How do I Create a SoL Community and Why?
Based on a letter written by Peter Senge:
I believe the best type of process for formally creating a SoL community is one where it emerges naturally from a learning community that is already forming. After all, all SoL is is a global network of learning communities. It is not "an organization" but an idea. Collaboration is vital. Innovation led by practitioners is essential, but without research to translate new practices into better theory and method, there is no larger scale learning. The real issues are very deep, embedded in core Industrial Age assumptions that underlay virtually all organizations (for example, that school is a machine for producing graduates, just as businesses are machines for producing profits). Only when there is a critical mass of new examples of thriving organizations that break these assumptions will people see what is possible.
I have a few ideas about the type of process that can help in this evolution, but I am very interested in all your thoughts as well. I think we should help people focus on their deepest aspirations (not on "creating a SoL" for the sake of creating a SoL). The focus should be on the doing. But there may also be some important questions to begin to get people thinking together: What are some of our most important aims for learning in our community? Are there particular aspirations we have for the society as a whole? Are there particular issues that we would like to focus on? How would we like to be able to continue to work together? to stay posted on each other's progress? In what ways would it help our efforts to be connected to colleagues in other countries? These are the sorts of questions that it would be best to engage people in talking about. For example, one SoL group is working on a scenario process involving leaders from around the country on the country's future in the digital world. Other country groups are focused on the future of education, or health, or national competitiveness.
The real question is where is the energy for deep and generative collaborative learning in your community? If this energy starts to flow, people will not want to leave their collaboration to chance. This will lead naturally to interest in how to organize to sustain their collective efforts and in what can be learned from other countries about how to do this.
When a SoL should be formally established is situational -- whenever it really can make a difference. The primary advantages to formalizing a SoL community are, in my mind:
- Developing a more explicit set of aims and working groups (like the current SoL Sustainability Consortium) with resources dedicated to support coordination;
- Linking research and practice, so that there is adequate study, reflection, and commitment to sharing what is being learned in specific projects and organizations (I have seen so many examples of wonderful "local breakthroughs" that simply do not build momentum toward larger scale change because there are no dedicated resources to study and share);
- Connecting to the Global SoL Network, so as to have more regular exchanges of ideas, people and inspiration.
I hope this is helpful.
-Peter Senge