Social design of network learning society

EduCities is a network city for educational purposes. At the moment, there are more than 1 million EduCitizens registered in EduCities. 2,000 schools (more than half of schools in Taiwan) have built their EduTowns (smaller version of EduCities) and 18,000 classes are running their EduVillages. But these figures only represent an infrastructure, a bare skeleton, of a future network learning society. Based on the authors' work on EduCities, they argue that a network learning society will not be a 'tribal' learning society or a learning ecology, as portrayed by John Seely Brown in his keynote at ICCE98. Instead, it will be a 'structured' learning society. This structure mimics the current real world society we are used to today. The essence of the power of network is connectivity - connecting people, physical objects, information repositories, almost everything in the world. The question is how we use this network capability to link the old social structure, and from that, cultivate and diffuse learning elements into this structure, and expand the structure to form a larger but connected learning society. These strategies and actions taken are what we call the social design of a network learning society. If network learning is a learning ecology, then it must evolve around an existing structure.