RhizoRhetoric: 4 Open

I just realized that I merged two characteristics of complex systems in yesterday's post. Cilliers' third characteristic has to do with direct and indirect feedback loops, but I won't correct my mistake here. I think I covered it sufficiently yesterday.

Cilliers' fourth characteristic reads this way:

Complex systems are open systems—they exchange energy or information with their environment—and operate at conditions far from equilibrium.

In my previous post, I explored how complex systems exchange energy and information among the elements within the system. This is the complementary process in which the system exchanges energy and information with its ecosystem. In some ways, this is the external process that feeds the internal process. A complex system (think here of a zygote or a writing swarm) may bring an internal store of energy and information (think of DNA and college degrees), but without regular exchanges of energy and information from the ecosystem, any complex system will die. Again, this is a fundamental process that accounts for the formation and functioning of stars and atoms as well as of writing swarms.

One cannot understand a writing swarm without understanding the energy and data streams that feed that swarm. The identity of the swarm emerges as the nexus of all those internal and external flows and exchanges of energy and information, and the swarm functions and sustains itself only so long as flows and exchanges persist.

The energy and information flows are dynamic, constantly evolving, which means that the complex system such as a writing swarm operates "at conditions far from equilibrium." Direct and indirect feedback loops are at work between the swarm and its environment just as they are within the various elements of the swarm itself. New information and energy feeds into a swarm, which processes that energy and information, dampening some and amplifying other but all the while modifying itself to accommodate and respond to that new data, and then the swarm feeds back new information and energy, which modifies its ecosystem across all scales. Constant feedback cycles process energy and information and feed back energy and information at both local and global scales.

This processing is at times synchronous within a writing swarm, but more often it is asynchronous as different writers across the world work and write at different times, so that documents emerge in fits. A whole section can emerge in a somewhat new direction with new energy and information, and then the entire swarm must process that new direction and adjust itself to it. Sometimes the new section finds a home, sometimes it is pruned. It is always edited and always leads to other edits as the swarm reconfigures itself.

This network of dynamic exchanges within and without the writing swarm defines the swarm and the writing that it produces. Eventually, the exchanges of energy and information stop and the document attains equilibrium. It is completed. The writing swarm, however, does not attain equilibrium; rather, it remains dynamic if it does not disband or die. Tension can emerge between the static, completed document and the dynamic, constantly reforming swarm, which can move beyond or away from the document in a very short time.

Swarm writing, then, can be a very messy process. While the swarm will try to manage its internal processing, it is always open to new information and energy streams which can surprise, delight, and confuse the swarm. Swarm writing makes great demands on the resourcefulness and resilience of the swarm to find its place within its ecosystem. This has certainly been the case with our swarm, which has struggled to find a way to express itself within an ecosystem not quite ready to listen to its song.

The Battle for Open

Grading has slowed my writing and reading, but I couldn't help noticing a few posts, the first one from Audrey Watters about The Battle for "Open". As I had just written about open systems, I was curious to compare her idea of openness with my own. I did not find an explicit statement about openness in her post, but if I'm reading between the lines correctly, then I think we are coming at the idea from quite different perspectives.

Watters links to some of her earlier posts about openness, and I pick up from them that openness for her has to do with how we define things, especially access to things, "culturally, pedagogically, politically, financially".  In a 2011 post, she says, "I think we're in store for lots of conflict over what constitutes "open" -- how it's funded, how it's labeled and licensed, who mandates "what counts."" Then in her next end-of-year post, she mostly writes about the open textbook movement and the friction it is experiencing from slow adoption by students and faculty and from challenges by commercial vendors. If I understand correctly, then, Watters is working with openness in cultural, pedagogical, political, financial, and legal contexts. These are likely the contexts that most interest most readers, and eventually, they are the contexts I have to move into. However, I have been coming at openness through complexity and open systems theories, which can be more than just a bit abstract. Still, it has likely left me with a slightly more optimistic perspective than Watters', as the natural laws that describe complex, open systems give me great confidence that in the long run openness will win out. Complex systems are open, and I count all humans, collective and individual, and all knowledge as complex systems. Thus, I'm confident that in the long run, humans will always find ways to open communication.

