Etienne’s work on social learning theory places learning at the core of human existence and assumes that it is fundamentally a social phenomenon. Learning is the foundation of who we are (becoming). It is social because our human nature is social, not just because (or when) we interact with others or use certain tools.

We are aware of the current trend to focus conversations about social learning on social media. We understand this trend because, indeed, emerging social media technologies are surprisingly aligned with the tenets of social learning theory. We believe that this is precisely why they constitute such an important trend. But it is the social nature of human learning that makes these tools so relevant today, and potentially transformative, not the tools that make human learning suddenly social.

We want to promote this broader view of social learning and base our work on it, whether it is theoretical work on social learning capability or practical work with organizations, governments, and international development projects. All these areas can benefit from taking a deeply social view of learning.

While social learning has never been about social media, we agree that a theory and practice of social learning today certainly can’t ignore these emerging technologies. They open countless new avenues for the social nature of human learning to manifest and in some cases, expand.

Even so, we want our work on social learning to explore this social nature in its essence, while seeing social media as a recent phenomenon to be explored and leveraged. What makes all this exciting is the convergence of multiple trends: the increasing acceptance of social learning theory, the explosion of social media, the rise of social networks, the need to anchor organizational strategies, public policy, and developmental imperatives in a social understanding of learning, and the globalization of learning challenges.

All communities of practice are networks in the sense that they involve connections among members. But not all networks are communities of practice: a community of practice entails shared domain that becomes a source of identification. This identity creates a sense of commitment to the community as a whole, not just connections to a few linking nodes.

Communities and networks are often thought of as two different types of social structure. From this perspective, one would need to ask the question: given a group, is it a community or is it a network?

We prefer to think of community and network as two aspects of social structuring, which require different forms of developmental work.

• The network aspect refers to the set of relationships, personal interactions, and connections among participants, viewed as a set of nodes and links, with its affordances for information flows and helpful linkages.
• The community aspect refers to the development of a shared identity around a topic that represents a collective intention—however tacit and distributed—to steward a domain of knowledge and to sustain learning about it.

There are groups where one aspect so clearly dominates that they can be considered “pure” communities or “pure” networks. A personal network, for instance, is rarely a community as people in the network are not likely to have much in common except for being connected to the same person in various ways; and they may not even know about each other (even though they are potentially connected from a networked perspective). Conversely the community of donors to a cause may feel a strong allegiance and identity with the cause they share. They know about each other because they know that there is money flowing toward the cause beyond their own donations. And yet they do not necessarily form a network (except potentially), as there may not be any interactions or direct connections among them.

For most groups, however, the two aspects are combined in various ways. A community usually involves a network of relationships. And many networks exist because participants are all committed to some kind of joint enterprise.

From this perspective, the questions one would ask are: given a group, how are the two aspects intertwined and integrated, how do they contribute to the cohesion and functioning of the group, and which one tends to dominate for which participants? And at any given time, which aspect needs to be developed as a way to increase the learning capability of the group?

For more details on this contrast, see our evaluation framework for communities and networks.

A team is held together by a task. When the task is accomplished the team disperses. Team members are likely to learn something in the performance of that task, but this learning does not define the team. It is the task that keeps them together. And it is their respective commitment and contributions to the task that is the main source of trust and cohesion among them.

A task force is a special type of team pulled together to address a specific problem, usually of broad scope. Often people are selected in order to represent an organization or a perspective in the negotiation of a solution. It is their commitment to the process that keeps them going and respect for the voices they represent that builds trust.

A community of practice is held together by the “learning value” members find in their interactions. They may perform tasks together, but these tasks do not define the community. It is the ongoing learning that sustains their mutual commitment. Members may come from different organizations or perspectives, but it is their engagement as individual learners that is the most salient aspect of their participation. The trust members develop is based on their ability to learn together: to care about the domain, to respect each other as practitioners, to expose their questions and challenges, and to provide responses that reflect practical experience.