From renaissance scholars to renaissance communities: Learning and education in the 21st century

The understanding, framing, and support of learning, working, communicating, and collaborating is media-dependent: tools, materials, and social arrangements have always been involved in defining and conceptualizing these activities. Historically the emphasis has been to educate and support individual “Renaissance scholars”. In today's world, most of the significant problems are systemic problems that transcend not only the individual human mind but cannot be addressed by any one specialty discipline. To cope with these problems requires not only “Renaissance Scholars” but “Renaissance Communities” in which stakeholders coming from different disciplines can collaborate. Our research at the Center for Lifelong Learning & Design (L3D) over the past two decades has been focused on creating a new understanding of learning, new media, and new learning organizations. Our co-evolutionary perspective explores the dialectical relationship between: (1) how a deep understanding of learning creates innovative demands and design criteria for future generations of social-technical environments; (2) how the unique potential of computational media impacts and transforms learning by transcending "giftwrapping" and “technology-centered” approaches; and (3) how new learning organizations contribute to reconceptualizing and reinventing learning and education in the 21st century. The conceptual framework is illustrated by specific developments of social-technical environments that we have designed and evaluated including: collaborative, domain-oriented design environments, environments created by mass collaboration, and courses-as-seeds.