GISS and GISP Facilitate Higher Education and Cooperative Learning Design

Abstract

International cooperation in higher education management has successfully expanded on Geographic Information Science and Systems (here named GISS, for the “space of places”), which facilitates the exchange of worldviews among learners. On a general level, after clarification of the notions of “design,” “pedagogy,” “GIS,” and “path dependency,” the potential for self-organized Web-supported learning is explored. Global socio-economic trends in land-use, energy, and economy (i.e., collective evolutionary learning) serve to provide lessons for individual learning procedures. Path dependency is a concept used both in economics and education management. This chapter suggests using a collaborative, dialogic learning structure that allows learners to act on several layers of reality simultaneously: the cognitive, discoursive, social, interactive, and integrative. Strategies for graphic notation of social procedures within “social spaces” are suggested. Graphical Information on Social Procedures (here named GISP, for the “space of flows”) should facilitate the design of online courses and blended learning courses because it allows for analyzing the interplay of different horizons and layers of human interaction. To sum up, this chapter uses several analogies from global socio-economic trends in order to describe the highly complex challenges and opportunities for auto-adaptive online pedagogy and the design of higher education that leads towards the dynamic self-responsibility of learners.