Online and Distance Education Commons^™

What Can Social Networks Tell Us About Learning Ecologies?, Caroline A. Haythornthwaite

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

The ecology metaphor is drawn from the biological sciences and refers to the “scientific study of the distribution, abundance and dynamics of organisms, their interactions with other organisms and with their physical environment” (British Ecological Society, 2016). In recent decades, the metaphor has become useful for tackling the complexity of new information and learning environments, particularly as driven by the increasing quantity of information, the growing number of available media and means of communicating, the extended reach of information technologies, and the new practices arising from these configurations. This paper brings to the discussion of learning ecologies the research and …