Academic network and sustainable learning environments
The article focuses on one academic network involving 12 supervisors of participatory action research and their 30 postgraduate students at the University of the Free State in South Africa as they create sustainable learning environments (SuLE) in 30 schools in South Africa. These 12 academics work in collaboration with colleagues from one other African and two European universities. Their students individually and collaboratively create learning communities in their own respective research settings involving learners, teachers, parents and all instances of civil society working together to formulate practical strategies to enhance an aspect of schooling at a time. Face-to-face interactions do take place among researchers and participants who become co-researchers in the process. However Information and Communication Technologies are used extensively to facilitate the activity of the network. It is in these contexts that issues of hierarchies in terms of power emerge, knowledge forms and so on. The question the author responds to in this paper using Manuel Castell’s notion of‘space of flow’ therefore is; how does this network function? That is; how is the network mind distributed and memory stored? How is power distributed and how can the effectiveness of this network be evaluated?