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Local Knowledge and Sustainable Learning Systems:

A Zambian Prototype

Lynn Ilon
lynnilon@snu.ac.kr
Seoul National University

M’zizi Kantini
Chief Learning Officer
Global Knowledge Institute, Zambia

This paper centers around the growing importance of learning and its
economics for development. Yet, the parameters for such learning are
rapidly changing and being redefined. This paper first describes these
changing learning environments: knowledge is being redefined in a world
of Knowledge Economics and accumulating digital knowledge; societal
well-being is being rethought away from industrial output; networks of
knowledge redefine the nexus of local and global knowledge; and
collective learning expands the possibilities of innovation and
creativity. Second, this new learning environment raises questions about
old education assumptions which are explored: sustainability in light of
networks and social capital, local knowledge in view of linked global
knowledge networks, expert knowledge in view of collaborative and
contextual knowledge and educational resources in light of networks and
the decreased need for physical campuses. Finally, the paper describes a
learning ecosystem which is being prototyped in Zambia which is
designed around the new parameters and usurps many of old
frameworks for a sustainable, locally relevant, world-class research and
learning environment built around a local, national and international
network.

Keywords: Economics of knowledge, Learning networks, Innovation,


Sustainability, Technology and development

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Old suppositions of how learning does and should occur are being substantially

rethought in a world that is viewed as globally linked, constantly expanding in

knowledge, driven by innovation, and where learning occurs through networks.

Systems of learning that seemed inherently to be state-planned just a generation ago,

are now giving way to networks of learning that are driven by the laws of social

networks, collective-adaptive principles and collaborative knowledge building. In

such a world, it is possible to rethink the role of “local knowledge” and to imagine a

sustainable learning system. Such a system would have particular importance in

communities and countries where existing education systems are poorly funded, of

little relevance to their communities, or where members cannot access systems that

give them a chance to make meaningful contributions. The paper begins by

establishing the changing parameters of learning and then presents the case of the

Global Knowledge Institute in Zambia which is beginning to build a learning system

based on these principles.

Changing Ecologies of Learning

Much has been written about an emerging knowledge economy, but a linked

trend is, perhaps, of more profound consequence – the changing environment of

learning (Araya & Peters, 2010; Archibugi & Lundvall, 2013). Several trends and

lines of research inquiry are converging with respect to learning. The notion of

knowledge is rapidly changing from the simple notion of the accumulation of facts

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and procedures to the notion of knowledge as dynamic and contextual (Allen, 2001;

Pu, Lin, Song, & Liu, 2011). The role of technology has opened up the ways in

which knowledge is built collaboratively (Downes, 2010; Royal Society [The], 2011).

This, in turn, is giving ways to new thinking about how people learn both in the

classroom (Greeno, 1998; R. K. Sawyer, 2006) and informally through global

networks (Davidson-Hunt, 2006; Nieves & Osorio, 2013). While much of this

appears to involve innovation from, about and for wealthy countries, a close

examination of their characteristics and attributes reveals just how profoundly they

change the development environment and prospects for poorly resourced countries.

This section reviews several of these changing environments and their most salient

characteristics.

Knowledge is rapidly growing and accumulating

Notions of who can be educated, whose knowledge “counts,” and how valuable

one’s knowledge is are largely based on an older view of knowledge – as (1) a scarce

resource and (2) primarily valuable as a contribution to industrial production. Both

these views are quickly being replaced by a view that knowledge is a cheap, ever-

expanding resource that is increasingly unbounded by resource scarcity and makes

contributions to communities and societies in a variety of ways only one of which is

through industrial output (Mayer-Schönberger & Cukier, 2013).

This shift in the concept of knowledge creates a substantial new environment for

thinking about knowledge as a resource – who owns it, who controls, who has access
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to it and who can use it to better their lives and the lives of those around them.

There are several characteristics of knowledge that stand in sharp contrast to either

physical goods or service goods. Knowledge, once developed, is cheap to get

reproduced, it can be spread with little cost and used widely by lots of people

without denying anyone else the use of the (knowledge) resource. It accumulates

(rather than depletes), thus creates its own supply (more knowledge from which to

create new knowledge) and demand (new curiosity, ideas, innovations). It is

inherently difficult to own and control and, if one tries to own and control

knowledge, it tends to lose its value unless a strict set of laws and regulations can be

built around it to protect it – also increasingly difficult to enforce (Blakeley, Lewis, &

Mills, 2005; Cortright, 2001; Siemens, 2006).