This does not mean, however, that the legal and normative laws that function at the social level cannot impede or modify the exchange of information among complex systems, at least in the short term. They can and they do. We all see that. We pass laws, for instance, to govern the exchange of music, and those laws can cause great trouble for those who enact more open exchanges than the laws allow. Openness (or piracy as the music conglomerates and their lawyers term it) is inevitable, but vested interests will fight it, sometimes vehemently, even violently.

I also want to note that openness for me is a relative term not an absolute term. Nothing is ever completely closed or completely open, but always on a sliding scale of more or less open. If complex systems were totally open to their environments, then they would lose their internal integrity and collapse, merge, or die. The boundaries of complex systems are fluid, flexible zones that interpenetrate other boundaries, but they are not totally open. Exchanges are always managed, or the system suffers. We humans, for instance, have to be open to intake food, but we can't intake the wrong kind of food or too much of any kind of food. If we do, we damage ourselves. Watters no doubt supports near universal access to low/no cost textbooks, but she would not favor a virus spread by such textbooks, or an attack to change the content of all those texts to something damaging (but then that raises the question of damaging to whom?). In other words, Watters likely favors, as most all of us do, some management of the boundaries of any complex system, virtual or real. Where to put the boundary and who should enforce the boundary is always the point of contention, and that issue will never, ever go away. Moreover, the boundary will shift as technologies and social structures shift. As we shift from print books to tablets, we are inevitably changing the rules of exchange of academic information, but we should not expect the textbook publishers to be happy about it, or acquiescent. We are always and forever negotiating our boundaries. It's a messy process, and never completely pleasing to anyone. As near as I can tell, it's the burden of living.

Still, I applaud what Watters is doing, and I'm most jealous that she can keep track of all these developments in education. She is such a better scholar than I. Still, I have to keep in mind that the boundaries of any complex system, such as a textbook, always tend to open more and more to the ecosystem (if it survives as a textbook at all), but a complex system is never totally open without losing itself and its identity. Finally, negotiating the boundaries of any system is a never-ending task (just try keeping things out of a baby's mouth, for instance). It's the hard work of life and must be embraced.

Educational Complexity and Open Systems

The fourth property of complexity that both Taborga and Lawrimore discuss within the context of modern organizations is openness or, as Lawrimore terms it, adaptability. This is, I think, a particularly critical property of complexity and most relevant to my current conversations about education, especially the conversation about MOOCs. Openness and the concomitant adaptability overturn so much of how we normally think about the world, especially education, that it is difficult to decide where to start, so I'll begin with what our two interlocutors say and see where it leads:

Taborga says:

The fourth property of complexity is that the system is open. An open system responds to its environment. Complexity Theory posits that all systems are open with the possibility that the total universe is the only closed system. Continuing with the project team example, there are numerous external influences that determines the project’s course. Funding would be an important external variable for a project team.

Lawrimore speaks of adaptation rather than openness, but clearly he is approaching the same property of complexity:

Adaptive refers to the fact that living systems constantly adapt to their changing environments. (Adapt means "fit to.") In organizations people adapt to each other, to customers, the economy, competitors and many other things. They are able to adapt through learning. Continuous learning is very important in Complexity organizations.

