Introduction: The Long View—Technology, Learning and Social Life

Abstract

This book is about networked learning, and it offers a different way of thinking about the relationship between digital and network technologies and learning. In the author’s lifetime, digital and networked technologies have developed from large-scale technologies marginal to everyday lives, deployed in sizeable organisations, to items the public carry in our pockets and use routinely in our everyday lives. Networked learning is a critical research-based approach which casts a cold hard eye on the evidence, informed by a set of flexible but robust values that I claim should inform education. Research in networked learning is interested in praxis, action in the world informed by theory and also an engagement in practice informed by a notion of what is good. This book sets out networked learning from a single perspective for the first time. Networked learning has grown strongly over the past 15 years into a robust and productive area of research, and it has informed some significant areas of successful design and development.