Situated learning is a theory that explains an individual's acquisition of professional skills and includes research on apprenticeship into how legitimate peripheral participation leads to membership in a community of practice. Situated learning "takes as its focus the relationship between learning and the social situation in which it occurs".
Situated cognition is a theory that posits that knowing is inseparable from doing by arguing that all knowledge is situated in activity bound to social,cultural and physical contexts.
An online community of practice (OCoP),also known as a virtual community of practice (VCoP),is a community of practice (CoP) that is developed on,and is maintained using the Internet. To qualify as an OCoP,the characteristics of a community of practice (CoP) as described by Lave and Wenger must be met. To this end,an OCoP must include active members who are practitioners,or "experts," in the specific domain of interest. Members must participate in a process of collective learning within their domain. Additionally,social structures must be created within the community to assist in knowledge creation and sharing. Knowledge must be shared and meaning negotiated within an appropriate context. Community members must learn through both instruction-based learning and group discourse. Finally,multiple dimensions must facilitate the long-term management of support as well as enable immediate synchronous interactions.
Learning sciences (LS) is an interdisciplinary field that works to further scientific,humanistic,and critical theoretical understanding of learning as well as to engage in the design and implementation of learning innovations,and the improvement of instructional methodologies. LS research traditionally focuses on cognitive-psychological,social-psychological,cultural-psychological and critical theoretical foundations of human learning,as well as practical design of learning environments. Major contributing fields include cognitive science,computer science,educational psychology,anthropology,and applied linguistics. Over the past decade,researchers have expanded their focus to include the design of curricula,informal learning environments,instructional methods,and policy innovations.
Cognitive apprenticeship is a theory that emphasizes the importance of the process in which a master of a skill teaches that skill to an apprentice.
Networked learning is a process of developing and maintaining connections with people and information,and communicating in such a way so as to support one another's learning. The central term in this definition is connections. It adopts a relational stance in which learning takes place both in relation to others and in relation to learning resources. In design and practice,networked learning is intended to facilitate evolving sets of connections between learners and their interpersonal communities,knowledge contexts,and digital technologies.
Network of practice is a concept originated by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid. This concept,related to the work on communities of practice by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger,refers to the overall set of various types of informal,emergent social networks that facilitate information exchange between individuals with practice-related goals. In other words,networks of practice range from communities of practice,where learning occurs,to electronic networks of practice.
Étienne Charles Wenger is an educational theorist and practitioner,best known for his formulation of the theory of situated cognition and his more recent work in the field of communities of practice.
Legitimate peripheral participation (LPP) describes how newcomers become experienced members and eventually old timers of a community of practice or collaborative project. LPP identifies learning as a contextual social phenomenon,achieved through participation in a community practice. According to LPP,newcomers become members of a community initially by participating in simple and low-risk tasks that are nonetheless productive and necessary and further the goals of the community. Through peripheral activities,novices become acquainted with the tasks,vocabulary,and organizing principles of the community's practitioners.
A learning community is a group of people who share common academic goals and attitudes and meet semi-regularly to collaborate on classwork. Such communities have become the template for a cohort-based,interdisciplinary approach to higher education. This may be based on an advanced kind of educational or 'pedagogical' design.
Group cognition is a social,largely linguistic phenomenon whereby a group of people produce a sequence of utterances that performs a cognitive act. That is,if a similar sequence was uttered or thought by an individual it would be considered an act of cognition or thinking. The group can be a small group,such as 3–5 people talking together or working together online. The group can also be a larger collective,such as a classroom of students or a global community contributing asynchronously to an extended discourse on a problem or topic or to a knowledge repository like Wikipedia. The theory of group cognition is a postcognitivism philosophy,which considers a larger unit of analysis than an individual mind as a producer of cognitive activities such as creative problem solving.
Enactivism is a position in cognitive science that argues that cognition arises through a dynamic interaction between an acting organism and its environment. It claims that the environment of an organism is brought about,or enacted,by the active exercise of that organism's sensorimotor processes. "The key point,then,is that the species brings forth and specifies its own domain of problems ...this domain does not exist "out there" in an environment that acts as a landing pad for organisms that somehow drop or parachute into the world. Instead,living beings and their environments stand in relation to each other through mutual specification or codetermination". "Organisms do not passively receive information from their environments,which they then translate into internal representations. Natural cognitive systems...participate in the generation of meaning ...engaging in transformational and not merely informational interactions:they enact a world." These authors suggest that the increasing emphasis upon enactive terminology presages a new era in thinking about cognitive science. How the actions involved in enactivism relate to age-old questions about free will remains a topic of active debate.
A community of practice (CoP) is a group of people who "share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly". The concept was first proposed by cognitive anthropologist Jean Lave and educational theorist Etienne Wenger in their 1991 book Situated Learning. Wenger then significantly expanded on the concept in his 1998 book Communities of Practice.
Practice theory is a body of social theory within anthropology and sociology that explains society and culture as the result of structure and individual agency. Practice theory emerged in the late 20th century and was first outlined in the work of the French sociologist,Pierre Bourdieu.
In the theory of community of practice,an interdisciplinary field between sociology of education and educational psychology,the notion of a duality is used to capture the idea of the tension between two opposing forces which become a driving force for change and creativity. Wenger uses the concept of dualities to examine the forces that create and sustain a community of practice. He describes a duality as "a single conceptual unit that is formed by two inseparable and mutually constitutive elements whose inherent tensions and complementarity give the concept richness and dynamism".
The Institute for Research on Learning (IRL) in Palo Alto,California was co-founded by John Seely Brown,then chief research scientist at the Palo Alto Research Center,and James Greeno,Professor of Education at Stanford University,with the support of David Kearns,CEO of Xerox Corporation in 1986 through a grant from the Xerox Foundation. It operated from 1986 to 2000 as an independent cross-disciplinary think tank with a mission to study learning in all its forms and sites.
Cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) is a theoretical framework which helps to understand and analyse the relationship between the human mind and activity. It traces its origins to the founders of the cultural-historical school of Russian psychology L. S. Vygotsky and Aleksei N. Leontiev. Vygotsky's important insight into the dynamics of consciousness was that it is essentially subjective and shaped by the history of each individual's social and cultural experience. Especially since the 1990s,CHAT has attracted a growing interest among academics worldwide. Elsewhere CHAT has been defined as "a cross-disciplinary framework for studying how humans purposefully transform natural and social reality,including themselves,as an ongoing culturally and historically situated,materially and socially mediated process". Core ideas are:1) humans act collectively,learn by doing,and communicate in and via their actions;2) humans make,employ,and adapt tools of all kinds to learn and communicate;and 3) community is central to the process of making and interpreting meaning –and thus to all forms of learning,communicating,and acting.
Alison Fuller is a British educational researcher and Professor of Vocational Education and Work at the Institute of Education of the University College London and,where she also serves as Pro-Director for Research and Development. She is a leading educational researcher in the UK,with her research centering on work transitions,apprenticeships,vocational education and training,and workplace learning.
Neuroarchaeology is a sub-discipline of archaeology that uses neuroscientific data to infer things about brain form and function in human cognitive evolution. The term was first suggested and thus coined by Colin Renfrew and Lambros Malafouris.
A landscape of practice (LoP) is a social sciences concept introduced by Etienne Wenger-Trayner and Beverly Wenger-Trayner in a 2014 book.
