Ecologies for Learning and Practice provides the first systematic account of the ideas of learning ecologies and ecologies of practice and locates the two concepts within the context of our contemporary world. It focuses on how individuals and society are being presented with all manner of learning challenges arising from fluidities and disruptions, which extend across all domains of life. This book examines emerging ways of understanding and living purposively in these new fluidities and provides fresh perspectives on the way we learn and achieve in such dynamic contexts. Providing an insight into the research of a range of internationally renowned contributors, this book explores diverse topics from the higher education and adult learning worlds. These include: The challenges faced by education systems today The concept of ecologies for learning and practice The role and responsibility of higher education institutions in advancing ecological approaches to learning The different eco-social systems of the world—local and global, economic, cultural, practical, technological, and ethical How adult learners might create and manage their own ecologies for learning and practice in order to sustain themselves and flourish With its proposals for individual and institutional learning in the 21st century and concerns for our sustainability in a fragile world, Ecologies for Learning and Practice is an essential guide for all who seek to encourage and facilitate learning in a world that is fundamentally ecological in nature.

Learning ecologies are a new way of interpreting our presence and actions in the world. An ecology of practice for the purpose of learning and performing provides us with opportunities for action, information, knowledge and other resources. It includes the contexts and places we inhabit and the spaces we create to reason and imagine. It includes our processes and activities for performing and creating new value. It includes our relationships and the tools and technologies we use and it enables us to connect and integrate our past and current experiences. While the first edition of the book was aimed primarily at educators working in higher education, this shortened version has in mind the people who support learning and development in organisations that are not primarily educational.

The three concepts central to this volume—practice, learning and change—have received very different treatments in the educational literature, an oversight directly confronted here. While learning and change have been extensively theorised, their various contexts articulated and analysed, practice is notably underrepresented. Where much of the literature on learning and change takes the notion of ‘practice’ as an unexamined given, its co-location as a term with various classifiers, as in ‘legal practice’ and ‘teaching practice’, render it curiously devoid of semantic force. In this book, ‘practice’ is the super-ordinate organising idea. Drawing on what has been termed the ‘practice turn in contemporary theory’, the work develops a conceptual framework for researching learning in, and on, practice. It challenges received notions of practice, questioning the assumptions, elisions, conflations and silences on the subject. In so doing, it offers fresh insights into learning and change, and how they relate to practice. In tandem with this conceptual work, the book details site-ontological studies of practice and learning in diverse professional and workplace contexts, examining the work of occupations as various as doctors, chefs and orchestral musicians. It demonstrates the value of theorising practice, learning and change, as well as exploring the connections between them amid our evolving social and institutional structures.

e-Learning Ecologies explores transformations in the patterns of pedagogy that accompany e-learning—the use of computing devices that mediate or supplement the relationships between learners and teachers—to present and assess learnable content, to provide spaces where students do their work, and to mediate peer-to-peer interactions. Written by the members of the "new learning" research group, this textbook suggests that e-learning ecologies may play a key part in shifting the systems of modern education, even as technology itself is pedagogically neutral. The chapters in this book aim to create an analytical framework with which to differentiate those aspects of educational technology that reproduce old pedagogical relations from those that are genuinely innovative and generative of new kinds of learning. Featuring case studies from elementary schools, colleges, and universities on the practicalities of new learning environments, e-Learning Ecologies elucidates the role of new technologies of knowledge representation and communication in bringing about change to educational institutions.

In Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies, Asao B. Inoue theorizes classroom writing assessment as a complex system that is “more than” its interconnected elements. To explain how and why antiracist work in the writing classroom is vital to literacy learning, Inoue incorporates ideas about the white racial habitus that informs dominant discourses in the academy and other contexts.

What do we mean by the word ‘context’ in education and how does our context influence the way that we learn? What role can technology play in enhancing learning and what is the future of technology within learning? Re-Designing Learning Contexts seeks to re-dress the lack of attention that has traditionally been paid to a learner’s wider context and proposes a model to help educators and technologists develop more productive learning contexts. It defines context as the interactions between the learner and a set of inter-related resource elements that are not tied to a physical or virtual location. Context is something that belongs to an individual and that is created through their interactions in the world. Based on original, empirical research, the book considers the intersection between learning, context and technology, and explores: the meaning of the concept of context and it’s relationship to learning the ways in which different types of technology can scaffold learning in context the Learner-Centric ‘Ecology of Resources’ model of context as a framework for designing technology-rich learning environments the importance of matching available resources to each learner’s particular needs the ways in which the learner’s environment and the technologies available might change over the coming years the potential impact of recent technological developments within computer science and artificial intelligence. This interdisciplinary study draws on a range of disciplines, including geography, anthropology, psychology, education and computing, to investigate the dynamics and potential of teacher-learner interaction within a learning continuum, and across a variety of locations. It will be of interest to those teaching, researching and thinking about the use of technology in learning and pedagogy, as well as those involved in developing technology for education and those who use it in their own teaching. For practical examples of the way the Ecology of Resources framework has been used visit: http://eorframework.pbworks.com.

This book address fundamental questions of human development, revisiting old questions and applying original empirical findings.