University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Education. / This thesis reports on the development and testing of a framework for making sense of the collective professional learning of primary Science and Technology teachers in an elearning mediated context. Web-based networks and collaboratories are playing an increasingly prominent role in private and public sector knowledge building and innovation. In Education, online communities now frequently support teachers’ professional learning. However, despite the pervasiveness of this network zeitgeist, such studies rarely describe or analyse (let alone theorise) teachers’ collective learning, focusing paradoxically instead on the learning of individuals, albeit in group contexts. Without a clear understanding of collectivity, the design of initiatives for systemic professional renewal is significantly impeded. This investigation addresses this urgent need to describe, analyse and theorise teachers’ collective learning. Serendipitously, an Australian Research Council Linkage Project, DESCANT (SciTech), provided a context that confronted those ethical, theoretical and pragmatic challenges necessary to make collective learning both possible and likely. Cohorts of primary Science and Technology teachers, supported by consultants, Education Department officers and University researchers, worked together, in networked ways, to conceive, prototype and trial an e-learning environment for the professional development of cohorts of their peer teachers. Democratic participation was assured, a generative theory of learning adopted and pragmatic steps taken so as to establish a principled, yet experimental, trial for studying collective learning. Group learning at every stage of this process was documented, and examined for ethical, theoretical and pragmatic evidence of collectivity. That is, judgements were made as to whether the learning that occurred at each stage of the project could be understood as a complex, dynamic learning ecology. The study’s findings reveal that collective professional learning did occur, to a greater or lesser extent, at every stage of the DESCANT process. Furthermore, the collective learning of these teachers could be well described and explained by considering how those ethical, theoretical and pragmatic challenges - the pillars of the learning ecology framework developed here - were met. The account makes clear just how complex, dynamic, highly nuanced and ecological in nature collective learning is. It was then a small step to theorise systemic professional renewal in terms of collective conceptual movements on an adaptive (learning) landscape and, in the light of what occurred, to extrapolate, speculatively, from the generative theoretical pillar with which the study began. Of course, this study has acknowledged limitations. Nevertheless, its successful small-scale piloting of a learning ecology framework for making sense of collective, networked professional learning demonstrates that the framework has a range of epistemic benefits - not least, internal and external coherence. As well, it provokes thinking about key characteristics of networked approaches to collective professional learning. Above all, this study suggests the worth of continuing to test and refine this learning ecology framework in those diverse settings where systemic renewal is critical.

Work in organisations is a shared and joint endeavour often accomplished by groups, teams or other collectives. Yet groups at work do not always learn at work, limiting an organisation’s capability to thrive in knowledge economies. Research investigating collective learning at work continues to place the analytic focus on entities or abstractions representing the collective. For example, culture, power, group membership, group structure, group communications, motivations and skills are often examined to explain why groups learn or not in organisations. In contrast, this thesis investigates what it means to learn together when people act, talk and judge at work through their relational and responsive interactions. This relational orientation conceptualises learning as emerging from patterns of interactions that are responsive to local contexts and shaped by practical sensemaking that occurs in the everyday practice of work life. Specifically in the case study interpretive tradition, I investigate the relational practices of dyads and small groups in three disparate organisational contexts and professions. The organisational, group and individual characteristics differ widely for musicians in an orchestra, apprentice chefs in a commercial kitchen and rehabilitation staff in a corrections centre. Yet these three groups shared relational similarities in learning how to weave ways of acting, talking and judging together to make their work ‘work’. Such weaving together is enabled by shifting conceptually from notions of context as descriptive setting or situatedness to the notion of groups contextualising together. This thesis contributes to collective learning research by highlighting the significance of patterns of interactions and the dynamics of practice. The findings enhance existing collective learning theory by including spatio-temporal concepts from theories of organisational change and complexity. The findings have implications for guiding the learning of commencing practitioners into professions as well as for generating modes of transdisciplinary learning across professions. Re-viewing collective learning in relational ways recognises that learning is an emergent phenomenon, each time practised anew from interactions between people and the possibilities that lie within. The Latin prefix con means with. It seems appropriate that concerts performed by musicians, condiments added to dishes by chefs and the consequences of behaviours by corrections staff across diverse contexts of work can provide practical insights for better understanding how groups learn collectively at work.

