Autopoesis in on line learning

Abstract

Conception of autopoesis has an important place among conceptions of self-organization. Biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela consider living beings as self-referring and self-constructing autonomous systems, namely, as autopoietic systems. They proclaimed: “All doing is knowing. All knowing is doing” in their famous book “The Tree of Knowledge”. It concerned all living beings, including human beings with the biological roots of their cognition. Author of the article choose this conception of self-organization as working model of on line teaching and learning just because the lack of such biologist roots in on-line communication. Unconsciousness but influenced features of live communication by humans with their “embodied mind” just loose in communication on line. Analyzing own experience of off line and on line teaching in frame of autopoetic approach, author tries to seek the means to overcome the restrictions of on line teaching and learning. The idea by Maturana and Varela about continually recurrent interactions between participants of doing and knowing which provide their creation of common world in common linguistic field became the main point of conclusion. Active communications between lector and students and between students in workshops can partly compensate an absence of live communication. It means that standard obvious relation between quantity of lectures and workshops have to be changed with free choice by lector among new special forms of on line learning. Original work of students for solving the tasks are preferable, especially if the tasks are connected with scientific or technologic researches. In any case supporting the discussions and debates, teachers can stimulate those recurrent interactions which guarantee the autopoesis as self-construction of common world in which self-organization of young persons is possible in their becoming the young specialists. The concept of autopoesis is able to maximize the success of communication between teachers and students and students to each other to provide feedback in the joint actions of cognition, creating the effect of sustainable self-organization in learning.