Adrian Miles’ Vlog 2.1 recently raised the issue of “networked knowledge objects,” where knowledge objects indicate a mnemonic interface students build to access learning experiences. Miles describes them as being “made by connecting different media objects … the deep learning equivalent of itnerwingling, or small parts loosely joined.” Finally he goes on to suggest that while “individual blogs are nearly such objects … blog ecologies are.”

Miles’ assertion connects with two recent posts dealing with blog community and deep learning. Let me deal with the former first.

The concept of a blog ecology strikes an interesting juxtaposition with that of a “community.” Besides its conventional sense, ecology immediately invokes for me both Guattari’s virtual ecology and Kittler media ecology. While quite different from one another, all three suggest a very different sort of para-ethics from that of community. Ecological ethics relies upon the recognition of interdependency across species lines, and it is not a recognition that necessarily manifests itself on the level of “choice” or “free will” but rather one that is emerges with the system. Community, on the other hand, is the imposition of an ethical “being-the-same” through consensus. Animals that are “natural enemies” exist in the same ecology: we are all part of the ecological food chain. Such relations are not possible in communities.

Thus I was thinking what it might mean to create a learning ecology rather than learning community. Indeed, if Miles’ networked knowledge objects are well-exemplified by blog ecologies, then perhaps this already suggests a learning ecology. I was also thinking about Collin’s recent post on the changing uses of the web–particularly how folks are increasingly accessing the web by different devices (phones, etc.) and different interfaces (blog aggregators). When I was reading it, it reminded me of the often-discussed notion of ubiquitous computing.

So this was all coming together in my head in something like the following way. Deep learning suggests a submersion in what would now be a network of information. Learning then would occur through the development of these networked knowledge objects, which would be the mechanism by which students organized and interacted with their informational environment. In such a scheme, rhetoric would describe the means by which students co-existed with other entities, not in their “community,” but in their ecology.

Of course I suppose that communities would also form, and this is also appropriate, just as many animals group together, but it would be interesting to think of community as an emergent property of ecology rather than as some ethical imperative.