A view of time, temporality, lies at the heart of what they are both saying. All complex systems have an evolutionary arc that we can trace fairly well looking back on it, but that we find very difficult to trace looking forward. This seems such an obvious thing to say—especially in light of Darwin and our common, everyday experience—but it isn't. Basically, we humans do not like an open future. We spend great resources and energy on trying to fix the future, in all senses of the word fix. This is, I think, the heart of fundamentalism, especially the scientific and religious varieties, both of which posit a deterministic view of reality. The fundamentalist scientists believe that if they can know the position and speed of all the particles of a system (and only they can), then they can determine any past or future disposition of that system. As Lee Smolin describes it in Time Reborn (2013), they believe that systems are path independent and totally controlled by eternal natural laws expressible in timeless mathematical formulae that work each time, every time to accurately describe reality both past and present. The fundamentalist religious believers, on the same hand, believe that if they can properly interpret scripture (and only they can) then they can determine the past and future disposition of all humans on the planet and predict the End of Times. For them, all history is path independent, its arc ordained by the divine from the Beginning and all controlled by eternal divine law expressible in timeless ritual formulae that work each time, every time to accurately describe reality both past and present.

Complexity says otherwise. Eternal scientific laws are not much improvement over eternal religious laws because reality is NOT absolutely determined by either set of laws, certainly not by both. At the heart of every atom and every galaxy lies enough probability to provide wiggle room for almost anything to emerge, including somewhat conscious and intelligent apes, and whatever emerges comes with new laws to follow, as laws, physical and otherwise, are also emergent properties of emergent systems. All complex systems—and for me that includes everything from the most inert rocks to gravity—are open to change. Heraclitus would be proud.

So, one might complain, anything goes in this open-ended, relativistic universe? Don't be absurd, and don't jump off the Golden Gate Bridge to test it. The probability of your death is near certain (about 98%), and as one of the few known survivors (the fortunate effect of just the tiniest wiggle room) is likely to tell you: on the way down, you might change your mind. No, open adaptability is that zone between an anything-goes chaos and an only-one-thing-goes determinism, and life and all that we humans hold dear emerges in this open, temperate zone poised between hot, erratic chaos and cold, fixed determinism. We humans can enjoy the heat of chaos for a time, but too close for too long and we die a hot death. We can depend on the fixed cold of determinism for a time, but too close for too long and we die a cold death. Frost had it right when he said in his poem Fire and Ice that the world would end with either fire or ice and that either "would suffice."

Unfortunately, too much of modern education is based on a scientific determinism, which replaces a religious determinism. Some may see that as progress, and perhaps so, but not much, I think, and certainly not enough progress. We need a complex view of learning based on an understanding of open, adaptable systems. Indeed, if people were not open, adaptable, and changeable, then what would be the point of education? Fortunately, people are open and adaptable systems; thus, education is a worthwhile endeavor. Why, then, have we constructed schools on the factory system for the purpose of batch producing a consistent product? I think I can understand why we did it in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when industrialism was triumphing in business and reductionism in science, but why are we persisting into the 21st century? Ford's assembly line was a fairly decent system for outputting an endless line of black-only Model Ts, but even the assembly line has moved way beyond Ford's early iteration of it. As an aside, I think his fascination with the assembly line goes a long way in explaining Ford's attraction to fascism. The assembly line is fascism for business, and while it  may have narrow benefits for a narrow time, one shouldn't base a life or a nation on it.

Morin helps me understand the implications of this openness and adaptability, especially for education. First, open systems can be understood most completely only if we account for their relationships with the environment. As Morin says,  "Reality is therefore as much in the connection (relationship) as in the distinction between the open system and its environment" (On Complexity, 11). If you want to understand a student, you don't get very far looking merely at GPA, though GPA does have real, if limited, utility. In other words, you cannot reduce a student to one, or even a collection, of objective characteristics and expect to know very much. Students are not closed systems, definable from the outside-in. They are open systems, definable from the inside-out to all their connections and interactions with their ecosystems over time. All complex, open systems must be understood from the inside-out and not reduced to some handful of essential characteristics from the outside-in. This includes school subjects, which cannot be closed into disciplines but must be explored from the inside out into. Morin's thoughts about studying open systems are most apropos to education, I think:

Methodologically, it becomes difficult to study open systems as entities that can be radically isolated. Theoretically and empirically, the concept of an open system opens the door to a theory of evolution, that can only come from the interaction of system and eco-system, and, in its most significant organizational leaps, can be conceived of as the "going beyond," the surpassing, of the system into a meta-system. The door is, therefore, open for a theory of self-eco-organizing systems. These systems are themselves open, of course, because far from escaping 'openness,' evolution toward complexity increases it. In other words, it is a theory of living systems. (11)

 Let me add here that this approach to openness is perhaps what most attracted me to the conversation about Connectivism, a theory of education first formally suggested by George Siemens and Stephen Downes in about 2005. Some have questioned whether or not Connectivism is really a theory, but they are mostly trying to define Connectivism from the outside, to reduce it to a few canonical characteristics. Both Siemens and Downes have also performed this kind of definition in their writings (and, by the way, I do value this kind of definition—I just think it is radically limited when applied to complex, open systems), but what is really brilliant about what Siemens and Downes have done is to pretty much abandon defining Connectivism from the outside as objective observers and turn to defining it from the inside as engaged participants. The result of this switch has been MOOCs, among other things. Connectivism is now defining itself from inside-out, and the definition has gone in directions that I suspect Siemens and Downes would have never explored or pursued. It is a messy definition, but much more real, I think, and infinitely more engaging. Connectivism, then, is being defined not merely on the basis of what characteristics separate it from all other theories but mostly on the basis of what it connects us to, on the affordances that it provides. The boundaries of the theory are better seen from the inside as the outward limits of how far we can take these particular set of ideas.

Of course, I think all theories are better seen from the inside, especially if you want to understand them, but we are in the reductionistic habit of separating to define, not connecting to define. The complexity theory behind open systems will change that, I think. And again: I am not saying that defining from the outside-in has no value. It does. But it is only part of the story, and a small part at that. You will never really understand rap music if you stay on the outside. You have to get inside it to understand it. You have to see what it can connect you to, where it can take you, and that is seen from the inside. Open systems are like that. Everything is like that.

When Morin says that "methodologically, it becomes difficult to study open systems as entities that can be radically isolated", I am reminded of the marvelous work that Jenny Mackness and her associates Williams and Gumtau are doing with emergent learning. Of course, they are studying open systems, but I suspect, their tools are still based too much on a reductionist approach to science that works from the outside-in. Mackness has said to me that merely coming up with the new terms and concepts to describe what they are seeing has been a struggle. If you want to see better how to approach complex, open educational systems, then you should follow their work.

Human and Non-human Connections, #cck12

I want to continue using comments from a discussion I've had with Frances Bell, mostly on Dave Cormier's blog. Let me note up front that I have not understood Frances particularly well, or perhaps a more forgiving way to say it is that I am having to learn what she means, and I don't always do that before I speak. It's a bad habit, but thus far, she has been quite generous with me.

At the end of her comment on Dave's post, Frances introduced two very interesting topics that I've been edging toward through my last two posts:

1. the connections between humans and non-human in understanding learning, and
2. power relations in networks, especially "where the machine is seen as amoral and humans as 'democratised.'"

I want to explore in this post the first issue: the connections between humans and non-human in understanding learning. Connectivism says that knowledge can involve non-human entities. I find a telling footnote in a list of Principles of Connectivism in George Siemens' online book Knowing Knowledge. The salient principle reads "Knowledge may res ide i n non-human appliances, and learn ing i s enabled/facilitated by technology." The footnote reads:

The concept of knowledge resting in non-human appliances (mediated by artificial intelligence or directed by intelligent agents) is controversial. As with the discussion on context-games, how one defines knowledge largely determines whether one will accept this definition. As I mentioned in the preface, I have largely avoided the use of the word information in this text. It could be well argued that all knowledge is simply varying shades of information, and information itself is transformed into knowledge when we have a personal relationship with it (i.e., we internalize information). This discussion, from my perspective, is unnecessary for the purpose of this book. In order to have any practical discussion of information and knowledge, we need to discuss it as if it is something that a) describes some aspect of the world, and b) something on which we can act. This simple definition provides the basis for viewing knowledge as being able to reside in non-human appliances.

