How much do you love the word DYNAMIZE? When I saw/heard Stephen Downes use it in his talk on “Learning Networks: Theory & Practice” from 2005, he says “Dynamize…I know dynamize is not a word, but there wasn’t a good word. A networks is something that is fluid, it is something that is dynamic, it is something that changes constantly. Connections are grown, connections are shaped, connection are changed.”
I thought well if it wasn’t a word it was a perfect word to describe how my learning connections within this course are growing. Each day I am looking to more and more blogs, I’m searching for more images, seeking out new videos, increasing the people I follow on Twitter and those that follow me are increasing. My connections are growing, shaping and changing. I very much suspect some of these connections will remain until the end and into the future and some will not. We each will serve each other in a variety of ways and what ever those are is perfect. I may only connect to student A once and that is great. It may be all I need to gain more insight into something or even more so, it may be all I need to create 1000 new connections. If the latter is the case think of the impact that 1 student has made to my increased knowledge portfolio.
When do I love learning….when one idea, piques my interest to seek out more information and that piques my curiosity to find even more.
I tried to search out dynamize since it did indeed or rather Stephen’s explanation perfectly fit my current experience. So after finding out that dynamize is indeed a word, I started looking to find out when it became a word. In doing so I found great video from BBC News – “When Does a Word Become a Word?” I then started hoping that if Stephen thought in 2005 (and the audience since they chuckled at his remark of using the word) it wasn’t a word; perhaps he is the one that is responsible for putting it in there. Alas, one reference does link it back to 1850 dynamic. Oh well, the journey and connections I followed to find this was worth every moment of the experience.
Dynamics is used in game design to refer to “Behaviors that emerge from the game” or “the run-time behavior of the mechanics acting on player inputs and each others’ outputs over time”. There is also the notion of “group-dynamics” or “fuild-dynamics”.
Check out this paper that describes the notions of Aesthetics, Mechanics and Dynamics