Conclusion

This chapter contributes to our understanding of the challenges the digital era presents us by proposing a socio-technical framework, which emphasizes feedback as the critical link connecting social systems and technical structures intended to support the transformation of information into actionable knowledge supported by meaningful learning strategies. The analysis presented explored the social life of information in the context of decisions and with an emphasis on the role of ICTs as key feedback systems supporting a learning-based approach to decision-making. In proposing a learning-supported view of decision-making, the discussion identified some of the key principles of the socio-technical framework. The main thrust of the framework is the alignment of social structures and social actors in ways that seek to integrate different modes of learning with different models of decision-making. This integration is to be supported by a range of decision-learning structures (in ICT systems), which create different feedback levels. These combined, have a bearing on the alignment between decision actions in relation to what, how and why one learns. This alignment however, is acknowledged to be fraudulent, with a number of challenges not the least of which is how one learns to balance personal and collective learning priorities.