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I have built a dynamic mental model of Seven Levels of Interaction which describes evolving patterns of experiential, emergent knowledge in the connections between various agents within increasingly complex nested networks, with increasing levels of knowledge thickness. For knowledge is not static, but a set of evolving structural configurations, artifacts of interactive experiences.
The theory of connectivism asserts that individual learning is literally growing new neural configurations by being presented with experiences . Those neural configurations are activated in the future when presented with the same types of experiences. A person sees the pattern. (Read Christopher Alexander on Pattern Language for more on this.) This experience of pattern recognition (the etymology says it all: re-cognition, to know again) can take a number of forms, as follows.
- One can be looking at data and recognize a pattern and thus gain information – data in formation. Data only becomes information when the energy has been structured for the receiver for which it is intended. Information evolves because each look is a new look, with a new configuration of experience.
- Experiencing patterns within information grows knowledge.
- Over time, knowledge which integrates experiences using several of our multiple intelligences flourishes into understanding. This where people start to become engaged with one another.
- Understanding crystallizes into wisdom—stories, poetry, songs, sacred texts, metaphors, myths, symbols, and archetypes. Wisdom is both personal and collective, the legacy of the past that helps us navigate the present.
- Persons of wisdom may generate a vision, the growing of a new pattern for the future. “Vision” has been called by many names—imagination, ingenuity, insight—and is the precursor of change. Einstein said, “It is imagination that gives shape to the universe.”
- People who work together to implement a vision are embodying the noösphere—being one mind, accountable to one another. “The earth and I are of one mind.” (attributed to Nez Perce Chief Joseph)
At one end of the spectrum are thin interactions, mostly between individuals or teams. At the other end of the spectrum, networks and communities of networks engage in thick interactions, which combine elements from a broad repertoire of interaction types. When interacting on many levels simultaneously, a person can take a different role (of those described by Etienne Wenger) in each level—peripheral, inbound, insider, boundary, or outbound — and the roles are fluid.
The Seven Levels of Interaction continuum is an evolution of what was originally termed the Data Information Knowledge and Wisdom hierarchy (DIKW), which has been evolved and adapted by a number of writers since the 1920s. My Seven Levels of Interaction model takes a connectivist/relationalist approach, and looks at interactions in terms of a typology of agent connection (from individuals to communities of networks).
Standing Stone at Shalom Mountain Retreat and Study Center
Shalom Mountain Retreat and Study Center has been loving crafted into a New York Catskills mountainside over a period of several decades. Climb a slope steep enough to get your heart pounding, to stand in awe, in a hidden meadow, between four pink granite standing stones several stories high, spaced several football fields’ length apart. Deep in the woods, you’ll encounter a yurt meditation room, a mossy labyrinth, an outdoor mud bath, many embraceable trees, and a rambling white frame retreat center where thousands of people have come over the years to learn how to become more conscious, loving and fully alive.
To provide encouragement for these retreatants in their day-to-day world after they leave the exalted moments of the retreat setting, support groups are active in many cities in the US and Canada. They offer regional retreats, potluck dinners, heart-to-heart communication, and more. Here in Chicago, I have been a part of the formation and evolution of the Shalom Heartland support group. A group of five individuals self-selected as the “Shalom Heartland Leadership Circle”. Over the past four years I’ve observed how we coalesced, and how each one of us has manifested individual responsibility, cooperation, collaboration, and intra-organizational plasticity (one node in the network can take over work typically undertaken by another). We have engaged with one another to think about our purpose, and to create activities here in the Midwest, grow our Shalom Heartland membership, communicate with other support groups, and evolve as an organization.
Fritzof Capra has said, “In nature there is no “above” or “below,” and there are no hierarchies. There are only networks nesting within other networks.” Our Shalom Heartland Leadership Circle is one of those nested networks, within the larger network of shared leadership which is the ineffable Shalom Process.