Because knowledge is growing rapidly, spreading cheaply, increasingly

accessible to growing numbers of people around the world and because it is the

basis upon which new ideas, creativity and innovations are built, the chance to build

such new ideas is widening away from those who had rather exclusive access to the

heretofore networks of knowledge (conferences, higher education, libraries, research

reports) and to the wider world. Facts and procedures are now made widely

available soon after their discovery and a diverse set of people are free to evaluate

these findings according to a diverse set of contexts.

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Rethinking Societal Well-Being

Whereas knowledge resources are increasingly becoming accessible for people

in poor communities and countries, the value that can be made from this knowledge

toward societal welfare is now a focus of much research (Fitoussi, Sen, & Stiglitz,

2010; Fleurbaey, 2009; Giovannini, Hall, Morrone, & Giulia, 2009; Stiglitz, Sen, &

Fitoussi, 2009). This is because the shift in thinking that societal well-being was

routed in the accumulation of wealth and goods (industrial output) has shifted to the

notion that it is created through the ability to be innovative on how people think

about how to use their energies – including how to use material resources.

Whereas the old idea of societal well-being was rooted in the notion that a society

should accumulate and grow "capital" resources largely through industrial output,

the new notion of how society builds its well-being is founded on the view that it is

human ideas and creativity that move societies forward (Aghion & Armendariz de

Aghion, 2006; Howkins, 2002; Romer, 1991). The invention of the printing press,

the idea of a wheel or sailing ships or the ability to navigate by reading the stars are

all ideas spawned from human creativity that moved the world forward. Some of

these ideas do build industrial output, but others simply improve lives on a daily

basis without ever going through markets.

Paul Romer introduced this alternative view of "economic development" at a

conference of the World Bank in 1990 (Romer, 1991). Although Romer could see that

ideas could substantially change the trajectory of a society, it was also the

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"economic" characteristics of ideas that intrigued him. For the ways that knowledge

is built, exchanged, shared and distributed is wholly unlike that of physical products

or even services (such as getting one's car repaired or hair cut) (Cortright, 2001;

Siemens, 2006; Warsh, 2007).

Thus, for low resourced communities, the chance to use what resources are

available in creative ways and to regard local resources as important to a global

world, has raised the possibility of attracting value to such communities and

increasing value primarily through the resource of innovation, ideas and creativity.

Linking knowledge locally and globally

But such value generation cannot occur unless the flow-through of ideas is

linked to a broader world. Ideas and innovations may be of value in and of

themselves, but unless they are linked to a broader world of financial transactions,

they cannot bring additional resources into a community.

The traditional view of economic or international development was to view

development as a largely unilateral movement – of goods, ideas, knowledge,

processes, infrastructure and services (financial, communications, etc.) from an

industrialized world to a poorer world (Arndt, 1987). But a newer idea comes from

the notion that the world is interlinked and the well-being of one part of the world is

linked to another part. Global movements of climate, disease and migration were the

first recognized links (Miller, 2000), added to this was the notion that weak states

posed a particular global threat (Rice, 2006; Woods, 2005). Increasingly, however,
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there is a notion that the world is held together through other kinds of links such a

communication, transportation, financial, political and social links (UNCTAD, 2012;

World Bank, 2013) and that these links can either have positive or negative

consequences.

This networked view of the world is being examined through networking

theory (Barabási & Frangos, 2002). But the science of social networks is an off-shoot

that studies the ways that knowledge is being transmitted, built, sustained and

grown in an increasingly global manner (Benkler, 2007; Christakis & Fowler, 2009;

Nieves & Osorio, 2013). In this view, each node (community – whether physically,

geographically or virtually defined) is both a contributor and a receiver of

knowledge. What was once thought to be the universal knowledge constructed by

experts is now viewed as knowledge dynamically built through collective processes,

mediated continuously, rebuilt, and applied within context (Shirky, 2009;

Weinberger, 2011a). The province of “universal” knowledge is shrinking (although it

does not disappear) whereas the province of contextual knowledge (many possible

applications and solutions depending upon the context) is rapidly growing and

becoming much more robust. In this instance, “local” quickly becomes relevant and

rebuilds “global” knowledge in a dynamic manner. Solutions to global problems of

disease, terrorism, financial contagion, refugees, political instability, etc. are resolved

or mitigated through the application of context-specific approaches. Local

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knowledge becomes global wisdom and local knowledge has value both locally and

globally.