Work in organisations is a shared and joint endeavour often accomplished by groups, teams or other collectives. Yet groups at work do not always learn at work, limiting an organisation’s capability to thrive in knowledge economies. Research investigating collective learning at work continues to place the analytic focus on entities or abstractions representing the collective. For example, culture, power, group membership, group structure, group communications, motivations and skills are often examined to explain why groups learn or not in organisations. In contrast, this thesis investigates what it means to learn together when people act, talk and judge at work through their relational and responsive interactions. This relational orientation conceptualises learning as emerging from patterns of interactions that are responsive to local contexts and shaped by practical sensemaking that occurs in the everyday practice of work life. Specifically in the case study interpretive tradition, I investigate the relational practices of dyads and small groups in three disparate organisational contexts and professions. The organisational, group and individual characteristics differ widely for musicians in an orchestra, apprentice chefs in a commercial kitchen and rehabilitation staff in a corrections centre. Yet these three groups shared relational similarities in learning how to weave ways of acting, talking and judging together to make their work ‘work’. Such weaving together is enabled by shifting conceptually from notions of context as descriptive setting or situatedness to the notion of groups contextualising together. This thesis contributes to collective learning research by highlighting the significance of patterns of interactions and the dynamics of practice. The findings enhance existing collective learning theory by including spatio-temporal concepts from theories of organisational change and complexity. The findings have implications for guiding the learning of commencing practitioners into professions as well as for generating modes of transdisciplinary learning across professions. Re-viewing collective learning in relational ways recognises that learning is an emergent phenomenon, each time practised anew from interactions between people and the possibilities that lie within. The Latin prefix con means with. It seems appropriate that concerts performed by musicians, condiments added to dishes by chefs and the consequences of behaviours by corrections staff across diverse contexts of work can provide practical insights for better understanding how groups learn collectively at work.

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Education. / This thesis reports on the development and testing of a framework for making sense of the collective professional learning of primary Science and Technology teachers in an elearning mediated context. Web-based networks and collaboratories are playing an increasingly prominent role in private and public sector knowledge building and innovation. In Education, online communities now frequently support teachers’ professional learning. However, despite the pervasiveness of this network zeitgeist, such studies rarely describe or analyse (let alone theorise) teachers’ collective learning, focusing paradoxically instead on the learning of individuals, albeit in group contexts. Without a clear understanding of collectivity, the design of initiatives for systemic professional renewal is significantly impeded. This investigation addresses this urgent need to describe, analyse and theorise teachers’ collective learning. Serendipitously, an Australian Research Council Linkage Project, DESCANT (SciTech), provided a context that confronted those ethical, theoretical and pragmatic challenges necessary to make collective learning both possible and likely. Cohorts of primary Science and Technology teachers, supported by consultants, Education Department officers and University researchers, worked together, in networked ways, to conceive, prototype and trial an e-learning environment for the professional development of cohorts of their peer teachers. Democratic participation was assured, a generative theory of learning adopted and pragmatic steps taken so as to establish a principled, yet experimental, trial for studying collective learning. Group learning at every stage of this process was documented, and examined for ethical, theoretical and pragmatic evidence of collectivity. That is, judgements were made as to whether the learning that occurred at each stage of the project could be understood as a complex, dynamic learning ecology. The study’s findings reveal that collective professional learning did occur, to a greater or lesser extent, at every stage of the DESCANT process. Furthermore, the collective learning of these teachers could be well described and explained by considering how those ethical, theoretical and pragmatic challenges - the pillars of the learning ecology framework developed here - were met. The account makes clear just how complex, dynamic, highly nuanced and ecological in nature collective learning is. It was then a small step to theorise systemic professional renewal in terms of collective conceptual movements on an adaptive (learning) landscape and, in the light of what occurred, to extrapolate, speculatively, from the generative theoretical pillar with which the study began. Of course, this study has acknowledged limitations. Nevertheless, its successful small-scale piloting of a learning ecology framework for making sense of collective, networked professional learning demonstrates that the framework has a range of epistemic benefits - not least, internal and external coherence. As well, it provokes thinking about key characteristics of networked approaches to collective professional learning. Above all, this study suggests the worth of continuing to test and refine this learning ecology framework in those diverse settings where systemic renewal is critical.