Networks are comprised of any grouping of connected agents. The concept of agents is nicely defined by Alvaro Moreno and Arantza Etxeberria in their paper, “Agency in Natural and Artificial Systems” ( published in Artificial Life,Vol. 11, Issue 1-2 (Jan 2005)), as entities in a network which can interact adaptively with their context in order to contribute to their own maintenance.
In social networks, some of the agents are human. In social learning networks, the intent is learning.
Our Shalom Heartland Leadership circle is a prototypical social learning network. It is a complex system in that it consists of interacting units and exhibits emergent properties (properties emerge from the interaction of the parts which are not properties of the parts themselves).
Just like the human nervous structure, a network of humans interacts internally and externally by continually modulating its structure. This includes many types of social learning networks with which we are familiar: families, schools, businesses, faith-based organizations, non-governmental organizations, nations, and so on.
A healthy network is one that learns. A healthy network has characteristics necessary for life and growth, as well as for its adaption to the environment, and cognition. The nodes of the network are engaged with one another. This results in self-organization, or homeostasis and synergy. As a network self-organizes, the nodes manifest individual responsibility, cooperation, collaboration, and that very desirable feature of intra-organizational plasticity I referred to earlier. At a more complex level of engagement, the nodes in a network engage with one another in cognition, creativity and growth, distribution, and reproduction or evolution.
This, in a nutshell, is my framework for a learning theory which I call relationalism. Relationalism is similar to George Siemens’ connectivism, which situates learning in the experiential activity of the nodes in a network. Relationalism, however, is a more robust, holistic and ecological view of the interactions between the learner, the educator and the complex environment in which learning occurs.
Educational looping flows: from DensityDesign
George Siemens, Stephen Downes, Terry Anderson and Jon Dron all talk about emergent learning in social learning networks, and implicitly and explicitly discuss structural elements and their affordances.
Jon Dron asserts in his 2007 book, Control and Constraint in E-learning: Choosing When to Choose, that “The ongoing challenge for developers and users of social software in e-learning is therefore to build systems and processes in which the structures that develop are capable of being pedagogically sound and supportive of learning communities.” I do wish Dron would have used the phrase “learning experience designers” instead of “developers”. Part of the reason people don’t learn is that the environments for learning which we present have been mostly just developed, without the careful consideration afforded by using the templates, guides, processes and conceptual approaches of a design discipline. If any of you have ever used WebCT, for example, you know what I mean. Nonetheless, Dron does specify design principles which imply a structural framework for social learning which begs to be revealed and integrated with conceptual treasures in interaction design drawn from other fields.
In reviewing Dron’s work, Terry Anderson commented, “To my knowledge, these are the first attempts at extracting underlying design principles or patterns for educational social software.”
There are lots of cognitive tools out there to help LxD practictioners dive into the interdependence of social, cognitive and affective interactions of the various agents of networked systems, and the affordances of these interactions which lead to learning. We can build our understanding of that complexity on a very sturdy foundation of the proven mental models, concept maps, metaphors, and design principles of interaction design, also known as IxD.
The discipline of interaction design employs design patterns, or optimal solutions to common interaction design problems within specific contexts. “Design patterns help designers align with standards, they speed design, and they often extend or transform into new contexts or applications.” (from IxDA). The field of learning interaction design (LxD) can adapt and augment these pattern libraries.
Familiarity with fundamental works in the field of interaction design will also help learning interaction designers. Among the leaders in interaction design are the principals of the Nielsen Norman Group: Jakob Nielsen, Don Norman, and Bruce Tognazzini. Their research and publications are numerous; a seminal work was The Design of Everyday Things (1988). Jakob Nielsen’s book, Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity (2000) is the best-selling book about user interfaces, with more than a quarter million copies in print in 22 languages. In terms of interface design specifically, Tognazzini’s (2003) First Principles of Interaction Design can be a baseline for the development of principles of social learning design. The work of these three individuals has set the standards for web usability, intranet usability, email usability, and user experience for special audience segments such as users with disabilities, children, teenagers, and seniors.
