Environment and self organisation

As you’ll have gathered, I’ve been pre-occupied recently with self organisation, self regulation and learning. Thus two phrases leapt out at me when my Planet project colleague, Yishay Mor, blogged about Europlop 2008.
“Funny thing, how social scientists will stand before a hall full of neatly packed passive listeners and preach about collaborative constructivist learning, while the computer scientists just do it.”

“EuroPLoP 2008 also leaves ample space and time for the real work of conferencing, the stuff that can’t be captured in predefined structure, because it emerges out of the discussions at the time and place.”

For Yishay, then, working in a research context, the really valuable process is self organisation rather than regulation (whether by self or others). I note, though, that for the outcomes of self organisation to be useful research ideas the environment has to be structured in an appropriate way – which implies a fair degree of control or regulation of the environment and an understanding of the types of environment that encourage effective emergent behaviours - or, in memetic terms, a knowledge of the types of environment that will select useful behaviours. So, for the conference to be a success, the environment is controlled although the entities within it are not. Perhaps, though, even here the environment is less controlled than at a conventional conference? Is deliberate absence of control, in itself, a form of control?

I’m not entirely convinced by the memetic, selection, interpretation. It is not clear to me why a relatively uncontrolled environment should select useful research behaviours. It might select all sorts of other things (eg. a lot of alcohol addiction, if Yishay’s emphasis on beer is to be believed). There is evidently a much more complex relationship between environment, interactions between conference delegates, and attributes of the delegates than a simple selection model would suggest. Perhaps, an uncontrolled environment, a community of research practitioners (ie. the interactions) and delegates with “academic” attributes are all necessary conditions. If these conditions are independent, then one would say that selection of the right sort of delegates, and community of practice, had happened before the conference started: only those who meet the necessary conditions are in jobs that will pay for their attendance – they have been ruthlessly selected through educational and career structures. However, it also seems entirely likely that the conditions are not totally independent - that the environment, community and delegates help bootstrap each other up to the useful research behaviours. This, after all, is presumably why we encourage research students to attend conferences.

In a previous post, I suggested that for effective learners, the attractors, or stable states, are educationally desirable behaviours. It seems to me that there might be two ways we could ensure this. The first is by the environment ruthlessly selecting those who have these behaviours – this approach might be said to characterise HE prior to the mid 1960s and the beginning of a widening participation agenda. The second is by helping learners to develop strategies for finding these states, and for avoiding other, equally stable but educationally undesirable, states (for example by turning them into repellers). If my analysis of Yishay’s conference experience is near the mark, then a self organisation model of learning needs to understand, not only the necessary environments and communities for learning, but also the dependencies of environment, community and student attributes that will help students become learners.

Memetics & Self Organisation

When Anoush alerted us to Susan Blackmore’s talk on memetics it sparked a flurry of debate. Like the rest of the CA I have a number of issues with Blackmore’s argument. However, what I was struck by was the relation between Universal Darwinism, and the idea of self organisation discussed in my last post.

In my snowflake example of self organisation, we have, essentially, two factors at work: the interactions between the water molecules, and the interactions between the water molecules and the environment (largely defined by temperature and pressure)

It seems to me that Universal Darwinism provides three factors as a basis for self organisation:
Mimicry/replication/heredity – ie, the interactions between entities
Selection – ie. the interaction between an entity and its environment
Variation – ie. an autonomous characteristic of the entities

If the entities are genes, we get the whole panoply of living species that we know, as emergent states – from amoeba to armadillos.

If the entities are practices, we get memes.

And, according to Blackmore, if the entities are information, we get temes.

If one takes this self organisation view, it becomes clear how, as Blackmore claims, living species, memes and temes can emerge bottom up and without any top down purpose or direction.

It also seems that the Universal Darwinism example captures the three fundamental types of factor we have to take into account when thinking about any self organising system: the characteristics of the entities; interactions between the entities; and interactions of the entities with the environment