Review of: Hodgson et al. (2014) The Design, Experience and Practice of Networked
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Review of: Hodgson et al. (2014) The Design, Experience and Practice of Networked Peter Goodyear
Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015
1 Author(s) and Contents of the Book This book draws together a selection of outstanding papers from the 8th biennial Networked Learning Conference, held in 2012 in Maastricht, The Netherlands. The editors— Vivien Hodgson, Maarten de Laat, David McConnell, and Thomas Ryberg—are well known, within Europe and more widely, as leading figures in the field of research and development that has emerged in the last 15 years or so under the name ‘networked learning’. Indeed, Hodgson and McConnell are among the originators of this field, which focuses on researching situations in which people learn in collaboration with others, with much or all of their interaction being mediated through network technologies (Steeples and Jones 2002; Goodyear 2014). Conference proceedings can be of uneven quality and sometimes offer an unsatisfactory sampling of contemporary work. This is not the case here. The editors have been able to select from among strong papers, which authors have revised in light of feedback at the conference itself and from the editors. Overall, this makes for a good representation of the field, with contributions from a number of its best-known researchers and educational innovators. The coherence of the book emerges from several sources, in addition to the editors’ judgement and commentary. This is quite a tight-knit area of work, with substantial overlaps of interest, not just in substantive issues but also in terms of theoretical perspectives and pedagogy. The book contains 12 main chapters preceded by an editors’ introduction. They are grouped into three sections: ‘‘Networked Learning Spaces and Context: Design and Practice’’, ‘‘Networked Learning in Practice: The Expected and Unexpected’’ and ‘‘The Practice of Informal Networked Learning’’. It should come as no surprise to hear that many of the chapters take a practice-based view of learning: there is not much here that reflects cognitive psychological perspectives. Moreover, the book includes a number of
P. Goodyear (&) CoCo, Faculty of Education and Social Work, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia e-mail: [email protected]
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contributions that are influenced by socio-material theorizing, with more than a smattering of Actor Network Theory. It would be unfair to some of the authors to try to capture the flavour of the book in a single sentence, but the essential elements that come together here are: learning as engaging with others in substantial projects of shared concern, drawing together and held together by complex assemblages of people, digital and material tools and other artefacts. Teachers’ work then becomes a matter of designing for such learning, guiding and facilitating some of the activities that unfold, and promoting reflection on the shared experiences and their outcomes. Dewey, Illich, Freire and Scho¨n meet Latour, Schatzki, Hutchins and Orlikowski. This
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