Women’s underrepresentation in the technology industry is a relevant and timely issue. The increasing use of technology and its expansion into our daily lives demand greater technical literacy and skills. Despite its growth, the industry remains male-dominated; fewer than 9% of executive officers and directors in Canadian technology companies are women (Macdougall et al., 2017). Researchers have linked women’s underrepresentation in technology leadership to the ‘chilly climate’ in technology spaces and a ‘leaky pipeline’ of women leaving the fields throughout their career (Prescott & Bogg, 2014b; Vitores & Gil-Juárez, 2016; Wynn & Correll, 2018). This research explores how a community can support learning and leadership development for women in technology. This case study examined the women’s experiences in YYJ Tech Ladies and their accounts of underrepresentation in technology, learning, and leadership. Their stories and reflections indicated that a community for women could create a safe space, sense of belonging, knowledge-sharing, and consciousness-raising. This study highlights the importance of community in facilitating women’s learning and confidence, essential factors for addressing experiences in male-dominated environments and supporting women’s career and leadership development / Graduate

L’apprentissage collectif dans un système multi-agents considère comment une communauté constituée d’agents autonomes partageant un même objectif d’apprentissage peut bénéficier, au niveau individuel et collectif, d’échanges structurés d’informations. Les agents, reliés par un réseau de communication, ont tous la faculté de percevoir des observations, appelées exemples d’apprentissage. Cette thèse s’appuie sur un protocole pré-existant, SMILE (Sound-Multi-agent-Incremental-LEarning), qui organise un échange parcimonieux d’exemples et d’hypothèses. Ce protocole garantit, dans le cas d’agents tous connectés, que les agents obtiennent une hypothèse qui tient compte de tous les exemples perçus par l’ensemble des agents. Il existe des variantes séquentielles de ce protocole qui mettent en place une propagation de l’information pour offrir les mêmes garanties dans un réseau, non pas complet mais, connexe.Cette thèse apporte deux nouveaux éclairages sur l’apprentissage artificiel collectif. Une première étude montre l’influence de la structure du réseau sur l’apprentissage avec un protocole dont les communications sont limitées au voisinage, sans propagation. Une seconde contribution présente et analyse un nouveau protocole, Waves, qui préserve les garanties de SMILE et dont les interactions en parallèle rendent l’apprentissage en réseau plus dynamique. Ce protocole est évalué en détail,dans un contexte simplifié de tour par tour, ce qui permet de le raffiner par la suite avec diverses améliorations. Il est cependant conçu pour s’adapter à un apprentissage en ligne et une acquisition non limitée, ni en temps ni en nombre, de nouveaux exemples par la communauté. / Collective learning in multi-agent systems considers how a community of autonomous agents sharing a learning purpose may benefit from exchanging information to learn efficiently as a community as well as individuals. The community forms a communication network where each agent may accesses observations, called learning examples. This thesis is based on a former protocol, SMILE (Sound-Multi-agent-Incremental-LEarning), which sets up parsimonious examples and hypotheses exchanges between agents. In a fully connected community, this protocol guarantees an agent’s hypothesis takes into account all the examples obtained by the community. Some sequential protocols add propagation to SMILE in order to extend this consistency guarantee to other connected networks. This thesis contribution to the artificial collective learning field is two fold.First, we investigate the influence of network structures on learning in networks when communication is limited to neighbourhood without further information propagation. Second, we present and analyze a new protocol, Waves, with SMILE’s guarantees and a more dynamic learning process thanks to its execution in parallel. The evaluation of this protocol in a simple turn-based setting gives the opportunity to improve it here in multiple ways. It is however meant to be used with online learning without any restriction on the acquisition rate of new examples, neither on speed nor number.