Long-time readers of this blog will remember that I have a long standing interest in self-organization in informal online learning communities (e.g., the 2002 paper on Online Self-Organizing Social Systems, the 2003 paper OSOSS – Crisis / Response, the 2004 paper Sociability and Scalability in Online Learning Environments, etc.). This is an area which I continue to watch with interest.
So I was extremely interested in this new article, Transport Layer Identification of P2P Super nodes:
Although self-organized systems appear very effective under the assumption that all individuals follow the same simple set of rules, the presence of key, well-informed individuals altering their behavior according to their prior experience might generally enhance performance even further.
The article was recently reviewed in Wired:
“This begins to change how we think about self-organization,” said Nicola Plowes, a behavioral ecologist and ant specialist at Arizona State University, who was not involved in the research. “Informed individuals making those decisions actually result in a process that is more efficient than a simple homogeneous self-organized system.” The findings will be exciting for technologists and mathematicians who use insect-based algorithms, Plowes believes.
The findings should also be interesting for MOOC and other educational researchers for whom self-organization provides a major conceptual framework.
So how do we make people aware that David Wiley has a particular interest in self-organization in online learning communities. I think we need an online who’s who in the MOOC world where we can cross reference people to their areas of interest.
Agreed. I’m not sure of the mechanism, but a more efficient way to find people along with their areas of interest is needed. Right now I am relying far too much on chance encounters.