Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community
Good point about online communities I think needs highlighting and clarifying. "The fallacy is to think that social networks are just made up of people. They're not; social networks consist of people who are connected by a shared object... it's like the idea of an attractor in a dynamic system." (If you want a fun read, look up 'strange attractors' in Google - that's the sort of thing he means here. Anyhow, the clarification: even though the members have an interest in an object in common, it does not follow that you can define the community in terms of that object. The object is just what brings people in; the community develops a life of its own after that. The definition of the community is found in the connections, not the object.

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Mar 28, 2024 10:37 p.m.

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