Patterns of Meaning in a Cognitive Ecosystem: Modeling Stabilization and Enculturation in Social Tagging Systems

Abstract

We address the question of how shared meaning emerges in mass collaboration settings in education when it is not bound to a pre-defined curriculum. We take social tagging as an example where we examine how users converge to a common vocabulary and develop similar internal categories. The theoretical basis is provided by a view of a cognitive ecosystem that looks at how patterns emerge in an organism-environment system as a result of artifact-mediated collaborative human activity. First evidence for this view comes from a field experiment using a social bookmarking system where individual learning was mediated by the formation and stabilization of patterns on the group level. We then suggest a connectionist network model of categorization and verbal behavior as a means to model the processes of pattern formation and stabilization. We first show how this model predicts individual tag assignments in a dataset obtained from delicious.com. Using the same dataset, we then demonstrate the stabilization process in a community of simulated learners that results from feedback of the popular tags other learners have already assigned to a resource. We discuss the implications of a cognitive ecosystem view for mass collaboration in education and particularly for collaborative knowledge creation in MOOCs.