Organiser’s Report on the MeCCSA-PGN Conference 2-3 July 2015 (original) (raw)
THE COMMUNAL 'WE'? A Conversation Piece on the Richness of Being a Network
2000
This document was written at the request of the Steering Committee of the Network for New Approaches to Lifelong Learning (NALL). It is intended to articulate the richness of academics and their community/union partners working in an SSHRCfunded network, especially the cross-over between NALL's core groups and projects. It is written to focus on the Network's core debates of the past four years. There are five. The Communal 'We'? • 2 "constructing" informal learning conceptually as a function of academic practice. Some built on the existing literature while others "read against" it. Only some of this tension is methodological. A question the Network now faces is whether it is possible to integrate or make "common sense" out of results generated from different sites, standpoints and methods. If not, what are the alternatives for presenting what we have learned? 4. Clarifying, augmenting and/or challenging the dominant definition of informal learning. Network members have been successful in exploring the nature and extent of informal learning with new actors and organizational environments. Potentially rich, their work puts serious pressure on existing definitions in a field already troubled by boundary problems. One of the biggest challenges comes from First Nations/Aboriginal communities in which the existing conceptualization is actually reversed. Other projects make a case for "seamless: informal learning, one that recognizes the tacit qualities of the process and the various ways it is embedded in daily life (including formal education). Network researchers continue to struggle with the relationship between learning and experience, perhaps especially between learning and collective (social/political) experience and interaction. 5. Formulating strategies that would appropriately address the tendency of dominant groups and discourses to regulate and appropriate informal knowledge. NALL is characterized by ongoing debates over formal/institutional "recognition." The primary tension is between members who view informal learning as a powerful strategy for validation of untapped or de-legitimized knowledge, and members who view it as a way of regulating and appropriating this knowledge. PLAR is the most specific programmatic example of recognition. Some researchers call for its equivalent in their particular setting. Others are concerned with practices of governance, for example, with the ways that individuals (informally) learn to take responsibility for re/making and regulating their own conduct. Invoked here are complex relations of power/knowledge, as well as the contradictions of "empowerment." Thus, we arrive at the theme for the October 2000 NALL conference: Contested Terrain: The boundaries and practical impact of informal learning. Through this document, a background reading for that event, I hope that the general areas for debate and possibilities for action (research, program, policy) have become more clear. The Communal 'We'? • 3 period. At the same time, reviewers were concerned about certain "weaknesses," most of which reflected their desire for better "integration" of the Network. Although it took a different view, the NALL Steering Committee agreed that it would be wise if someone fleshed out the depth of the work that has been done across NALL's six groups over the past few years. Members wanted to understand the dimensions of cross-over between groups and especially to highlight learning within/across different populations. Related to this was the need to identify and articulate the richness of working as a network. What do we know because we are/have been more than isolated projects? What more can we say as a result? Members of the Steering Committee felt it important to capture findings that were not anticipated and surprises that arose out of participation at both project and more collective levels.
A Peer-Reviewed Journal About, 2020
How do we think about networks under post- digital conditions? What does this imply for research? This journal issue takes as its outset, the call of the transmediale festival to “[leave] be- hind a decade marked by a backlash against the Internet and the network society” in order to re-evaluate the limits of ‘networks’. It refers to Robert Filliou’s “The Eternal Network,” an idealistic notion from the 1960s, pointing to the interconnectedness of everyday-life actions across an emerging global world at that time. This is a good reminder that network cultures exist beyond the technical reality of network culture as we now know it despite our primary identification of networks with social media and planetary computation. By drawing on the legacies of critical and autonomous network cultures, the aim was to make the limits of Internet-based networks visible but also highlight alternatives. Is there a conceivable counter-power to networks? Which alternative technological models and cul...
