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Coworking & Zones of Proximal Development

Quick repost from the coworking google group. This was too good not to share here.

A member of the Global Coworking Google Group named Garth posted the following:

I spent Earth Hour chatting with an old buddy about his passion, psychology.  When I told him what we’re trying to achieve with coworking, he suggested I look up “zone of proximal development.”  Any of you have enough psych background to assess whether there is some value in reviewing the literature on that?  Could it be applied to coworking?

So I don’t have much of a psych “background” other than my armchair interest in it as Coworking (like most things) has become less about business and more about people for me. Here’s my response, with some minor edits for clarity from the original post to the Google Group:

I’ve spent a good amount of the last year reading more articles and books on psychology, sociology, and cognitive science for ideas and lessons to apply to coworking…chiefly for the purpose of finding terms like this that could lead to more study of the context. It’s so often that I observe a pattern and the main thing keeping me from understanding it more is not knowing what the pattern is called or means, so I can’t look up a study or research paper on it. Best I can do is write about it and hope somebody posts about it.

Interestingly enough, I think this concept is a meta explanation of exactly that experience. Here’s what I mean:

A quick skim of the concept makes me think there’s a lot of application here. It also reinforces some of my theories that coworking is most valuable when it’s not a room full of “likeminded people” doing the same thing (startups, law, technology, creative, communication, writing, art, business, science, education, etc) but instead a room full of “likeminded people” doing DIFFERENT things (startups, law, technology, creative, communication, writing, art, business, science, education, etc.).

That is to say, especially as adults, we’re less likely to learn from peers that are too similar. We spend too much time reinforcing each other’s existing habits and knowledge instead of creating space for new knowledge to be exchanged. That “space” isn’t physical space like a coworking space, but conceptual space, like the “zone of proximal development”.

Essentially, we share what we know. We don’t share what we don’t know. And we don’t know what we don’t know. Coworking can help break down those barriers.

Coworking, in its best forms, creates a zone where we’re surrounded by people aren’t limited by knowing what we don’t know (or know what we do know) and it can be shared in loose contexts and formats that we’re all increasingly comfortable with.

Cool shit. Thanks for sharing, Garth.


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28
Mar 2011
AUTHOR Alex Hillman
CATEGORY

coworking, indyhall

COMMENTS 1 Comment
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  • http://loudfeed.com drron

    I’m glad I followed your link to the Wikipedia article on Zone of Proximal Development, as just the other day I was trying to remember the name of that Soviet psychologist (Vygotsky), whose work I read about during my post-doc in neuro-psychology over 25 years ago. In the 1980′s I was also part of an early version of coworking that involved around 60 Mac developers, so I have observed the effects of “coworking” for decades.

    Coworkers Understand Us Better Than Google and Filter Solutions In certain circumstances, Google alone cannot compete with a coworker, especially when we do not know the best “search terms” to use in a question. That coworker might use Google to provide the answer derived from a better search or just know the answer. One of the best benefits is when a coworker, watching you perform a task, offers you a much more efficient method of performing the task. Last year I was once again using a command line interface. A coworker watching what I was doing showed me a couple of simple ways to use Text Mate instead of command line editors like vi, which I had struggled with a couple of decades ago and was now revisiting. I already owned Text Mate. I had some experience with the problem, but there were a couple of “holes” in my knowledge. A coworker is much better than Google in identifying the “hole” in your knowledge and acting as a filter to get you to the information you need. We all perform many tasks that we could probably do more efficiently. But, how do we learn those more efficient solutions? Do we read all the manuals? We often continue utilizing a method of doing something, which we know to be less than optimal, because reading the manual today would take longer than the less efficient method we’re employing. A coworker can act as a filter to help you traverse a more efficient path from the problem to the solution.

    Now, I need to refresh my memory about Vygotsky and re-read some of his work. Thanks for being virtually proximal and leading me down a search path that helped me to remember a name that was on the tip of my tongue a couple of days ago, but irretrievable!