Stephen Downes

These are sweeping claims, but from my perspective they are fundamentally correct: "the fundamental constituents of reality are seen as actions and the agents that produce them. More complex phenomena are conceived as self-organizing networks of interacting agents that evolve to become increasingly complex, adaptive and intelligent systems. The resulting worldview allows us to address the most fundamental issues of philosophy..." For me, the interesting questions in education and technology revolve around questions like this: what are these agents and actions? What are the principles of self-organizing systems? What sorts of systems learn more effectively? How do we understand concepts like 'knowledge' and 'learning' at all? These are links to preprints of a 2011 paper: 39 page PDF. Another copy. Read more from Francis Heylighen. Also, I found it worth while to quote at length a section on mobilization from this item in my blog.