New Economics of Knowledge

Within this new context of knowledge, networks and societal well-being is the

emerging economics of knowledge. Far removed from its commonly confused

counterpart, Knowledge Economics (how knowledge makes money through markets),

the economics of knowledge is the study of how knowledge creates value – with or

without markets. In this respect, several authors have begun to uncover

characteristics of knowledge that set it far apart from the production of material and

service products (Blakeley et al., 2005; Siemens, 2006).

Unlike physical items, ideas can be spread among people without much cost.

Whereas physical items always take nearly the same amount of resources to

duplicate1, ideas, once built, can be spread in vast networks at nearly no cost.

Physical goods (or services) can usually only be used by one person at a time (or are

consumed and never used again). But ideas can be used by millions of people

simultaneously and continuously. The consumption of a good or service reduces its

overall demand (at least for the moment) but the use of new knowledge creates

demand for new knowledge and also is the supply for the creation of new

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And sometimes those resources come at increasing costs as those resources are either
depleted or more difficult to acquire. This is known as increasing returns to scale.
Knowledge, on the other hand, while often very expensive to build initially (lots of time
and brain power, often from highly skilled people), it is almost cost-free to duplicate.
Thus, knowledge has decreasing returns to scale.
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knowledge - knowledge creates its own supply and demand. A physical resource

depletes natural resources and requires more resources to be used to replace what

has been used. But new knowledge just adds to existing knowledge in an endless

accumulation of knowledge. It is an endless resource.2

These characteristics of knowledge make it a cheap resource – easy from which

to build new ideas and innovations. Although knowledge, per se, is a far cry from

innovation or creativity (which requires further input of learning and sometimes

collective learning), it is, nevertheless, the building blocks upon which such

creativity is founded.

Expanding possibility of collective creativity

The understanding of learning in knowledge economics is well articulated by

New Learning Sciences (Sawyer, 2006). The New Learning Sciences began in the

1970s based on research emerging from psychology; computer science, philosophy,

sociology, and other scientific disciplines. As they closely studied children's learning,

scientists discovered that instructionism was deeply flawed (Papert, 1993). By the

1990s, after about twenty years of research, researchers concluded that learning is

not the acquisition of a collection of facts about the world, and procedures for how to

solve problems. It is not memorizing and repeating facts and procedures beginning

from simpler to complex ones under the instruction of an all-knowing subject expert

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Although this endless resource is not without its own challenges. See Weinberger (2011b)
for a good overview of how the accumulation and access to knowledge through networks
is reshaping how we manage knowledge and think about expertise.
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who, in the end, measures the success of learning by finding out how many of these

facts and procedures students have put in their heads (Sawyer, 2006). This is not

learning but instructonism education. Further, research began to question the

relevance of, what UNESCO (2005) called, “the unjustified violence often imposed

by others (family, school and society) to ensure these cognitive efforts and the whole

set of punishments that has for too long accompanied learning.” Rigid divisions of

knowledge were rethought as were the evaluation methods which were based on the

symbolical and economic value of certificates. Rather, learning researchers began to

investigate social networks of knowledge production and its transmission as well as

the material nature of the environment within which this occurs such as print and

digital media. Accordingly, the new learning research has shown that in the current

technologically complex, global and knowledge based society, a new education

order is required (Bereiter, 2002; Drucker, 1993). Field (2006) argues that the new

education order is lifelong learning rather than the one-off dose of school and college

that characterize instructionism education. But he is quick to point out that

The problem that remains is that in practice, lifelong learning is still


looked at as a tool for producing skilled labourers and its repackaging of
subjects beyond formal schooling and college. And researchers have not
been immune from these trends: many studies of adult learning have been
published that refer to lifelong learning in the title, without much sign
that the authors have reframed their focus and analysis in ways that
reflect an important new conceptual framework. This applies to
academics: universities have introduced programmes and courses dubbed
as lifelong learning but the management, content and administering of the
same course programmes is that of the old school of thought – human

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capital. This is devaluing lifelong learning as a concept of reality (Field,
2006, p. 3).

Building knowledge through collective networks is emerging as a new source of

learning creativity which builds on this learning research. The need to have people

who can build knowledge, be creative and innovative is consistent with the

emerging possibilities of collective learning through networks. Formal education

and its rigid structures are giving way to a more informal networked view of

education (Chatti, Jarke, & Frosch-Wilke, 2007; Jarvela, Naykki, Laru, & Luokkanen,

2007).