Of course, this is too short a selection to be taken as a definitive statement of Siemens' position, but it can be a useful point of departure for my own thoughts. First, I notice a tension in how Siemens situates knowledge in an appliance, by which he seems to be suggesting modern, electronic appliances with artificial intelligence and intelligent agents. In his principle and then again at the end of the footnote, Siemens says that knowledge can reside in non-human appliances. He compliments the verb resides with resting when he says that "the concept of knowledge resting in non-human appliances … is controversial." To my mind, reside and resting suggest a passive holding place for knowledge, and this is very old hat indeed. We've been using non-human appliances such as cave walls, clay tablets, and papyrus scrolls to hold knowledge for millennia, both as extensions to our memories and vehicles for communication. Nothing new here. Of course, we can store more information in smaller spaces than before and we can share that information more readily with more people, and those are important differences, but they seem to me differences of degree rather than kind.

What is new is captured in Siemens' verbs mediated and directed. I don't know how active a role George is positing here for non-human appliances—and the meanings of these two particular verbs could be slanted either way toward more or less activity—but this is a difference in kind from the non-human knowledge appliances that came before, or so it seems to me. One of the virtues of a printed book is that it does NOT interact with the text, with the information contained within its covers; rather, the book preserves unaltered the text so that what I read today is the same as what I read yesterday (minus my own marginalia) and the same as what I will read again tomorrow. The text is static. Today, text is dynamic—along with other forms of information/knowledge such as image, number, audio, and so on (allow me to use information and knowledge interchangeably for a moment). Few these days will visit a third time a web page that hasn't changed, and while those changes are still mostly made by humans, they are increasingly being made, mediated, and directed by non-human appliances. This represents a fundamental shift in the relationship between human and the non-human knowledge/information appliance.

I see this difference most clearly in terms of Edgar Morin's distinction between closed systems and open systems. A stone is an example of a closed system: it is self-contained, needing next to nothing from the eco-system to maintain and persist as it is. Life forms, including humans, are examples of open systems: they are not self-contained, but absolutely require a dynamic exchange of energy, matter, organization, and information between themselves and their eco-systems to persist as living forms.

A book is more like a closed system (not completely closed, as I will argue another time, but for now, let's just say it's more closed); the recommendation engine on Amazon is more like an open system. The book does not take in more energy or information, process it, rearrange itself according to the inputs, and release new energy, information, and waste into its eco-system. This is not to say that the book is not a dynamic system. It is. Rather, the book is dynamic more in the way a stone in a stream is. Dynamic eddies and swirls develop, shift, grow, and wane as the water rushes about the rock, but the rock does not take in those as inputs. It just remains what it is until stronger outside forces push it into being something else. We want something similar from our books. We want them to stay put as they are. Just try re-writing Huckleberry Finn to see what a fuss you will raise.

The Amazon recommendation engine, on the other hand, does take in information and energy from its eco-system. It then processes that information, rearranges itself accordingly, and releases new energy, information, and presumably waste into its eco-system. This engine is more like a rather single-minded amoeba, or maybe a pigeon. I'm not sure how high up the intelligence ladder to go, assuming there is such a ladder, but this non-human appliance is able to monitor its environment, take in information, recognize options, make regular judgements based on that information, and release new information into the eco-system, which then becomes part of the reiterative feedback into the recommendation engine. Like all life-systems, the Amazon recommendation engine has the ability to self-organize, or simulates that ability very, very well.

Interacting with an open-system appliance is different from interacting with a closed-system appliance, or it sure feels different. But if so, then how? Let's think on that for a day and talk about it tomorrow.