| dc.description.abstract | Mobile and wireless technologies are globally aware therefore so to do institutions have to think
globally. By this is meant not simply making learning objects available to international students,
but inventing ways to engage students from any geographical location with these objects in such
a way that the outcome is knowledge.
This paper explores the applicability of personalized profiling as a means to link students
studying similar disciplines to each other, and proposes a self-organizing ‘living systems’ model
that aims to overcome present impediments to the creation of sustainable, ‘open’, m-learning
communities.
‘Open’ m-learning communities are characterized by their ability to self organize and adapt to
changing circumstances. Their conceptual framework is systems theoretical, which draws on
understandings about the natural world from the biological and physical sciences. Concepts
such as “open structure”, “self organization” and “living systems”, have currency in the
discourses of information and computing sciences (i.e., the research fields of artificial life and
artificial intelligence). In the biological scientific view, the sole purpose of a living organism is
to renew itself by opening itself up to its environment, or to another structure. In natural
scientific terms, an organism that is in equilibrium is a dead organism. Living organisms
continually maintain themselves in a state far from equilibrium, which is the state of life.
The transfer of understandings about the operations of living systems is evident in the
approaches of computer game designers and programmers, where “swarming” and other
empathetic behaviours of organisms such as bees, fireflies and even stem cells, provide the basis
for the design of software to support massively multi-user on-line gaming. This new knowledge
may have applicability in new approaches to m-learning, for example, through learner selfprofiling
and the automated matching of learner profiles to other learners and learning
opportunities. The first step in this process is that of understanding how the specificities of
emerging mobile and wireless technologies might facilitate open m_learning and the formation
of m-learning communities. | en |
