralized web applications. Content was pre-programmed by subject-matter experts aided by instructional designers and then dropped into rigidly formatted. Learners accessed this data mostly by reading web pages and by interacting with form-based quizzes and polls. Discussion was held inside closed email systems. I used to describe this system as the “classroom as database.”
A learning network is a radically different approach. A learning network can be thought of as an online platform with a constantly changing structure built by distributed, autonomous, and largely self-interested peers. A learning network uses emergent social software platforms (blogs, RSS aggregation, and podcasting) to tie together a set of services that support collaboration and communication. Learning networks make information in networked databases easy to access and to combine and display in new ways. In a network, learning is built collectively by the learners. Learners use simple tools that they control (blogs and podcasts) to create content. Links and tags knit this content together. And search and RSS make the content visible and navigable and help learners stay on top of it all.
Learning networks do enhance the capacity of learners to do more in loose commonality with others. Learners who are connected through networks are typically better informed, smarter, faster, and more connected than their peers. Networked learners are more innovative and productive because they have larger and deeper social networks. Networked learners have more people outside their organization in their networks. They are more aware of who to go to and where to go to get critical information. They have more new people (to the organization) inside their networks. And they invest significantly more time in their network.
Emerging models of information and cultural production, radically decentralized and based on emergent patterns of cooperation and sharing, but also of simple coordinate coexistence, are beginning to take on an ever-larger role in how we produce meaning–information, knowledge, and culture–in the networked information economy….Individual human capacities, rather than the capacity to aggregate financial capital, become the economic core of our information and cultural production….liberation from the constraints of physical capital leaves creative human beings much freer to engage in a wide range of information and cultural production practices than those they could afford to participate in when, in addition to creativity, experience, cultural awareness and time, one needed a few million dollars to engage in information production. (page 54)
Benkler goes on to quote: Eben Moglen:
'If you wrap the Internet around every person on the planet and spin the planet, software flows in the network. It's an emergent property of connected human minds that they create things for one another's pleasure and to conquer their uneasy sense of being too alone.' (page 55)
At its core, learning is about human creativity and expression and the quest for connection. In this passage, Benkler explains how decentralization both liberates human creative capacity and connects us to one another. This is for me the most exciting aspect of learning in a network. I have always felt both constrained and alone inside a database-backed learning application. New social software programs like blogs, podcasting and aggregators, in connection with the creative programs that I use to make things on my Mac, have thoroughly energized my creative spirits, along with connecting me with like-minded people. This combination has produced a powerful new stream of ideas, innovations, and relationships that would not have been possible outside of a learning network. I believe this transformation is possible for anyone in any setting as long as they are given the right tools and training.
Later in the book, Benkler takes on the issue of virtual communities:
We are beginning to see the emergence of greater scope for limited-purpose, loose relationships. These may not fit the ideal model of “virtual communities.” They certainly do not fit a deep conception of “community” as a person's primary source of emotional context and support. They are nonetheless effective and meaningful to their participants. It appears that, as the digitally networked environment begins to displace mass media and telephones, its salient communications characteristics provide new dimensions to thicken existing social relations, while also providing new capabilities for looser and more fluid, but still meaningful social networks. (page 357)
I believe that this new type of connection is profoundly important for learning. What Benkler is saying about relationships here can be applied to learning in an enterprise. Learning networks can deepen one's ties to peers and co-workers by creating continuous and powerful new channels for communication and exchange. For the past 18 months I have been using blogs and web services for project management inside Otter. Each person in the company has freedom to publish what they are learning to these channels. As a result there is a fresh stream of ideas and contributions that have deepened the dialog among us and improved opportunities for innovation. At the same time learning networks can create connections among people in a large, fluid social network. I use an RSS aggregator as my main interface for information flows from this network. In this aggregator I have gathered channels of information from a group of people who are writing about issues I see as important to innovation and learning. (To subscribe to my list, you can import the following OPML list into BlogBridge: http://www.blogbridge.com/rl/3247/Otter+Learning+2.0.opmlwww.blogbridge.com/RL/yournumber.opml) I have very little direct contact with these individuals but I am in touch with their brains, often on a daily basis.
One of the big bugaboos of e-learning has been utilization and participation. Programs had notoriously high drop-out rates and poor user satisfaction ratings. The learning network model can address these weaknesses. Here's Benkler:
It is the feasibility of producing information, knowledge and culture through social rather than market or proprietary relations–through cooperative peer production and coordinate individual action–that creates opportunities for greater autonomous action, a more critical culture, a more discursively engaged and better informed republic, and perhaps a more equitable global community.
That's the big deal. What is really at issue here is human motivation. And learning because it is about creative expression and satisfaction and reputation lies outside of the frame of common assumptions about what motivates people to work. Benkler looks at theory of economic motivation of the past two decades and finds it wanting:
Across many different settings, researchers have found substantial evidence that, under some circumstances, adding money for an activity previously undertaken without price compensation reduces, rather than increases the level of that activity. The work has covered contexts as diverse as the willingness of employees to work more or to share their experience and knowledge with team members,….Where extrinsic rewards dominate, this will increase the activity rewarded as usually predicted in economics. However, the effect on intrinsic motivation, at least sometimes, operates in the opposite direction….Persuading experienced employees to communicate their tacit knowledge to teams they work with is a good example of the type of behavior that is very hard to specify for efficient pricing, and therefore occurs more effectively through social motivations for teamwork than through payments….For a wide range of reasons–institutional, cultural, and possibly technological–some resources are more readily capable of being mobilized by social relations than by money. (page 95)
For all of us, there comes a time on any given day, week, month, every year and in different degrees in our lifetimes, when we chose to act in some way that is oriented to fulfilling our social and psychological needs, not our market-exchangeable needs. It is that part of our lives and our motivational structure that social production taps, and on which it thrives…What needs to be understood now, however, is under what conditions these many and diverse social actions can turn into an important modality of economic production. (page 98)
We contribute to learning networks for intrinsic reasons of personal satisfaction and reputation building. No one is paying me to write this article. I am doing it because it satisfies an itch I've had to make sense of Benkler's ideas in the context of my work. I hope that the outliers in my learning network will read what I have written and critique it, enhance it and make it more meaningful. None of this is new. What is new is that I now have the means to produce, publish, and distribute what I have written well beyond what was possible even three years ago. The first big learning program I developed in 1983–Weapons in Space with Carl Sagan and Henry Kendall– was done with satellite TV, IBM word processors, and fax machines. No email. No macs. No internet. Now I can make my own movies and publish them to the web: http://kathleengilroy.com/blog/_archives/2006/3/27/1842922.html. By combining new creative tools within networks, we have unleashed entirely new means of collaboration and communication which can transform people and the places they work. Learning networks can offer strategic advantages and new channels for innovation:
By the time of this writing, in 2005, these new opportunities and adaptations have begun to be seized upon as strategic advantages by some of the most successful companies working around the Internet and information technology and cultural production more generally. Eric von Hippel's work has shown how the model for user innovation has been integrated into the business model of innovative firms even in sectors far removed from either the network or from information production–like designing kite surfing equipment or mountain bikes. As businesses begin to do this, the platforms and tools for collaboration improve, the opportunities and salience of social production increases, and the political economy begins to shift. (page 127)
Benkler has much, much more to say on these topics. If you read only one business book this year, The Wealth of Networks should be it.
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