Felicia Sullivan's List: Self_Organizing

This is a survey tool was distributed by one of the Occupy Research group members.

The Mycelium School holds three core beliefs. Education for the 21st Century should:

1) Facilitate a textured understanding of self

2) Provide diverse and learner-centered opportunities for the participant to develop connection and purpose

3) Provide the tools needed to manifest meaningful connection in the world

"The essence of life is (interconnected) process. If the processing of material-energy and information ends, life also ends. The defining characteristic of life is the ability to maintain, for a significant period, a steady state in which the entropy (or disorder) within the system is significantly lower than its non-living surroundings. So the sequel to Renan’s Law is: “And living systems want to stay connected in order to survive”. We see the echo’s of this in the Internet Freedom protection projects.












Living systems according to Parent (1996) are by definition “open self-organizing systems that have the special characteristics of life and interact with their environment. This takes place by means of information and material-energy exchanges. Living systems can be as simple as a single cell or as complex as a supranational organization such as the European Union. Regardless of their complexity, they each depend upon the same essential twenty subsystems (or processes) in order to survive and to continue the propagation of their species or types beyond a single generation”.[4]"

Sara Wedeman writes and researchers on the links between community and organizational success

"Rhizomatic learning is a way of thinking about learning based on ideas described by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in a thousand plateaus. A rhizome, sometimes called a creeping rootstalk, is a stem of a plant that sends out roots and shoots as it spreads. It is an image used by D&G to describe the way that ideas are multiple, interconnected and self-relicating. A rhizome has no beginning or end… like the learning process. I wrote my first article on the topic ‘rhizomatic education: community as curriculum’ in an article I wrote in 2008."

"Books are good at telling us things. Lectures are good at telling us things. You are not making a book or a lecture. You are making a game. Games are good at showing us things.”"

an excellent run down of motivatoins, styles and tactics used in MOOCs

ased on the Demand-Control-Support (DCS) model, the present paper aims to investigate the influence of job characteristics such as job demands, job control, social support at work and self-directed learning orientation on the work-related learning behaviour of workers. The present study was conducted in a centre for part-time vocational education in Flanders (Belgium). The students in the centre work for 3 days a week and attend school during the other two days. A questionnaire using scales adapted from validated instruments was used. Students were asked to complete the questionnaire with the job in mind they were doing at present. A total of 115 students from different sectors completed the questionnaire. It was assumed that high scores for self-directed learning orientation and high scores for the job characteristics job demands, job control and social support would be associated with more work-related learning behaviour. All scales had acceptable Cronbach alpha values. The results of the linear regression analyses indicated that only the self-directed learning orientation scale predicted the work-related learning behaviour to a significant extent.

Abstract: We seek to identify work practices that make Free/Libre Open Source Software 
(FLOSS) development teams effective. Particularly important to team effectiveness is decision 
making. In this paper, we report on an inductive qualitative analysis of 360 decision episodes 
of six FLOSS development teams. Our analysis revealed diversity in decision-making 
practices that seem to be related to differences in overall team characteristics and 
effectiveness. 

concept of peer production

"Peer production systems rely on users to self-select appropriate tasks and "scratch their personal itch". However, many such systems require significant maintenance work, which also implies the need for collective action, that is, individuals following goals set by the group and performing good citizenship behaviors. How can this paradox be resolved? Here we examine one potential answer: the influence of social identification with the larger group on contributors' behavior. We examine Wikipedia, a highly successful peer production system, and find a significant and growing influence of group structure, with a prevalent example being the WikiProject. Comparison of editors who join projects with those who do not and comparisons of the joiners' behavior before and after they join a project suggest their identification with the group plays an important role in directing them towards group goals and good citizenship behaviors. Upon joining, Wikipedians are more likely to work on project-related content, to shift their contributions towards coordination rather than production work, and to perform maintenance work such as reverting vandalism. These results suggest that group influence can play an important role in maintaining the health of online communities, even when such communities are putatively self-directed peer production systems."