Implications for Networked Learning of the ‘Practice’ Side of Social Practice Theories: A Tacit-Knowledge Perspective

Abstract

The chapter presents a tacit-knowledge perspective on networked learning. The perspective draws on prior work by the author which integrates insights from the Scandinavian reception of Wittgenstein, phenomenology, and situated learning to form a view of knowledge as tacit, situated, context-dependent, embodied doing. This view, it is argued, is inherent in the ‘social practice’ theories which many researchers within networked learning take as their point of departure but has been neglected because the ‘practice’ side of these ‘social practice’ theories has been neglected. Building on this view of knowledge, it is argued that networked learning activities in general risk taking on the role of artificial, stand-alone activities detached from the ‘primary contexts’ of the participants, i.e. contexts which carry significance for them, in which they involve themselves as persons and which they consider important for who they are. Networked learning activities which have this role are not experienced as fully meaningful. In some cases, especially within distance learning programmes, the networked learning setting may itself become a ‘primary context’, but this cannot be counted on. The main claim of the article as concerns designs for learning is that networked learning will in general be most successful if it is designed as ‘mediator activities’ to facilitate the resituating of content between the ‘primary contexts’ of the learners, rather than to act as a ‘primary context’ itself.