The New Parameters of Learning Sustainability

These diverse new parameters of learning are converging from various fields of

Economics, Technology, and Learning but are all held together by the study of Social

Network Theory. In a world where knowledge can easily be digitized and spread

around the world using electronic networks, the building, diffusing and access to

knowledge is networked and the means by which this is done is social. This, in turn,

raises new questions about the old precepts about development and learning

systems. The old view of development as poor countries patterning the model of

wealthy countries (Arndt, 1987) is giving way to a view of ideas as the building

block of social progress (Romer, 1993). The explosion of access to knowledge and its

attendant growth explained by social network theory (Tapscott & Williams, 2012;

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Weinberger, 2011b) provides us with alternative means of viewing learning. Both

lead to new, fundamental questions.

What is a sustainable learning system?

Social networks are not exclusively technological – they exist in all groupings of

people. But their unique characteristics give some ideas of how knowledge is

creating a new way of sustaining a valuable resource – the ability to innovate, create

and build new ideas. The understanding of sustainability in knowledge economics is

emerging from at least three theories, namely, the social network, social capital and

complexity theories.

The Social Network Theory studies production and sharing of information in an

interpersonal communication structure, the relationships around a person, group or

community that affects beliefs or behaviors – the causal pressures inherent in a social

structure. The particular structures of such networks (known as scale-free) lend

themselves to being sustainable. Individuals can join such networks and make

contributions with little effort and without substantial managerial effort. This makes

contributing relatively cost-free and the ability to receive information highly

rewarding as such networks are efficiently organized by their nature (Barabasi, 2005;

Benkler, 2007; Shirky, 2009).

Substantially related to social network theory is complexity theory. Properly

designed, social networks can be complex, collective and adaptive. That is, they

adapt to emerging knowledge and that new knowledge effects a total “eco-system.”
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The knowledge changes the environment of knowledge. The entire system of

knowledge, then, is a living entity by which social systems adapt to a changing

environment – the very essence of sustainability. This very characteristics means that

such systems can be self-organizing – adding and dropping members, growing and

shrinking, adapting knowledge as they build and grow or shrink. They

spontaneously emerge, without being designed from the outside. Many such

systems exist on the web and, for cultures that thrive and adapt as the world

globalizes, it could be said that they successfully adopt aspects of complex systems

(Ilon & Altmann, 2012; McElroy, 2010).

Social Capital theory is the study of norms and networks that enable collective

action and facilitate mutual benefits (Woolcock, 1988). This is also a concept of social

networks. The idea is that people who work together using some collective cohesion,

build collective norms, values and identities and thus, benefit from this collective

action and meaning. Since collective building and collective benefits are linked, the

actions contribute to sustainability. The World Bank identifies five key dimensions

of social capital: Groups and Networks - collections of individuals that promote and

protect personal relationships which improve welfare; Trust and Solidarity –

elements of interpersonal behavior which fosters greater cohesion and more robust

collective action; Collective Action and Cooperation - ability of people to work

together toward resolving communal issues ; Social Cohesion and Inclusion -

mitigates the risk of conflict and promotes equitable access to benefits of

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development by enhancing participation of the marginalized; and Information and

Communication - breaks down negative social capital and also enables positive

social capital by improving access to information (World Bank, n.d.).

From the above theoretical perspectives, sustainability is looked at as a process

that is social in nature and continuously creates, evaluates and adapts new

knowledge. The significance of seeing sustainability as a social process solely

focused on knowledge production and integration, or simply innovation, is threefold.

First, within the context of a sustainable learning system, it shows us that

sustainability is about reconciling ideas and practices at local and global level, within

a given social context. Second, it suggests that social capacity is central - social

contexts have varying capacities of trust, reciprocity, relationships, and norms and

this has a bearing on the collective capacity to collaborate around learning or

innovation. Third, the learning process can be self-organizing. Six components of

learning sustainability emerge from this: interconnectedness, innovativeness,

inclusiveness, heterogeneousness, adaptive organic growth and ownership.

Interconnectedness is a set of relationships including the density of

opportunities for intrapersonal and interpersonal interactions which determine the

velocity of information generation, flow and behavior change. Innovativeness is

production and integration of new knowledge and behaviors. Inclusiveness means

the participation and engagement of everyone’s behavior and ideas to have freedom

and share equal opportunities to be and associate. Heterogeneousness is the

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coexistence and plurality of ideas. Adaptive Organic Growth means that the learning

patterns are utterly emergent and predisposed to making knowledge in accordance

with the same endemic social patterns found in all complex adaptive systems.

