Today I return to "The Social Life of Information" by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid.

Chapter 5 is called "Learning - in Theory and in Practice". For me, this is the heart of the book. I have read a number of articles by these two authors over the years, and this is where they get to describe their fundamental ideas about learning - ideas I know I am going to agree with.

They begin by making a distinction between knowledge and information.

1. Knowledge usually entails a knower
2. Given this personal attachment, knowledge is harder to detach than information
3. Knowledge is something we digest rather than merely hold.

For me, these points are exemplified by this web site. The web site represents information. What is important (to me) is how my mind is affected by my reading, and by the notetaking of this web site. Nonetheless, the critical issue is what is in my mind. The web site is simply a shadow of the reality.

Here is a nice quote: "The importance of people as creators and carriers of knowledge is forcing organizations to realize that knowledge lies less in its databases than in its people (p. 121).".

There has been a fair amount of effort and research into "best practices", where these are identified for a particular setting and then incorporated into a new setting. This idea applies well to education, where there are numerous attempts to watch a "good teacher" and then to expect the novitiate to be able to teach (almost) as well. In spite of the logic of the enterprise, it has only met with marginal success. The difficulty is in the transfer. This is because the practice is not a surface phenomena but a deep structure problem of what is in the respective minds of the participants.

They refer to Jean Lave & Etienne Wenger (I have their book, Situated Learning):

• "Learning a practice, they argue, involves becoming a member of a "community of practice" and thereby understanding its work and its talk from the inside. Learning, from this point of view, is not simply a matter of acquiring information; it requires developing the disposition, demeanor, and outlook of the practitioners. (p. 126)".

They then go on to mention three of my favorite authors:

• Jerome Bruner: "learning about" and "learning to be"
• Gilbert Ryle: "knowing that" and "knowing how"
• Michael Polanyi: "explicit knowledg" and "tacit knowledge".

All three are playing with the same theme.

Such views of learning take us beyond information. "Each generation has its own fight against images of learners as wax to be molded, pitchers to be filled, and slates to be written on" (p. 135).