DYNAMIC LEARNING NETWORKS: UNDERLYING PRINCIPLES AND CASE STUDIES

Thanks to exchanges enabled by new technologies, a learner no longer responds as a behavioral machine to a system of standardized values, but evolves as a standalone living system by crossing the feedbacks resulting from his various interactions with his environment.
Dynamic learning networks represent a specific way of designing these interactions along a learning path that enables learners to transform their values and social skills through cross fertilization (2nd loop learning) instead of simply improving them (1st loop learning).

Objectives:
Through two case studies, we will explore the following hypotheses:
a. There is a potential learning dynamics consisting of a continuous renegotiation of the relationships between learners and their environment. This cycle impacts individual as well as collective knowledge. Learning then requires iterations for transforming habits, contexts and values of the relationships through learning objects.
b. The dynamics of learning results of the network of cross-stakeholders participations of the learner in various collective spaces, allowing him some freedom of experimentation as allowing the environment to evolve thanks to a variety of complex interactions.
c. Learning objects need to be dispatched along multidimensional ways of learning, so that the learner is confronted to complexity and paradoxes, not to antinomy. These dimensions are: education and training, project exploration, everyday behaviours and productions, coaching.
d. New technologies are dramatically helping dynamic learning networks to occur. Emergence of blended learning promotes the acceptance toward different spaces, combining various stakeholders and roles. Social communities promote the co-construction of knowledge and thus its appropriation. Finally, external inputs are accessible in multiple ways, coaching helps to find consistency.

Methodology:
Two case studies will be presented:
- The Self-Leadership program at the University of Geneva
- The development program for never-employed young adults (supported by Rolex)

The methodology is based on action research:
1- Context and goals of the action research in both cases
2- Design of a concept putting the hypothesis in practice
3- Co-construction of the action with the environment
4- Embedded evaluation through interviews
5- Semantic comparison between the two case studies

Conclusion:
1-Dynamic learning networks foster:
- The reconstruction of a habit by the individual as well as the redesign of his vision of the context as well as of himself,
- And the reformulation by the environment of its strategies toward the learner, combined with a reflection on the thinking patterns that support them.
2-They are built of specific intersecting spaces focused on problem-solving tasks, while gradually bringing learners to overcome dogmas through the exploration of their own answers.
3-The learning spaces are supported by specific different roles and challenges, so that the learner is finally free as well as responsible to draw his learning path throughout the complexity of his environment. New technologies help to differentiate these roles as well as the learning spaces. The people playing the mentioned roles are representing the environment and therefore led to learn themselves.