In “Lead Balloons, Stone Canoes, and Learning Styles” (published in Learning Circuits), Frank L. Greenagel argues that eLearning designs should focus less on developing online environments to accommodate different learning styles and more on preparing environments that situate the learner in a community of practice. He’s right, but as designers, our challenge should remain building learning environments where we can tell the community members, “you can have it all.”

Greenagel gets a number of things right in his article:

1. “Learning Styles” research is often a muddled and undisciplined domain. (It is: see S. Stahl, “Different strokes for different folks? A critique of learning styles.” American Educator, 23(3), 27-31(1999) for a thorough and pointed criticism, or read David Carter-Tod’s summary.)
2. Regardless of the demonstrated or potential utility offered by Learning Styles theory, the majority of online learning does not support individualized learning, but instead is collection of “one size fits all” content modeled on instructivist principles.
3. “Authentic” learning rarely involves an individual learner interacting with content, but instead is a socially mediated process wherein learners participate in a community of practice. (Etienne Wenger is the standard reference on this topic.)
4. Given (1), (2), and (3), online learning designs should focus their attention on developing and sustaining communities of practice that mirror their real-world learning counterparts. (A view espoused by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid in “The Social Life of Information.”)

Says Greenagel:

The ascendant practice today is an e-learning model built around a traditional classroom presentation—one that seems to equate information transfer with knowledge assimilation—highly scalable, but not individualized. On the other hand, there’s a good reason to believe that many competencies in the workplace—in lower level work and in the rarefied advanced physics and medical labs—are gained through participation in communities of practice. Is much of adult learning, therefore, simply, as Robert Frost put it, “hanging around until you’ve caught on?” Not quite. Observation (lurking, in online parlance) isn’t enough. There has to be what Lave and Wenger call legitimate peripheral participation in the work of the community for learning to happen.

If you will grant that premise, then the promise of Internet technologies lies in the ability to build and sustain communities, for in the interaction among members and the reciprocity of participation will emerge the tacit learning that is the basis of most competencies. The promise of the Internet lies less in the reach it affords—the scalability of Webcasts and textbooks saved as HTML—and more in the possibilities of multipoint communications that may help build communities of practice and other cohorts of learners.

I couldn’t agree more, and while I think the emphasis on developing “multipoint communications” is properly placed, I would add an additional challenge: don’t throw the baby out with the bath-water. Yes, we should assiduously work to develop enabling community learning environments. But we should also seek to augment these communities with rich, contextual learning objects for them to experience. As Seely Brown and Duguid describe (in a manner so eloquent and insightful that it has become my own research agenda):

The value of the Net doesn’t simply lie in the way it allows groups of people to talk with one another. It also comes from the way that, unlike telephones or video links, the Net can provide common objects for participants to observe, manipulate, and discuss. It’s not, then, simply a medium for conversation, nor is it just a delivery mechanism. It combines both, providing a medium for conversation and for circulating digital objects. Furthermore, it also allows participants to turn the ongoing conversation itself into another object of conversation for further reflection. Usually, educational technology tries to do one or another of these things. Ideally, it should combine all three.

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