The Network Society is a Disruptive Society
This short essay explores how the network society disrupts not only business models, but also our subjectivity and our ways-of-being-in-the-world. The paper then highlight how leaders need new support structures and specific coaching approaches to manage themselves in this new context. It briefly highlights one such approach the Analytic-Network five-frame coaching system (Western 2012, Western 2013, www.analyticnetwork.com) that shows how leaders need to work at deep personal levels, how they relate to others and are related to, how they take up leadership in a unique way, and how they influence change in networks. Finally they need to hold onto a strategic mindset and draw on the previous four frames to shape their personal and workplace strategy.
Networks benefit by bringing together practitioners from a variety of approaches
Lausanne Global Conversation, 2010
Networks, partnerships and alliances are strengthened when they welcome practitioners from a variety of approaches widely associated with the general thrust or aim of the network. The interchange between those using different approaches can be quite stimulating and helps keep the network from getting bogged down in any one approach. In other words, variety inspires creativity and ingenuity and the spread of the same throughout the network.
2009
Technologists promise a future in which pervasive, distributed networks enable radical change to social and political geographies. Design of these abstract, intangible futures is difficult and carries a special risk of excluding people who are not equipped to appreciate the ramifications of these technological changes. The Democratising Technology (DemTech) project has been exploring how techniques from performance and live art can be used to help people engage with the potential of ubiquitous digital networks; in particular, how these techniques can be used to enfranchise people with little technical knowledge, but who nonetheless will have to live with the design consequences of technical decisions. This paper describes the iterative development of a performance workshop for use by designers and community workers. These workshops employ a series of simple exercises to emulate possible processes of technological appropriation: turning abstract digital networks into imaginable, meaningful webs. They were specifically designed to target a technologically excluded group, older people, but can also be used with other groups. We describe the process of workshop development and discuss what succeeded with our test groups and what failed. In offering our recommendations for working in this space, we consider the methodological issues of collaborating across science/art/design borders and how this impacted on evaluation. And we describe the final result: a recipe for a performance workshop, also illustrated on a DVD and associated website, which can be used to explore the dynamics of technical and social change in the context of people's own lives and concerns.
The Arts and Artists of Networking
Ars Electronica Festival, 1995
The article reconstructs the history of artistic media combinations: from networking with media (telephone, radio, television) in net-works to networks (resp. net projects) and their consequences for established definitions of art. In: Gerbel, Karl/Weibel, Peter (ed.): Mythos Information. Welcome to the Wired World. @rs electronica 1995 (Brucknerhaus Linz, June 1995). Vienna 1995, p.54-67. URL: https://archive.aec.at/media/assets/60e0dbe6faaf520132424dfb27ed196d.pdf (Supplement: bibliography of the catalogue AEF 95. URL: http://dreher.netzliteratur.net/4\_MedienkunstArs\_Literature.html ).
Never Say I! Networking as a disciplinary system: Exit strategies
Technoetic Arts, 2012
"The main assumption of this presentation is that networking can be conceived in terms of an effect of apparatuses. It is characterized by hierarchical observations, normalizing judgements, examinations. From this point of view, networking is not an inter-disciplinary system or – even – a-disciplinary, but it is in fact a discipline. Then, given that one of the main aspects of networking is that we are completely merged with it, it is quite difficult to consider it as a discipline with a critical eye; and we can perceive its consequences mainly within the educational system. The aim of this presentation is, firstly, to describe networking as a contemporary practice, coexstensive with a specific disciplinary system. In this case, I would like to demonstrate how networking (specifically its most massive and less ingenuous branch, social networking) is one of the most powerful apparatus for contemporary subjectivation processes. Following Deleuze, it will be pointed out how networking is based on a peculiar regime of signs that reduces drastically the processes of subjectivation it determines, to the scarce possibilities offered by the apparatus. Secondly, some exit strategies from the (social) networking apparatus are suggested, built on three keywords: anomie, anonymity, untimeliness. They are based on the assumption that – against a continual push towards the presence or the tele-presence – the absence can be a concrete contemporary kind of process of subjectivation. "