ABSTRACT
At the beginning of the 21st century we have seen how educational activities and work practices increasingly take place in networks and across multiple and diverse settings and contexts. One could say that society has become increasingly particularized into sectors and sub-sectors with an increasing division of labor. In each sector and sub-sector, the development of knowledge results in increasingly specialized work practices, which represent a particular configuration of professional languages, technologies and organizational arrangements. The consequence is that expertise and knowledge increasingly appear as in-depth specialization within local contexts. Such specialization creates obvious challenges for knowledge integration. Domain-specific knowledge is not always easy to translate into general insights, since the parallels to other settings and activities are not obvious. The implication is that knowledge does not travel easily between different settings, such as schools, workplaces, and leisure actives. This creates additional challenges when problems in society and its different institutions require solutions that go beyond the local context.