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-28T20:13:44Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 2007- Durval Coorea Meirelles.pdf: 3028184 bytes, checksum: 35a420a4844eaaee93b18ed55bc4b28c (MD5) Previous issue date: 2007-12-06 / This thesis looks for to identify, the process of innovation through the collective learning and the results gotten for nine companies of technological base, installed in three Incubators located in Rio De Janeiro. The study it involved field research, with application of together questionnaire to the incubators companies, standing out the on aspects to the innovation, cooperation and learning. The used questionnaire searched to identify the institutional drawings, the learning forms, interaction and cooperation enter the different integrant actors of the incubator and its relation with the university, and the result presented under the form of products and innovative services. The theoretical referential was elaborated on the basis of national and international bibliography, especially in the considered authors neo- Schumpeterian, passing for the institutionalists, that are analyzing the enterprise moment to the light of the new technological paradigms and its impacts in the organizations. Authors are distinguished who work the on aspects to the university/company partnership, the technological innovation, entrepreneurship, collective learning for interaction, productive arrangements, nets of knowledge and incubators of companies. The study he looked for to go deep itself on the processes of technological and organizationais changes. He had as objective the inquiry on as if he gives to the process of collective learning for interaction university-company and cooperation company-company and looked for to evaluate the results gotten for the incubates companies, through the creation of products or new processes. It left of the hypothesis of that the development of products or of innovative processes in the companies of technological base it to a large extent occurs for the process of collective learning that occurs in the incubator, through the relations of the companies with the university, of the interaction and cooperation between them and the localization of the incubator in the outskirts of the university. / Esta tese procura identificar, o processo de inova??o atrav?s do aprendizado coletivo e os resultados obtidos por nove empresas de base tecnol?gica, instaladas em tr?s Incubadoras localizadas no Rio de Janeiro. O estudo envolveu pesquisa de campo, com aplica??o de question?rio junto ?s empresas incubadoras, ressaltando os aspectos ligados ? inova??o, coopera??o e aprendizado. O question?rio utilizado buscou identificar os desenhos institucionais, as formas de aprendizado, intera??o e coopera??o entre os diferentes atores integrantes da incubadora e sua rela??o com a universidade, e o resultado apresentado sob a forma de produtos e servi?os inovadores. O referencial te?rico foi elaborado com base em bibliografia nacional e internacional, especialmente nos autores considerados neoschumpeterianos, passando pelos institucionalistas, que est?o analisando o momento empresarial ? luz dos novos paradigmas tecnol?gicos e seus impactos nas organiza??es. Destacam-se autores que trabalhem os aspectos ligados ? parceria universidade/empresa, a inova??o tecnol?gica, empreendedorismo, aprendizagem coletiva por intera??o, arranjos produtivos, redes de conhecimento e incubadoras de empresas. O estudo procurou se aprofundar sobre os processos de mudan?as tecnol?gicas e organizacionais. Teve como objetivos a investiga??o sobre o processo de aprendizado coletivo por intera??o universidade-empresa e coopera??o empresa-empresa e procurou avaliar os resultados obtidos pelas empresas incubadas, atrav?s da cria??o de produtos ou processos novos. Partiu da hip?tese de que o desenvolvimento de produtos ou de processos inovadores nas empresas de base tecnol?gica ocorre em grande parte pelo processo de aprendizado coletivo que ocorre na incubadora, atrav?s das rela??es das empresas com a universidade, da intera??o e coopera??o entre elas e a localiza??o da incubadora nos arredores da universidade.

