As long as others are interested, I will add my two cents here (esp. since j has informed me that lurker mode is no longer working). Below is a piece on "online self-organizing social systems" we published in Quarterly Review of Distance Ed. The goal is to see if principles of biological self-org can be used to describe what's happening in a very large web board environment (I'm an instructional technologist by trade). http://wiley.ed.usu.edu/docs/ososs.pdf As a trivia bit, "osu" (pron. "oh - s") in Japanese translates loosely "what's up?", so we decided that ososs would be a great acronym, since is sounds like two people greeting each other. =) D Robert Luke wrote:
This is an interesting thread. With respect to knowledge management and fostering involvement in online communities, I have been working with the term open source learning (OSL) that lends itself quite well here. We are currently seeking to measure this kind of involvement in a community learning network study, using the metaphor of open source to describe the kind of iterative participation and development of social capital within community networks in general.
Also of interest may be Rajiv Shah's (who is on this list, I think) work on the social construction of code. There are interesting parallels between what I term open source learning (to describe the process of learning within networks) and the discussion about how code, as socio-technically constructed, contributes to this process. Rajiv can say more, but I have found his ideas very useful. He has an article linked from here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=328920
Also, I have a short article about OSL online here: http://smaug.java.utoronto.ca/~luke/articles/network_society/osl_cop.htm called “open source learning: developing communities of practice in the network society”
I am very interested in these ideas, as they relate very much to my own work on community learning networks, digital citizenship, diversity and accessibility, etc. Also relevant is Lucy Suchman’s work on situated actions, and Lave and Wenger’s community of practice work.
Best, Robert
-- http://wiley.ed.usu.edu/ "I'm much more interested in being right today than I am in maintaining that I was right yesterday."