Conclusion: Conceptualizing and Innovating Education and Work with Networked Learning

The aim of this concluding chapter is to reflect on the book’s central theme of conceptualizing and innovating education and work with networked learning and on the individual chapters’ contributions to developing this theme. In the first section, we present an overview of the book’s chapters which are sorted into three main parts: Part 1: Professional Learning; Part 2: Learning Networks’ Development and Use of Digital Resources; and Part 3: Innovating Networked Learning. We also highlight that a first chapter provides some background to the three parts of the book by tracing the conceptualization of networked learning’s basic terms in past conference papers. In the second section of the Conclusion, we identify a set of issues emerging out of the chapters—and indeed of the International Conference on Networked Learning 2020 from which the chapters stem. In our view, these issues constitute focus areas for future research: design for collaboration in networked learning, complexity of online networked learning in diverse physically located environments, the nature of learning and cognition, and politics and ethics in networked learning.