On a more abstract level, Paul Hekkert has distinguished three components or levels of product experience: aesthetic pleasure (gratification of the senses), attribution of meaning, and emotional response. In his core affect theory, Hekkert particularly focuses on emotional response, or affect, as a direct response to aesthetic pleasure and the cognitive activities involved in creating meaning. Since the sixties, affect has attracted the attention in various disciplines involved in product research, such as marketing, consumer research, ergonomics, economics, and engineering.
Read Designing Pleasurable Products, in which usability expert Patrick Jordan analyzes the design properties of usable interfaces and discusses the role of pleasure in product usage, which can and should also be applied to the design of learning experiences.
This blog post is getting kind of long so I’ll cut short my roll call of interaction design gurus and just end with a list of some of the tasks before us in the field of learning interaction design:
- point out gaps in the existing research
- enable methodical and systematic interaction design for social learning
- improve the design of learning applications and platforms
- help establish a common language for social learning research and design
- assist instructional design in targeting specific audiences and competencies
- stimulate the development of design patterns for social learning
- help develop unified theories of social learning
My mother and father, Katie Funk Wiebe and Walter Wiebe, 1947
My red-haired grandmother, Anna Janzen Funk, left school after the third grade to help the family survive the Russian Revolution. During World War II, my mother, Katie Funk Wiebe, declined a scholarship to study physics and enrolled in secretarial school, partly because my grandfather knew that a physicist would support the war effort, something against the family’s pacificistic beliefs, but also because that would enable her to quickly support herself. But both my grandmother and my mother were enthusiastic life-long learners. Their context was as Ukrainian, Mennonite immigrants to northern Saskatchewan, Canada, living in close-knit small farming communities. And that’s the socio-cultural context into which I was born, and everything I have learned in my life is meaningful within that very specific matrix of people, geography, culture, cosmology, and theology.
Every shred of meaning that I cherish is inter-subjective.
How are values, beliefs and thinking manifested? Gerry Stahl describes shared meaning as an emergent property of discourse and interaction. It is NOT “just some kind of statistical average of individual mental meanings, an agreement among pre-existing opinions, or an overlap of internal representations. . . It is not necessarily reducible to opinions or understandings of individuals.” Socially shared meaning is made visible in the interactions of agents belonging the group. In other words, watch my behavior and conversations with my family, my co-workers at Orbitz Worldwide, and with my friends at Quaker meeting, Shalom Mountain Retreat and Study Center, Reba Place Fellowship, and Evanston Home Educators.
In my interactions in those venues, plenty of shared meaning is emerging all the time.
Social learning: my nephew's tool acquisition activities, with two cousins and a mom
Some may question all this noösphere stuff and argue against the existence of any such woo-woo thing as a “group mind”. You may have more of a “black box” approach, thinking that human learning is personal, kind of mysterious, and that’s it.
“Given that we have for millennia become used to taking learning and thinking as activities of individual minds, it is hard to conceive of them as primarily group activities,” says Gerry Stahl, of of the College of Information Science and Technology at Drexel University.
For a long time I’ve seen everything, everyone, as interconnected and interdependent. That is indubitably a by-product of:
- studying Tielhard de Chardin at Tabor College and Marshall McLuhan at the J-School at the University of Kansas
- going over the top with the psychedelic mushrooms and cactus in my twenties
- a lifetime of meditation
- being a Canadian Mennonite and a Quaker
- being a member of the Benjamin Barber fan club
- too many hours on Facebook
- other socio-cultural factors yet to be analyzed
So for me, social learning is not a question of ontology, but rather of methodology. I am interested in learning the how interdependent cognition works. In other words, exactly what processes are involved in developing shared meaning amongst multiple individuals? What are the various agents, and what are their possible interactions? What are the artifacts of their interactions?
As a designer of experiences for learning, I want to know what’s in my toolbox. In upcoming posts, I plan to explore those topics, of agents and their interactions in social learning.
Stahl, G. (2005). Group cognition in computer-assisted collaborative Learning. In Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, April 2005, Vol. 21 Issue 2, p79-90.