Ownership implies that the learning process has a community participation that

fairly benefits and is influenced by each member. Everyone has a rightful claim.

Given these new parameters of knowledge, of societal well-being and of

sustainability, old truths are now open to question. If a sustainable learning system

is to be designed along the emerging parameters of knowledge, global networks and

sustainability, fundamental truths must be confronted. Three such questions are

prominent among them.

What is local knowledge?

Old views followed predominant views of development – assumption that

universal truths came, generally, from wealthier countries and were to be

transmitted to poorer countries. Local knowledge was relevant to geographic/

culture-specific areas.

This is likely because such "knowledge" is often considered to be community-

specific, having value not far beyond the boundaries of a given community or region.

To evidence this thinking, the World Bank's website on “Indigenous Knowledge”

states:

Indigenous knowledge (IK) is the local knowledge – knowledge that


is unique to a given culture or society. IK contrasts with the

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international knowledge system generated by universities, research
institutions and private firms. It is the basis for local-level decision
making in agriculture, health care, food preparation, education,
natural-resource management, and a host of other activities in rural
communities (World Bank Group, n.d.).

Some researchers have used indigenous knowledge to mean awareness, beliefs

and practices that pertains to the first known dwellers of a given geographical area

and such inhabitants are “usually small tribal people of non-European descent and

without elaborate political structures – who for decades, even centuries, have been

oppressed by invaders” (Bicker, Ellen, & Parkes, 2000, pp. 316–319).

Descriptions such as these gives an impression of local knowledge being static

and rigid rather than dynamic and evolving, further perpetuating the fallacious

notion that local knowledge only belongs to tribal peoples with artless technologies,

with little economic sophistication and existing largely outside the world market

(Bicker et al., 2000).

One way of viewing local knowledge at a global level has been through

commercial eyes. What has been produced or known locally sometimes has

commercial value globally such as pharmaceuticals or handicrafts or even music

(Barsh, 2001; McCorkle, 1989). In this view, local knowledge is “extractive” and

research and development value is maximized elsewhere outside local communities

and institutions. In India, for instance, Monsanto, a multinational seed corporation,

patented an Indian variety of wheat, “Nap Hal” and was assigned a patent number

in Munich by the European Patent Office in 2003. This patent was only revoked by

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the same office because of the active Campaign against Patent on Life as well as

against Biopiracy in India. Shiva (n.d.) notes that this is part of the larger scheme of

corporations pirating the collective innovation of farmers in breeding crops that are

resilient to droughts, floods and salinity.

A more recent view has been to see the world as interconnected with flows of

communications, disease, environments, finances, social, political and cultural

trends, migration and technology moving across borders in a hub and nodes. The

interaction is bidirectional and what affects one, affects the entire system. Thus, what

is global is a combination of the various locals (Fischer, 2000). Grins et al. suggest

that this approach is part of viewing development through a systems lens rather

than a linear planning lens (2011). The system is globally linked. Thus, local is no

longer local, but part of a global network of resilience and solutions. Cornwall (2002)

suggests that at least part of the success of this approach lies with the participation of

the local community in developing solutions to the problems. This has called upon

and is an entire new view of local knowledge.

What is the role of expert knowledge?

In Too Big To Know, Weinberger (2011b) suggests that what the world was once

willing to accept as fact is gradually diminishing and being replaced by knowledge

which is valuable within context. As an example, he explains that any fact was

considered factual as long as it remained the latest expert book in the library – until

replaced by a “new fact” (library book) at a future date. But, given the web, any “fact”
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is immediately mediated by other facts which appear in varying levels of validating

for varying contexts. As he admits, there still are particular accepted facts (a moon

attached to the earth) and expertise (people who understand the findings of large

hadron colliders, for example). But, much of what we know involving complex,

networked systems (political, economics, communications, environmental – most

human systems) change dynamically and are subject to interpretation relative to

their environment and contexts.

While Weinberger and others (Boyd & Crawford, 2012; Mayer-Schönberger &

Cukier, 2013; Rheingold & Weeks, 2012) do not get into the underlying theories of

how this knowledge growth works, it is probably germane to glimpse it here.

Complexity theory explains how large systems are composed of small systems that

have their own logic but which interact with the larger system in dynamic ways.

