of complex systems and ecosystems

After reading Dr. Danish's BeeSign piece where students were tasked to look at a complex system from multiple levels - at the agents involved to the properties of the system to aggregate affects of the interactions of all these agents - I decided that technology in education could be looked at from a similar range or depth of levels. So I modified my very first model inspired by Nardi and O'Day's (1999) metaphor of technology as an ecosystem. At the lowest level we have all the agents at play, everything from budgetary concerns to the actual technologies to pedagogy styles which are all already interconnected if we take a step up (a level) and look at the properties of the system - it's diversity, the given rules of each agent (what my last model jokingly tried to address via Wilensky's firefly piece), the co-evolution of agents over time, as well as the shared common locality and the dependence on stability through keynote species. A level higher gives us some of the common interactions everything from technology tutoring students to technology simply breaking, everything from political agenda being massaged to teacher burn-out.

If I were to go a level higher I would have "ecosystem outputs" perhaps and keep this one simplest of all perhaps "standardized test scores up" and "standardized test scores down" or perhaps "learning authenticity up or learning authenticity down." I would want to leave it open for the person using my model to write in their own goal or purpose or telos or hoped for outcome. Once they do so I would refer them to the quote on the right which you can't read in the picture above, but it states, " Technologies can open, close, and otherwise shape social choices, although not always in the ways expected on the bses of rationally extrapolating from the perceived properties of technology" (Dutton, W. E. (1996) from his Information and Communication Technologies: Vision and Realities).

This quote I hope would help humble the user of the model by reminding him or her that ecosystem's are variable and unpredictable. And hoping technology will work (or for those on the other side of the agenda - hoping that school will work without technology) is as much a leap of faith as it is a rational calculation of all the known variables....precisely because so many variables are unknown and further the full range of how variables interact with other variables is also unknown...which often produce surprising second-order affects if we pay attention to the aggregate level such as fire flies lighting up in synchrony or bee hives surviving with enough food for the winter.