A tug of war at our 2009 family reunion: note the lurker in the white sunbonnet
I work for an international public company which is engaged in the stimulating task of adopting an Agile process for software envisioning and development. We have become a community of practice as we share and learn from one another. Together, we are looking at questions such as: What Agile techniques work for us and which don’t? How does the Agile process change the way we work together? What do we know we know? What are our best practices?
This is social learning, or informal learning, and everyone in the community of practice can join in.
However, not everyone participates equally. Jakob Nielson‘s study on participation inequality indicates that on interactive web sites, there is a tendency for most users to participate very little (if at all) and a few members of the community account for a disproportionately large amount of the activity. His research found that user participation generally follows a 90-9-1 Rule:
- 90% of users are “lurkers”
- 9% contribute from time to time, but other priorities dominate their time
- 1% participate very often and account for most of the contributions
Can we apply the 90-9-1 rule to an online environment, such as our company’s wiki, where a community of practice meets every day for social learning? A casual review of who’s contributing to our corporate wiki seems to add credence to the 90-9-1 rule, for it is the same small number of people who are contributing to the wiki, day after day.
But — this begs a couple of questions:
- Does a person’s participatory role change over time?
- Is “lurking” a bad thing?
Does a person’s participatory role change over time?
Etienne Wenger describes five trajectories of participatory behavior in his 1999 book, Communities of Practice: Learning, meaing and identity:
- Legitimate peripheral participation, not fully participating (lurkers)
- Inbound, headed toward full participation
- Insider, fully accepted into the community
- Boundary, sustaining membership in related communities of practice and “brokering” interactions between them
- Outbound, in the process of leaving a community
The implication of Wenger’s five trajectories of participation is that a person’s participatory role can change over time. If so, the designer of social learning systems must think, in Wenger’s words: “…fundamentally in terms of rhythms by which communities and individuals continually renew themselves.”
Is lurking a bad thing?
Wenger describes the concept of legitimate peripheral participation as the process by which newcomers become experienced members and eventually old timers of a community of practice. They start by engaging in low-risk, basic activities (like reading someone else’s wiki post). This is a way that newcomers become acquainted with the tasks, vocabulary, and organizing principles of the community.
As I examine the patterns of participation in our company’s Agile community of practice, my goal is to uncover the rhythms of participation, to see if those newcomers become inbound, heading toward full participation. I wonder if I can unveil the ways in which this participatory role change can be facilitated by the “insiders”. I am interested to discover if we have “boundary” members, and how they behave. And what are the signs that someone is in the process of becoming “outbound”?
Comment on a sugar cane field building, Jamaica, 2009
In accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, Al Gore used the occasion to warn us:
“We, the human race, are confronting a planetary emergency—a threat to the survival of our civilization that is gathering ominous and destructive potential even as we gather here. The Earth has a fever, and the fever is rising. The experts have told us it is not a passing affliction that will heal by itself. We are what is wrong, and we must make it right.”
Our noösphere is dis-eased. There are places in the noösphere where interactions are thin and lacking dimension. The connections between agents are sparse. An example occurs with large-scale organization which are not accountable to any civic entity, such as:
- transnational corporations which compete with each other for scarce resources, especially in Eurasia where extreme population growth makes massive demands on technological advance
- transnational churches
- some institutions of global governance, such as the World Bank
These are unaccountable organizations — agents with power which exceeds that of municipalities, provinces and nations. There are no standards for their behavior, and no way that any individual, or any existing civic entity can make it accountable. To use Benjamin Barber‘s language, these organizations are not interdependent with the rest of us. As a result, the energetic flow between these agents and the rest of us is compromised. The overall result is insufficiency in stewardship and distribution of physical resources, and longstanding global conflicts around those issues.
I invite you to visualize, however, a healthy noösphere which regulates the biosphere so that our planet can be sustained. Because I like the Earth, and I want it to be around in good shape for those who come after me.