This is the theory that is being used to explain the interaction of local knowledge and

global knowledge within the global knowledge/ learning system.

In this vein, numerous authors are beginning to frame how local contexts

respond to and also shape the larger ecosystem of natural, managerial, decision and

institutional systems of which they are a part using complexity theory (Innes &

Booher, 2010; Kay, Regier, Boyle, & Francis, 1999; Klijn, 2008; Morrison, 2008). Each

views local contexts as substantially influential in shaping the larger environment of

the whole.

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A local action may directly affect those at a larger scale without moving
through intermediary scales. Similarly, local action, instead of being
dampened out, may become amplified through the non-linear interactions
between components across scales. The impact of individual currency
speculators on the economies of entire countries exemplifies this interaction,
as individual actions are quickly scaled up through financial networks to have
profound effects on large-scale phenomena (Manson, 2001, p. 408).

In such a complex, interlinked world, new learning skills are necessary and

solving problems within a particular context is the subject of new learning theories

(Sawyer, 2006). Greeno (1998), for example, suggests that this kind of learning can

only occur in context. Thus, in designing the Zambia prototype which will be

explained later, local and global professionals got together, originally, to bring high

quality content to poor countries that is flexible and can be adapted to the local

context and can be combined with classroom instruction at a local level.

Within the field of International Development, the field of Security Studies was

the first, perhaps, to describe these overlapping dependencies by recognizing that

global flows of ecology, people, political and social movements and disease cause

instability and insecurity far from the source country and the solutions are by and

large local – understanding local dynamics and giving local populations

responsibility and ownership to deal with their problems (Rice, 2006; Lynn-Jones &

Miller, 1995; Miller, 2000). Such logic has been substantially expanded in the last

decade and has now included the policy imperative to consider global equity as a

financial and global stabilizing imperative (UNCTAD, 2012; World Bank, 2013).

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What are the salient resources for higher education?

Traditionally, higher education has been planned around its capital resources –

buildings, libraries, campuses, massive infrastructure (roads, water, utilities,

technology) and, of course, its faculty. It had to be planned this way. Access to the

sources of knowledge was scarce and expensive. It had to be amassed in one location

and students had to be shipped to that location to access the professor, books and

technology that could deliver the knowledge. This required that campuses the size of

small towns be built – usually with great capital and ongoing huge expenses.

But the sources of raw knowledge are increasingly cheap and do not require a

bus or car ride to access anymore – even in poor countries. Perhaps, especially in

poor countries where the cost of transportation and access to these campuses is often

prohibitively expensive but access to cell phone data networks is being driven down

by competition (and new underwater fiber optic sea cables (Song, 2014)). As with the

customization of products throughout the world, technology can now allow for the

customization of curriculum. Global experts can put together the materials that are

considered to be widely applicable throughout the world and local resources can be

used to find materials which apply to the local context.

Further, recent research has shown that students learn better when the

classroom is “flipped” – that is when students learn the materials (often through

technology delivery) before arriving in the classroom and then use collective

classroom time to build knowledge together (Ferenstein, 2012; Kronholz, 2012).

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Other research shows that learning occurs best when it can be applied within a

situated (socially defined) context (Wegerif, 1998; Wenger, 2000) . These two insights

in learning can be readily applied to the situation of poor countries by integrating

learning processes into the community. There is no reason why the general

knowledge that can be culled from experts (accessed through the web) cannot be

applied in the context of local institutions, communities, and organizations – using

their physical resources, their expertise, working on their problems and integrated

into their local circumstance. This learning system is formed organically from

community networks and resources in a manner that is environmentally sustainable,

economically viable, politically supported and socially responsible (Morrison, 2008).

The focus is thus shifted from physical capital to social capital. Learning is no

longer about the transmittal of (often static) knowledge from expert sources (often

divorced from the local situation) to the integration of dynamic resources

incorporated in the local networks of individual people, households, businesses and

organizations. This shift solves the problem of physical infrastructure and enrolment

capacities in poorly resourced countries. Learning spaces expand organically as

opposed to fixed classroom buildings and furniture. Also, the community

integration addresses the challenge of irrelevant curriculum because learning

becomes placed and content generated from community networks of the real lived

experiences.

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The Zambia Prototype

Such a system is being built, in small, incremental pieces, in Zambia in

collaboration with Seoul National University and a growing network of global

professionals. The system is built around the precepts of Knowledge Economics (two

of the professors working on the design are knowledge economists), the clear value

of local knowledge, the emerging principles of New Learning Theories and Learning

2.0 (Davidson-Hunt, 2006; Downes, 2010) and principles of sustainability.

