Well I think they are complementary. Let me lay out a miniature topography for the moment. My own work with Paul Duguid has evolved over the decade. We see four quite distinct levels from which to analyze learning. First, there is the individual level where the kind of individual learning that we are all familiar with takes place. Then, there is the level that invisibly exists between the individual and the organization that involves how communities of practice learning. This level is where Paul and I have focused our attention in the last few years. The next level concerns the firm that we tend to analyze as being a structured community of communities of practice. This level is usually the focus of those studying organizational learning and knowledge management. And finally, there is the level of the region—the local region such as Silicon Valley. At this level we have found the notion of learning ecologies to be most useful. It’s interesting if you think about a firm, itself, as a knowledge-ecology with a collection of communities of practice all interacting. It’s even more interesting when you think about, “How does a place like Silicon Valley, as a knowledge-ecology, really learn?” It’s clearly an ecology of companies all learning with and from each other. Does that make sense?

In quite different ways I think e-learning applies to all four dimensions, all four levels, but it applies differently — none of which has any direct bearing on distance learning by the way, although I could redefine distance learning so that it does. Think about it for a moment.

At the individual level, there’s a sense of linking, lurking, learning and acting or leading. It’s wonderful to think we have a new form of cognitive apprenticeship — where no matter how niche your interest (for a kid of any age from 8 to 80) — there are virtual communities of interest forming on the web that we can link to, we can lurk on the periphery of, we can move from the periphery to the center and back again. This was the very essence of our notion of apprenticeship learning, which we picked up from Jean Lave. Then you are able to explicitly engage in reflection on that as another form of learning.

At some point, linking, lurking and learning all become seamlessly integrated. That applies powerfully to the individual in terms of enculturating or apprenticing yourself to a community of practice. A distributed community of practice even allows you to extend your reach so some of the time you’re physically present, some of the time you’re virtually present and so on. But also note that a community of practice can sometimes get very inwardly focused so linking it to more global e-resources is often enough to kind of shock or lurch you from a particularly parochial point of view. Linking and even lurking can bring diversity from outside into the center of the community of practice and that has to help you learn. Finally, at the regional level, we are beginning to examine how one might overlay the virtual (i.e., the web) on top of the physical region so as to get the best of both worlds — the richly textured social learning that comes from shared physical experiences but now augmented by a diverse set of virtual experiences.

Constructivism has always been implicit in many of the things we have written. What really blew my mind a little while ago was the recognition that in a conversation we are socially constructing something together where one fragment of the conversation scaffolds another person’s fragment of the conversation and so on. This generates a virtuous spiral that reflects a profound sense of constructivism — one that is socially generated and socially scaffolded. The result is incredibly powerful. Such constructivism pertains not just to any conversation, but to conversations grounded in experience or in conversations where one is trying to make sense of some given information.

I’ve felt this first hand and suspect you have too. In many ways, it changes everything.

Another one of your ongoing themes has been simplicity and helping people deconstruct the world around them to truly reach a stronger level of understanding. I wonder, though, if our society is so programmed for success that we’ve made online programs almost too simple sometimes. As you’ve often pointed out, we shouldn’t make things so apparent that we skip actually struggling with them, searching for them, and working with them in a meaningful way. Can things be too simple? Can we deconstruct too far?

Those who are successful in the e-age are learning how to deconstruct our landscape either by deconstructing new beliefs or new conceptual lenses. By constantly seeking out patterns and by not denying what we find jarring we can actually learning to deconstruct our current ontology—the one we use to make sense of the world. Once we can deconstruct something, we can reconstruct it in a way that Ockham’s Razor* can now be freshly applied in this new context. So, for example, the search for simplicity, after an act of deconstruction, becomes key to radical business-concept breakthroughs and where major value creation is going to be in the next ten years. We all agree that in the next five to ten years, the game will be changing and we could try to layer on new modifications to old beliefs or we could actually step back and deconstruct our beliefs so that we could then reconstruct them in a new way.

Having said all that, in this new world the search for simplicity is tantamount to coming to the core understanding of how something is. I find the old cliché, “You don’t really understand something until you can say it in a simple way,” to be incredibly true and incredibly useful. And I think today, in the era where the economy of attention reigns supreme, the ability to get to the very essence of what’s going on very rapidly also provides tremendous business leverage. The power of saying something simply makes all the difference in the world.

