The human other-space between community and identity

With the Covid-19 rush to online, learning environments are suddenly of core concern. We each, student, teacher and staff need to be able to insert our personal learning environments into those of one another.

In an earlier post, I considered my Personal Learning Environment (PLE) first a purpose. Here I consider it as a place of a particular sort. A place between a real community “out there” and a real me “in here”. A place where I, who know (or doesn’t); I, who know how, or know that, or know what to do can acquire and practice that knowing with others.

I have always seen community and identity as two sides of a coin. The individual and society are co-constituted. The learning environment is a space between real communities and real individuals. It is a liminal space, which mediates between the self and others. The learning environment allows and facilitates the deconstruction, analysis and modelling of the real world, real community or real individual: psychometrics, for example, model the person. Such activity has a general aim of understanding and transforming the real “out there” or “in here” in some way.

Then, to acknowledge its own reality, the learning environment is itself a collection of real people, communities: schools, homes, disciplines, departments, institutions, professions engaged together in a project of creating liminal places: learning environments; other spaces between the real through which I learn.