A Web of Learning Opportunities

For at least two decades, politicians, academics and other stakeholders have advocated cooperation across sectors, administrative layers and other institutionalised boundaries to achieve objectives of what are called ‘learning regions’ and the ‘lifelong learning perspective’. Boundaries between geographical, institutional and sectors are becoming more porous. Regions and cities may be seen as complex adaptive systems (CAS), and hence do not necessarily follow the logic of formal institutions. While formal institutions have innate interests in regulating interaction and communication between their members, networks develop according to evolutionary or selectionist dynamics, in that the processes of change can be seen as analogous to natural (Darwinian) selection. Networks may be seen as the architecture of complex systems. Research on networks has been relatively extensive in the last 20 to 30 years in mathematics, sociology, anthropology, and biology. There is an emerging science of networks that studies the structure and function of systems. There is also substantial research on the features in the interconnectedness or interdependencies within the system that contribute to explaining the functionality of that system. In this perspective, we may view a learning region as a web of learning opportunities.