This post closely follows the structure of an article by Y Engestrom entitled FROM COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE TO MYCORRHIZAE. A webcast on the subject is also available.

Determining the proper object of information sharing is a key question for activity theory. In this metaphorical story, nurses’ tweets and online photographs relating to an informal, extra-curricular activity may eventually be accepted by the education authorities as a valid alternative to the institutional e-portfolio limited only to formal course materials and work experience.

The question of whether this learning object is best compared with a tree, a mushroom, a tuber or a mycelium is a matter of theoretical debate.

We can criticise the idea of the “community of practice” here as ahistorical and unnecessarily abstract. For example, nurses are organised not around a “master” but a “matron”. The matron was traditionally a strong mother-figure authority, phased out in the 1960s as part of an NHS reform process and brought back again recently as part of another. Thus it makes little sense to compare their training with apprenticeship as it might have existed in some traditional manual trades.

We can contrast the two 19^th century concepts of the romantic “Gemeinschaft” – a unified hospital full of nice nurses who are loyal to their collective, see the matron as their figurehead, and care mainly about the patients . And the hierarchical “Gesellschaft” of nasty scheming nurses who only care about advancing their own careers. A good NHS manager will try for a balance of these by providing different sorts of motivational and team-building strategies to manage “the process”.

The problem, according to Engeström, is that the trainee nurse making an e-portfolio is not really engaged in a linear “process”. Some nurses form out-of-work collectives which engage in activities such as roller-blading or participating in street protests. We could thus posit the future possibility of a “runaway object” in the form of a volunteer emergency nursing service on roller blades that would frame its actions partly as a protest against commercialisation of the health service.

Thus we can come to see the formal bureaucratic structure of the hospital as something like a tree. A tree depends for its existence on a complicated symbiotic relationship with the soil, this is an especially popular metaphor in north eastern Europe where people are keen on striding through damp forests to look for mushrooms. We can contrast this with the French philosophical taste for the rhizome which is good for making salads, or in the case of the potato – pommes frites.

Mycorrizae depend for their nourishment on the photosynthesis happening in the nearby trees (NHS funding) but the trees in turn get their water and minerals from the mycorrizae.

The metaphor can also be used backwards: “The mycelium is the Earth’s natural internet.”

Parallels appear in other natural systems such as social insects, which also seem to exhibit a kind of distributed intelligence, and in human activities:

• jazz improvisation, where a simple melody does not tell you what note to play but is still there in the background
• the way Whorf thought the Hopi (without a linear sense of time) could still imagine getting ready for something that was there in the future.

Mushrooms can seem to spring up overnight. So when the nurses get together and start roller-skating to road accidents everybody will say “that’s really cool”. They will probably document their exploits using twitter and uploaded photographs and thus the phenomenon spreads rapidly.

A similar venture is already under way in the area of medical research.