The Global Knowledge Alliance

The entire learning eco-system is known as the Global Knowledge Alliance

(GKA)(Global Knowledge Alliance, n.d.). The first component to be put in place was

a higher education system known as the Global Knowledge Institute (GKI) (Global

Knowledge Institute, n.d.). The GKI is now a legally constituted NGO in Zambia

with enrolled master’s degree students. Students receive some learning modules

through web links (initially through hard drives sent down from Seoul) but also

have classes where they meet and talk with local experts and have assignments

which take them into communities to apply their knowledge. The sustainability of

the knowledge flow involves linking global and local knowledge together as shown

in Figure 1.

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Figure 1: GKI Learning Flow

A second stage of building the learning eco-system is to begin to build

competence in capturing knowledge from local situations, validating it and sending

it up to global research centers. The flow of local knowledge can be turned into

revenue because it is currently in rare supply on a global level. Although globally

networked issues such as disease, migration, environment, political and social

instability and terrorism all have some components that can be addressed globally,

all also have local manifestation that require local knowledge and local-specific

treatments. Thus, the ability to gather local information and relate it to global issues

has value to global actors (nations, international organizations, world citizens) as

well as to local communities.

In order to prototype the gathering of local knowledge, the first challenge

undertaken by GKI was to attempt to gather quantitative data in a longitudinal,

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sustainable, valid manner. Three challenges were faced. First, residents of most

communities in Zambia are tired of being surveyed from outsiders and have become

used to giving stock answers that simply get information back to the interviewer

quickly and without additional questions. Second, in order to make the system

sustainable, community members needed to be included in the process, but no

methodology existed to do so reliably – so a new process needed to be developed.

Third, a means of transmitting, assessing and managing data needed to be

developed such that its validity could be assessed using globally acceptable norms.

Project Empower

The Global Knowledge Institute is prototyping a system that tackles these

three challenges. It is working with two high schools in the country – one in a rural

area and one that is on the outskirts of the main city, Lusaka. In each school, five

teachers have been enrolled in a new undergraduate program that will allow

existing teachers to raise their credentials from a two-year degree (essentially, an

associate’s degree in teaching) to a Bachelor’s degree while remaining as teachers

within their schools. Since most cannot remain teachers and upgrade their degrees

(they would, generally, have to quit teaching and go to a main city for three years to

complete a bachelor’s degree), this is a very exciting prospect.

At the same time, the program gives them the latest methods of pedagogy

and technological pedagogical knowledge content to situate the secondary school

curriculum in the community and raise its relevance and effectiveness. This is
24
motivating to the school since the pedagogy will be raised in the school. It also raises

the attractiveness of the school for prospective teachers since it means that there is a

chance that, in teaching at that school, one could also raise one’s qualifications.

While teaching, each of the GKI teachers will use an electronic tablet to

receive course material through a network which is built to link the school with the

GKI headquarters in the main city, the research center at Seoul National University

(SNU) and the pedagogical center at Georgia State University. Course materials have

been sent through this link. But, each teacher will also ask each of their students to

complete a survey once a week of about three minutes duration. The survey asks

simple questions about the student and family health (one week) and student and

sibling’s school attendance (second week). Thus, longitudinal data will be gathered

for some period of time. The data will be transmitted, once a week, up to a

centralized database which is accessible to SNU. The validation occurs by examining

trends. When a particular student, classroom, grade level or school falls out of a

trend line for a snapshot (one particular data period) or over time, the anomaly will

be captured by the SNU student network and sent back to the GKI master’s students

in Lusaka for further investigation. This can generate a validity index and provides

for a global flow of information as shown in Figure 2.

25
Figure 2: Resource Flows: Project Empower

This initial test-run is limited in several ways. First, the initial data is simple and

is only designed to test the system, but future data should be linked to situations that

are identified by the community as current challenges. For example, the rural

community faces changing weather patterns that cause them to be uncertain about

crop timing and types of crops. Longitudinal data could be about rain patterns, crop

yields and income and be transmitted to an agricultural specialist, for example.

Second, much of the information that comes out of communities is not in the

form of quantitative data, so a system of gathering and managing qualitative data

also needs to be tested. Using the teachers, the GKI will also begin to understand

how to do this in a sustainable way. The teachers live in the community and, given

that the curriculum training will involve having them get their students back into

26
the community to work on social, political, environmental and health problems there,

it is likely that a means of gathering high quality qualitative data can also be found.

