What
Consider the notion that people engage in many conversations, frequently at essentially the same time; on some scale, time is being sliced and given over to different conversations as if one leaves one room, enters another and picks up whatever conversation is going on there. A view of this important to game-based MOOCs entails these notions (and possibly more):
- There exists a teacher-student conversation.
- There exist student-student conversations.
- There exist individual conversations within one's head.
It is a unifying notion already that, in the case of a MOOC and those classes of conversation, that all such conversations are topic-centric in the sense that they
orbit the course material. In that sense, this is
business as usual.
But, what about those
extra-curricular conversations, those outside the MOOC, perhaps in other MOOCs. The question being explored here relates to this overriding interest:
- To what extent can the boundary infrastructures crafted in support of the conduct of any learning experience relate to the larger life of the learner?
In that question, we seek to understand ways in which a learning platform, a game-based MOOC environment be considered as an ecosystem in which the learner's experience expands beyond the game room.
Why
In thinking through a justification for why ask such questions, one faces the notion that we are talking about complex adaptive systems (CAS). When one makes that realization, one is faced with a large and supportive literature from which to explore the entire WhatWhyHow of this inquiry. Among the pillars of complex adaptive systems are these notions:
- Anticipatory Systems
- Emergence
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How
No clue, how, at the moment. Still trying to sort out what and why.