The key to me is learning how to craft evocative objects: they could be metaphors, sayings, or experiences which then help the other person rapidly construct their own understanding. Again, not provocative as much as evocative, so that it evokes the right kinds of ideas in the listener.

Great learners are, of course, great listeners and if you learn how to listen to and through an evocative object you learn how to leverage your emotional side as well as you cognitive side.

It’s clear that information takes on meaning relative to the context it’s rendered in or emerges from. In this era of multimedia, one has to be extremely careful about thinking that content can simply jump between different media — change context — and still preserve the same meaning. Here’s a trivial little example. People have become used to writing “flaming” email, but if you take that same flaming message and reformat it and then print it out as an office memo on formal office stationery, it can permanently damage the sender’s career.

Changing the context can completely change the meaning because we use context to help guide how we to interpret the text. For example, when I read The Wall Street Journal, I interpret the stories quite differently than when I scan the front page of the National Inquirer (as I check out my groceries). From course-grained examples, all the way down to when we interact with others in situ, we create a shared context that helps give meaning to that event. Context and content come together creating meaning.

I think it’s interesting to look at the entomology of the word context: context means bringing together the text — the texture of the event with the text of the content, i.e., merging the periphery with the center. A very practical example that often moves this intellectual notion to something you can act and reflect involves in situ learning. For instance, if I’m talking to an employee about some way that he or she happens to act, I can only describe it abstractly. If later I see the employee has just done that act, but is relatively unaware of it, I can stop the interaction and comment on what’s going on and get the person to reflect in situ on what has just transpired. The conversation is then anchored in the context that carries most of the meaning. This kind of concrete conversation is much more likely to lead to a real change in the person. Presenting context actually enables the learner (the employee) to move from having an intellectual event to one that has experiential meaning.

Let me deconstruct a couple of ideas from this. We actually separate very carefully, at least in some of our writings, the difference between knowing and knowledge. Knowing has to do with knowledge in action or being in action. The distinction is interesting because we know a hell of a lot more than we have knowledge. We know more than we think we know — because action takes place in a context which, itself, scaffolds or affords knowing.

I can’t remember how to do a certain thing on my motorcycle if I haven’t been driving it for the last few weeks, but as soon as I get on it, it instantly comes back as I start to participate with it in the world of action. That participation actually evokes this type of knowing and that’s one aspect of practice of riding — like in a professional practice. So, knowing, practice, and experience get much more interwoven in a contextualized way. That’s pretty critical.

One of the troubles we have now, as we go into the e-age, is that experiential learning is key to meaningful learning. In the virtual world, the notion of experience becomes stripped away from many of the social resources of everyday life. That’s one of the reasons why we think of our book as providing the first steps toward framing a “social life critique” of the digital age.

Even in the virtual world, you have information that has a social life in terms of how it gets kicked around in discussion groups, in chat rooms, in email, in list servers and so forth. So what we’re trying to develop in our book goes beyond the concerns of classical sociology. Our own analytic stance is exploring ways that “Things that you haven’t thought of as fostering a social life (such as a book or information) really do have a social life around them that provides all kinds of invisible resources for sense making whether one is in a physical or virtual world.” As a result, it’s becoming increasingly important to pay attention to what the invisible flow of social experiences around the information really is and then how it can be reinforced, etc, by the e-age and the web. This is especially important when moving to the virtual world has unwittingly removed your access to many of these resources—resources that you have become so second nature to you that you hardly are aware of them. And when they are removed you end up feeling frustrated but you don’t quite know why. Just think about what it is really like telecommuting from home rather than being in your office, surrounded by folks, one of whom invariably knows just what you need to know at that moment to get on with your task.

For a richer explanation of the social life critique as well as your overview of learning in theory and in practice, I encourage people to look at your book.

As we wrap up, most of all, I want to say thank you. Not only has it been a pleasure to talk with you in real-time, but you have really helped in my own personal education over the years. I’m not sure I would have taken certain roads without your introduction to topics and attention to matters beyond the common ways.

You know it’s interesting. I don’t think of learning as something that I study. It’s just that if you look at what’s so important, day in, and day out— it’s learning. If we stop learning, we die. Therefore, what really makes things fun for almost everyone is the ability to accelerate one’s learning. I’m very unpopular in certain circles for saying that we are all inveterate learners but when we go to school we get our passion for learning turned off. I keep hoping we can change schooling so as to amplify our innate passion for learning and that we can change the workscape into becoming a true learningscape. Thank you, too.