The outcomes of this exercise will include captured trends within local

communities that shows community resilience and problems in facing globally-

linked, locally manifested issues. Over time, a system of how to make local

communities become their own researchers and mechanisms of validating such data

within given community structures will be established.

The entire system is actually more complex. At each step, all teachers, students,

community members and researchers are, at various points, learners, researchers

and teachers. For example, the design of project “Empower” did not get solved (how

to make it valid, reliable and sustainable) until the global professors and researchers

actually walked out to the rural high school and spent most of the day talking with

the teachers. Essentially, on that day, the teachers became the teachers of the

researchers and professors. The students at SNU will also be the researchers as part

of their “reward” in being part of the global network. They will be part of the

research teams involving the global and local professors, researchers and teachers

that write up either the findings or processes. All research teams are vertically

constructed and horizontally integrated. These designs capture the essence of

knowledge economics – understanding that, if properly designed, people will often

freely add their knowledge (which they might otherwise get paid for) to a collective

in exchange for being part of an innovative process that is dynamic.

27
The physical infrastructure of the GKI is quite small – requiring only a small

classroom in Lusaka where the graduate students occasionally meet. The high school

teachers will meet in their own classroom onsite during evenings and weekends.

Most materials will be delivered electronically using the flipped classroom model.

The remaining cost is the construction of knowledge which is reduced by attracting

in global, regional and local researchers, professors and community members into a

dynamic knowledge eco-system from which all get new knowledge that suits their

particular needs.

Conclusion

In a world where knowledge is rapidly expanding, where it is being built

through expanding systems of social networks, and where new systems of learning

are being researched and explored as a consequence, the entire framework of

education is bound to be rethought. As with most revolutions and, certainly, the

adaptations to technology, the first steps is, inevitably, to do what has been done

previously, but with technology as a faster, more efficient tool. Thus, the first

iteration of learning with technology was to spread what was known more rapidly

and more accessible through existing networks – Wikipedia, online lectures, MOOCs,

even open sources textbooks.

But Marshall McLuhan’s often quoted and brilliant foresight is never more

relevant – “the media is the message” (McLuhan, 1964). The spreading of knowledge

28
through networks did not just change the way we receive knowledge, it changed the

entire environment through which it is known, built, organized, accessed and used

for innovation. Each time a new piece of knowledge is added to the network, it does

not just add to existing knowledge as a linear piece of additional knowledge, it

changes the environment – local knowledge becomes part of the global, but also

global changes as a result. Thus, the value in knowing and integrating what is local

is nothing less than knowing what the environment is for the entire world. This is

the essence of value by which a local learning eco-system can be built, sustained and

valued both locally and globally.

In so doing, it requires that old notions of learning and education be re-

examined. Sustainability must be viewed from a local level but can also take

advantage of the new science of social networks which have inherent aspects of self-

organizing and the emerging theory of knowledge economics where knowledge can

be built by paying through knowledge growth and exchange rather than money

currency. Local and expert knowledge have to be put in the perspective of a

globally-linked system of knowledge construction which is dynamic and has aspects

of complex systems. What is local or expert in one lens may have other effects or

notion when seen through another lens (or node or problem set). Finally, relevant

higher education can be viewed as having enormous resources throughout a

community because many parts of a community are knowledge generators,

29
knowledge makers and innovators. Physical resources are rarely limiting and many

people can play the role of researchers, teachers, and learners at various times.

The Zambia prototype shows one design that has existed, now, for three years

and involves aspects of all these emerging trends. At the outset, it began as

collaboration between one of the world’s top research universities and top

professionals in Zambia. As it was innovative in every respect, the decision was to

build it one piece at a time and its higher education component is in place. Now its

data/ sustainability components are being prototyped. A further component – a

global curriculum component – is being designed and will likely get its design

beginning in late 2014.

The fortunate news is that all this innovation no longer depends upon isolated

researchers in top universities. Rather, there is a network of busy, happy, engaged

people all the way from community members to students to researchers and

professors throughout the world that are working on the problem. Each has their

unique knowledge, set of resources, perspectives, ideas and dynamism to be brought

to the process. As the GKA grows, the synergy is quite palpable. The data

component will be validated as much by the engagement of the community as by the

coefficient it produces.

30
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