 Martin, thank you for coming and joining us today. Welcome to Eden. Your keynote this morning was about learning networks. Now, obviously, that's very vital for the future of education, but just how vital is it? For the future of education? Well, I thought you were going to say how vital is it for you? For me, networks are everything. I don't think you can do anything on your own anymore. So, for me, it's network learning is about creating a social web around you, if you like, sort of have access to people who you can talk to, who you can share issues with, who you can do things together with and throughout the presentation also try to make clear that education, of course, is also transforming much more towards this sort of active learning where students are joining networks and also learn how to reach out to, if you like, professional learning communities, which is already happening a lot, especially in higher education and things like that, which also means that you need to be able to validate the kind of information that you receive or the debates that you're taking part in. But in terms of educational future, I think it's very important to learn and teach those learning and thinking skills in order to participate in the debates and being able to contribute. So, for me, networking or communities or any social structure really is very important part of education. Is there a difference between a network and a community online? Online or not online? Well, you could say that every connection is sort of a network connection, but not every network is a community, so you could buy those kind of rules, if you like, you can make distinctions, of course. To me, networking is far more fluid and open and people maybe come in and out, whereas communities or communities of practice have maybe a longer tradition and a longer focus on a particular domain, as Ichen Wenger would probably define it. And also, the community itself may have developed some rules about how to engage and how to be a member of a community. So, a community you could see maybe, if you like, as a very stable kind of network in that respect. Now, Howard Reingold, I'm sure you've heard of, has written several books on this subject. I'll quote him. He said that being networked in the 21st century, that's the most important skill we need. But there must be other skills as well that align to that, aren't there? You mentioned some this morning. What kind of skills are we talking about? Well, I think you can sum them up probably by these 21st century skills, which are a lot talked about nowadays. Of course, being networked is very important, but also you're an individual in a network as well, so you need to be able to digest information. And in terms of the 21st century skills, you need to be a collaborator, a creator. You need to be able to work things out together. You need to be able to communicate. There are quite a lot of skills around it. But of course, these skills are used in a social setting as well. So, yeah, I think it's about the ability to learn and the ability to communicate about what you're learning are two very important things. Do you think we can teach those skills? Yeah, I think we can practice them and we can improve them. But yeah, I think you need to be very open. You need to have trust amongst each other that you can say and feel that you can say whatever you like. So, these skills reside in a culture if you like. And if the culture is not conducive to these kind of things, then you can teach all you like, but it's not being put into practice. So, I think that's also what I tried to say this morning. Before you can start thinking about networks or communities or stuff like that, you need to develop a culture in which those social structures can flourish. So, that's very important to me. So, talking about social structures, I'd like to tell us about the crowd. Sorry, the crowd. The crowd. As you mentioned this morning. Yeah, the crowd is a very nice initiative. It's an initiative by teachers, for teachers. It's a kind of association, I believe, where teachers who are interested in learning from and with other teachers, they can pay a kind of a membership on a yearly basis. And it gives them access to the crowd. You know, as we use the term the crowd or the clouds, I feel like, you know, it's a bit confusing sometimes. I don't know really what the difference maybe is in this context between the two concepts. But the idea, of course, is that you join a larger group of people who are interested in working together, interested in hearing about each other's practices. And I think that's a wonderful step towards stimulating teacher professional development from a sort of a more bottom-up approach. Because a lot of professional development is sort of still dictated by organizational future scopes or whatever, you know. And I think it's very important to stay in touch also with the issues that teachers encounter in daily practice and develop a culture of learning around that. And I think the crowd is doing a very nice job of setting that up. One of the issues that they do encounter, and you mentioned this is a wicked problem, I think, was the term you used, was the lack of discoverability of some of these networks. They are invisible until it's somehow flagged up that they exist and then you join them. But how do we get over this barrier of the networks being invisible and not discoverable? It's a tricky question, you know. In my work I tend to make a bit of a distinction between sort of what's happening formally and what is formally accounted for and stuff like that and what do people do spontaneously through self-organization and things like that. And I always make a comparison. Like if you look at an organization from that kind of organizational chart everything is very clearly put into boxes and people have assigned tasks and things like that. So the flowchart of the organization is very well formally established. But then if you look into daily practice what it is that people do and how they organize themselves more in the informal daily routines they don't follow these boxes, they don't follow these charts. You know you phone somebody or you send an email to somebody who you know and trust that they can help you. So this informal reality within organizations and things like that is not really formally recognized and therefore also not very utilized. So what I try to do is to create within the formal structure more space for this informal self-organization. And by that I don't mean to formalize informal activity but I just want to create more scope for it. And then of course the critique you often get is yeah because when you do this you make it more visible. People you know they may not want to engage with it and I think that's fine. The informal can even go further informal if you know. So you can have formal, you can have informal formal and you can have truly, truly informal if you like. So I think there's different levels of scale that you can work with. But in terms of the visibility or the invisibility aspect of it all if you don't know what is happening around you it's hard to engage, it's hard to be a member of it. So that's why I think it's important that these networks that are spontaneously organized they get a voice and they show what they're working on. Not only just for the benefit of themselves but also for the benefit of the organization or the domain or the professional identity. Well thank you for giving us a nice insight into your research and into network learning as it stands. Martin, thank you for joining us today. Yeah, you're welcome. Thank you.