As you well know, I have never been a huge Vyg. fan. I thought his work was interesting and important – but seriously flawed! And I really don’t think he was as apocryphal as he seems to be becoming. You know my predilection for rooting around past thinkers looking for clues and ideas for explaining the present – well I think there are lots of others with more to say and which are not based on introspectionism.

Thanks for this post – you’re wading into some deep water : )

I’ve been working on a project in the direction of social /informal learning for quite some time and I’m still trying to get my head around the theory.

Trying to build things has forced some simplicity on us, but these questions are still fascinating to me. The implementation of this starts easy enough – with “learner centered tools” – an aggregation model shown by Facebook (if you think of their various features as sep. tools) Friendfeed, drupal, Bpress, and the new version of Moodle all show some strong trending this direction.

Where I’m slightly confused with Vygotsky is in the attachment of tool to context and task. In the social tools sphere, RSS and APIs break (or constantly repurpose) context.

The individual uses Linkedin to build their reputation and passively job hunt. The enterprise, now with access to the Linkedin API, can use that same tool for Human Resource mapping. Some of this mapping can be used for the creation of Proximal Development Zones (Networks) for the employees – “Employees like you left for 3 years, worked at a non-profit and came back – talk to Sally, Jim and Mark about their experiences”

Our focus has shifted to the work around creating Proximal Zones (or learner networks) – we don’t care what publishing tool is used to express the learners interest or level. Most of them come with text or tags and semantic analysis is becoming increasingly realistic.

In short – we’re betting that adoption rates for various tools will vary for many reasons, but that Zones of development – wrapped around both people and their content – will be paramount.

(Sorry if this is less clear than your post : )

I think it is also useful to consider the roles individuals are playing when interacting using these tools to learn or either implicitly or explicitly support someone else’s learning (http://brains.parslow.net/role_taxonomy). To my mind, the role someone is in for a particular interaction probably has more impact than the actual tool itself. Tool selection is largely a matter of personal preferences, for client-side tools, and a matter of pragmatism in finding and connecting to others in terms of infrastructure based tools (e.g. Twitter is a useful medium for canvassing a broad church of people, but you can use many different clients to access that network). Interaction between the channels of communication (bridges between email, web pages, twitter, jabber etc.) allow a much wider range of choices. Of course, these are often limited by institutions, but as you suggest it is likely that, over time, the institutions will have to modify their rules and norms either due to the realisation that control is not in their best interests or because of direct pressure from their learners.