European Journal of Education, Vol. 41, Nos. 3/4, 2006 © 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. Blackwell Publishing Ltd.Oxford, UKEJEDEuropean Journal of Education0141-8211Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2006September 2006413/4••••Original Articles European Journal of EducationEllen Christiansen & Tom Nyvang Understanding the Adoption of TELEs — The Importance of Management ELLEN CHRISTIANSEN & TOM NYVANG 1 Introduction At the individual level, self-regulated learning consists of forethought, perfor- mance or volitional control and self-reflection (Zimmerman, 2000). In order to grasp the interplay between environment and learning, however, a systemic approach is needed. Viewing the learner, the tools and the environment as a system can be done in two ways: either as a phenomenon that is regulated by laws and can be uncovered through experimental research, a sort of ‘hard systems thinking’ where these three components are seen as ‘billiard balls’ that are subjected to interaction laws that make future outcome predictable if circumstances can be kept constant, or as acts of meaning, of ongoing interpretation, a sort of ‘soft systems thinking’ where, by observing and interacting with these three compo- nents, the researcher tries to uncover the dynamics that create meaning internally in the system. Here, we have applied the latter approach whereby the learner, the tools and the environment are viewed as participants in a wider learning system of relationships of feedback across the boundaries that make the learner, the tools and the environment appear as entities in the physical world. In doing so, we build on Bateson’s ecological epistemology of mind, in which the relationships between learner, tools and environment are understood to make up ‘a thinking system’. Bateson understands thinking as a metabolic relationship driven by feedback that is generated in loops of trial and error and defines a thinking system as one of relationships comprising the individual thinker, the tools with which to think, and the surrounding environment: . . . a redwood forest or a coral reef with its aggregate of organisms inter- locking in their relationships has the necessary general structure. The energy for the responses of every organism is supplied from its metabolism, and the total system acts self-correctively in various ways. A human society is like this with closed loops of causation. Every human organization shows both the self-corrective characteristic and has the potentiality for runaway . . . . What “thinks” and engages in “trial and error” is the man plus the computer plus the environment. And the lines between man, computer and environment are purely artificial, fictitious lines. They are lines across the pathways along which information or difference is transmitted. They are not boundaries of the thinking system. What thinks is the total system which engages in trial and error, which is man plus environment (Bateson, 2000).