Abstract

=Abstract=

**Self-Organizing Virtuality: a New Paradigm for Learning Ecosystems - submitted March 1, 2011**

Virtual worlds such as Second Life, game worlds like World of Warcraft and massively open on-line courses (MOOCs) provide virtual spaces in which new and innovative self-organizing communities form. The people who make up these group/guild/course memberships are not homogeneous in the usual sense. Ages, geographic location, religious and political affiliation are largely irrelevant in these environments; people connect based on shared interest and a match of need and skill. What begins as a casual social interaction between strangers often morphs into goal-oriented ad hoc associations and communities that support learning. But learning and self organizing virtuality only begins here.

 Although virtual worlds and avatars present great innovations in terms of learning spaces, simulations, etc. they have been largely static entities, depending on the actions of human agents to form, populate and manipulate them. We posit a new paradigm of virtuality where the virtual world itself is an agent/participant in the dialog that will contribute near-infinite fluidity and wild possibilities to the immersive experience.

 For virtuality to exhibit agency it must be self-organizing. How can virtual worlds be self-organizing? They can because they are completely, 100% constructed out of code. Self-organizing code is a well-established tenet of artificial intelligence.

 What kinds of heretofore impossible learning scenarios might be actualized by self-organizing virtuality? Perhaps hyper-virtualized worlds-within-worlds that materialize and dissolve like iridescent soap bubbles filled with semantic meaning and rich visual vocabularies; environments that spawn learning objects and cognitive clouds which can also spawn daughter worlds where participants can swarm and morph. Ad hoc civilizations, interpersonal lifeforms and swarmocracies will manifest.

 We learn as participants in a learning ecosystem - but can the ecosystem itself learn? What are the implications? Will emergent properties of an increasingly intelligent virtuality usher in some form of knowledge singularity or is it already upon us?

 These topics and more will be addressed in our paper – and we will model how such self-organizing virtualities-as-learning-ecosystems could unfold - while enumerating the already existing technologies and human inclinations that support this future vision.

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