This is an ethnographic study, highlighting protecting factors for children‘s ability to focus. Schools must do its very best for children, increasing their possibilities to concentrate, since this has a significant impact on both school performance and social interaction. Schools have limited resources. Can knowledge and experience from a developing country give useful and interesting input? Are there health factors for this group of pupils in an African school? The purpose of this research is to study children’s attention abilities and investigate supporting factors for pupil’s possibilities to concentrate as well as to determine the usefulness of these experiences in a Swedish school. In this study I found five salutogenic factors, which seemed to have a positive impact on children‘s ability to concentrate: Having possibilities to study makes a big difference if you are living in Ethiopia, so the importance of expectation is one of the factors. Expectations, from both society and families encouraged the pupils to do their best. Children are seen close to each other in bare classrooms. One can see them helping each other to focus during lessons. Cooperation and fellowship seemed to provide security and happiness, and thus, in turn increased the children‘s possibilities to pay attention and absorb knowledge. Learning at appropriate level in a collective learning process possibly helped pupils with problems in the area of attention/ concentrate. In addition to these environmental, salutogenic factors figured the use of a drug.In countries around the Horn of Africa is use of the herb ―khat‖ common. Some of the children self-medicate themselves to increase their concentration ability.

Dagens organisationer står inför stora utmaningar i att vara konkurrenskraftiga gentemot omvärlden. De mänskliga resurserna är organisationernas viktigaste faktor för att över huvud taget överleva. För att verksamheten ska kunna förvalta och nyttja medarbetarnas kompetens på rätt sätt behöver det skapas förutsättningar och tillfällen där relationer kan uppstå. Detta är något som diskuteras i både forskning och litteratur så även hur organisationer ska vara uppbyggda för att främja arbetet kring medarbetarna. Denna studie är ett bidrag att använda i organisationer för att arbeta med att utveckla medarbetarnas kollektiva lärande om varandra för att förstärka relationiken. Processmetoden som har använts för att skapa kollektivt lärande hos medarbetarna är Attraktivt arbete. Deltagarna har fått utföra metoden och observationer har gjorts på hur deltagarna har agerat under processen. Resultatet visar att för att åstadkomma ett kollektivt lärande behöver deltagarna visa på engagemang och viljan att lära sig om varandra. Genom dialog skapas förutsättningar att förstå varandra. Det är när förståelsen finns om varandra som relationerna stärks och på så vis skapas relationik. / Today's organizations face significant challenges in being competitive with the outside world. Human resources are the organizations most important factor at all survive. For the business to be able to manage and utilize employee skills in the right way, it creates conditions and occasions where relationships can occur. This is something that is discussed in both research and literature as well as how organizations should be structured to encourage work on employees. This study is a contribution to be used in organizations to work to develop employees' collective learning about each other to strengthen relationics. Process method that has been used to create collective learning among employees is attractive work. Participants have been carrying out the method and observations have been made on how the participants have acted during the process. The result shows that to achieve a collective learning requires participants to show the commitment and willingness to learn about each other. Through dialogue creates the conditions to understand each other. That's when the understanding is on another as relations strengthened, and thus created relationic.

Reflexive approaches to (multilevel) governance are currently discussed as essential for sustainable outcomes of decision-making. A key element of reflexive governance has been called collective learning. Collective learning has been argued to be a necessary tool or safeguard against the misuse of power in the context of sustainable decision-making. Though being named a key element, the effects of collective learning processes on power and conflict dynamics have been defined very vaguely in reflexive governance approaches. If at all, collective learning is described as an excursive debate that - given the choice of experienced actors and a set of rules – will automatically lead to balanced power distribution. This work contributes to the scientific discourse on reflexive governance by conceptualizing the process of collective learning in two steps. The first involves a conceptual claim whereby it is shown that collective learning, in addition to a discursive debate, consists of three ‘aspects’, communication, participation, knowledge implementation. This claim is exemplified via the investigation of a case of knowledge management in the sustainable governance project Civitas Dyn@mo, as it reflects the suggested aspects of collective learning.