Using mLearning and MOOCs to understand chaos, emergence, and complexity in education

In this paper, we look at how the massive open online course (MOOC) format developed by connectivist researchers and enthusiasts can help analyze the complexity, emergence, and chaos at work in the field of education today. We do this through the prism of a MobiMOOC, a six-week course focusing on mLearning that ran from April to May 2011. MobiMOOC embraced the core MOOC components of self-organization, connectedness, openness, complexity, and the resulting chaos, and, as such, serves as an interesting paradigm for new educational orders that are currently emerging in the field. We discuss the nature of participation in MobiMOOC, the use of mobile technology and social media, and how these factors contributed to a chaotic learning environment with emerging phenomena. These emerging phenomena resulted in a transformative educational paradigm.

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Designing for learning: Online social networks as a classroom environment

This paper deploys notions of emergence, connections, and designs for learning to conceptualize high school students’ interactions when using online social media as a learning environment. It makes links to chaos and complexity theories and to fractal patterns as it reports on a part of the first author’s action research study, conducted while she was a teacher working in an Australian public high school and completing her PhD. The study investigates the use of a Ning online social network as a learning environment shared by seven classes, and it examines students’ reactions and online activity while using a range of social media and Web 2.0 tools.

The authors use Graham Nuthall’s (2007) “lens on learning” to explore the social processes and culture of this shared online classroom. The paper uses his extensive body of research and analyses of classroom learning processes to conceptualize and analyze data throughout the action research cycle. It discusses the pedagogical implications that arise from the use of social media and, in so doing, challenges traditional models of teaching and learning.

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Emergent Learning and Learning Ecologies in Web 2.0

In this paper we argue that it might be useful for educational institutions to actively explore alternative frameworks such as complexity theory, communities of practice, connectivism, and the underlying threads of  emergent learning to inform their planning and strategy. We will attempt to bring together elements of all these  areas of research and practice  to develop a framework for emergent learning that can be applied across education, work, and social networking, with their increasingly blurred boundaries.

We explore the following:

• What are the conditions that enable emergent, self-organised learning to occur and to flourish?
• What mechanisms of validation are effective, can emergent learning networks be self-correcting, and if so, how?
• Is it possible to link, or even integrate, emergent and prescribed learning, and if so, how?

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Read also: Presentation

Presentation Recording

Complexity and Personal Learning Environments

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In a recent post to Dave’s Educational Blog, Dave Cormier made a number of comments about MOOCs (massively open online courses) in general, #PLENK2010 in particular, and personal learning networks/environments. Most of what he had to say was, as usual, quite insightful and very much in line with the way I tend to think about these issues, but he expressed a rather forceful caveat about the phrase personal learning environment (PLE). In short, he does not like its potential emphasis on the personal, or individual learner distinct from the group.