Network Logic - Index of

Network logic
more trust, which in turn strengthens the network itself. It is arguable
that NWP succeeded because it tapped and refreshed professional
trust among the participating teachers.
To say this is not simply to play with words for, if this hypothesis is
correct, there may well be many different ways of generating high
levels of social capital in addition to those specified in the analysis of
NWP. The explanation may not lie in particular practices, such as
teachers engaging in writing, but in the fact that here is one activity
that in this particular context helped to generate high social capital.
In a different context – another curriculum subject or another aspect
of schooling – very different practices may be successful in generating
the high social capital that allows teachers to learn with and from
their colleagues in a way that benefits their classroom practices.
Indeed, one of the things we really do need to untangle is whether
peer-to-peer approaches are always better than expert-to-novice ones
in education, or whether the latter have often been less successful
because they have lacked a basis of social capital. Indeed, expert-tonovice
systems do seem to work in apprenticeship-type relationships
where trust is well established, as documented by Jean Lave and
Etienne Wenger among others. 3 The problem may be not that expertto-novice
approaches are ineluctably destined to failure in the case of
teachers’ professional learning, but that we have missed out of our
analysis the key underlying feature, social capital, and mistakenly
assumed that the surface features, the participants’ identities as
experts and novices, are the critical variables that explain the low
success rate.
Networks, knowledge management and innovation
This brings us to another aspect of the wider conceptual framework
for networks since 1990, namely the dramatic growth of interest in
knowledge management and innovation.
From a knowledge management perspective, what we have
traditionally called professional learning is very often a form of
knowledge creation and knowledge transfer, alternatively conceived as
innovation and the dissemination of such innovation. We now
84 Demos