Online Self-Organizing Social Systems

David Wiley was kind enough to direct me to a paper he wrote with Erin K. Edwards a few years back: Online Self-organizing Social Systems: The Decentralized Future of Online Learning. I had seen references to it, but couldn't find a copy. This look at online self-organizing social systems ("OSOSS") from a learning perspective is similar to papers I found earlier from David Passmore. Passmore also looked at PerlMonks (my thoughts here) and investigated learning in Slashdot (my thoughts here), and came to similar conclusions. From Wiley and Edwards:

"While none of the existing OSOSS consider themselves learning communities, learning is happening among their users, and happening in an extremely innovative manner."

I'm seeing some evidence to support this in 43 Things, especially in reference to explicit learning communities that form around learning goals.