How can we change those thin and flat interactions in some parts of the noösphere so that they become rich, juicy and lively?
We will have to learn, fast.
But will our current ways of learning support us?
Etienne Wenger argues passionately in his prospectus for Learning for a Small Planet, “Our current ways of learning have fallen behind; they are not up to the task. We need new models about how to proceed and new visions of what is possible. Learning how to learn is a key to taking our problems into our hands and solving them. We need a new blueprint for learning how to learn—as individuals, communities, organizations, nations, and as an interconnected world.”
Fundamental is changing our systems of formal education. Broadly speaking, young people are run through a linear, factory system to prepare them to work in linear, factory systems. Around the world, the design of educational systems reflects the theories of learning available at the time they were built—behaviorism, cognitivism, even the relatively conscious approach of constructivism. These educational systems, however, were not designed with an understanding of how human and non-human agents are interconnected and interdependent parts of the biosphere. In today’s educational systems, uneven or no consideration is given to many of the agents involved in learning, such as collective agents, analytical software, databases, feeds, and user interfaces. Reflecting a materialistic world view, knowledge is viewed as a thing that can transferred from head to head – not as a system or a process that involves the whole person and the whole network, or as described by George Siemens’ book, Knowing Knowledge.
Distance education researcher Stephen Downes has commented that distance education is at the crossroads: “On the one hand, we have developed tools and systems intended to support traditional classroom based learning. On the other hand, we could (should?) be developing tools and systems to support immersive learning. We should be developing for dynamic, immersive, living systems.”
We will have to make basic changes to our learning systems, in order to be able to grow thick connections in our own neural networks, or between persons and in our larger networks.
Patterns of learning: a labyrinth at Kirkridge Retreat Center
Let’s explore the fractal-like, interlaced, and multi-dimensional patterns of evolutionary cognitive behavior which comprise the global noösphere described by Tielhard de Chardin in his 1955 book, The Phenomenon of Man. In other words, patterns of learning.
But before that, I want to establish that yes, I do believe that life is movement, and that we human folk are evolving spiritually. Here is a summary of how it is going in my own family:
- My Wiebe and Funk grandparents had a basic faith in God which carried them from feudal Ukrainian villages, through the Russian revolution, to a bustling and prosperous involvement in Canadian prairie culture.
- My parents caught this faith from them and buttressed it with a system of intellectual beliefs constructed from a dedicated study of contemporary Christian theology.
- Then I came along, not a very faith-ful person, impatient with traditional religious belief systems, but eager to develop my consciousness of myself, the earth and its inhabitants, and the Mystery of this planet, this solar system, this cosmos.
- Someday, one of my great-great-etc-grandchildren will understand humankind’s place and purpose in the universe. So, that’s my own belief system.
This kind of evolution of consciousness is occurring both individually and collectively everywhere around the globe.
A glimpse of the noösphere: Nine Inch Nails tour on Google Earth
The collective part is the noösphere, the layer of consciousness, the self-organizing and evolving system of all the interacting intelligences on Earth, which includes our embodied brains as well as our cognitive artifacts, such as memes and language.
One could argue that the noösphere includes all the multiple human intelligences noted by Howard Gardner: linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalistic and existential intelligence.
Another peek at the noösphere: garden plants at Catcha Falling Star, Negril, Jamaica
The noösphere also includes the intelligences of animals, plants, bacteria, rocks and water. All living systems are different sorts of knowledge working itself forward.
More agents in the noösphere: Power lines and vines on the West End, Jamaica
I also ascribe agency to non-living things, such as networked computer systems, cables, phone lines, wifi, radio frequencies, and so forth, which, (sorry, Marshall McLuhan), are not simply mechanical extensions of ourselves, but alive, too, somehow, as they intimately work with us and the rest of the biosphere in a process of continual restructuring (learning).
If a geography of the noösphere could ever be drawn, it would be like a fractal, in that it would be recursive, and self-referential. But somehow, at the same time there would be lots of novel bits, too. Because when connections are made, which is learning, something new is made.
