information ecology research mainly focuses on information ecosystems, information ecology in e-commerce, and information ecology in a network.

information ecology is an emerging field with vigorous development in recent years, and information ecology research is a multi-disciplinary subject.

A New Contribution to the Information Ecology of Humanitarian Work

Information ecology as a mind tool for repurposing of educational social networks

goal perspective, information ecologies have been designed to increase engagement with collaborative tasks (Price & Pontual-Falcão, 2011), enhance whole classroom learning (Rick, 2009), boost creative problem solving (Hilliges et al., 2007), support product design conversations (Bardill, Griffiths, Jones, & Fields, 2010), and coordinate complex collaborative working (Huang, Mynatt, & Trimble, 2006).

Information ecology was defined by Nardi and O’Day (1999) to be “a system of people, practices, values, and technologies in a particular local environment” (p. 49).

the design and integration of new technologies in learning activities cannot be studied independently of the classroom environment, less attention has been paid in learning environments

indicate that distributed cognition considers a collaborative activity taking place across individuals, artefacts and internal or external representations, as one cognitive system.

How the information ecology allows the design group to coordinate their actions? How awareness is distributed within the group when working with multiple technologies? How each one of the technologies in the ecology supports coordination and collaboration of learning activities?

an “information ecology” is a local environment enriched with multiple heterogeneous technologies, such as personal computers, handheld devices, interactive screens, which are interlinked as a unified system.

cognition cannot be tamed within the boundaries of an individual, but researchers should expand the unit of analysis to include the surrounding environment.

Information Environment

With few exceptions, most market democracies have recovered from the 2008 financial crisis. But the public has not recovered from the shock of watching supposed experts and politicians, the people who posed as the wise pilots of our prosperity, sound and act totally clueless while the economy burned. In the past, when the elites controlled the flow of information, the financial collapse might have been portrayed as a sort of natural disaster, a tragedy we should unify around our leadership to overcome. By 2008, that was already impossible. The networked public perceived the crisis (rightly, I think) as a failure of government and of the expert elites.

‘Thedilemma, then, is that a right to information couldmake people worse off in terms of information.’’Elgesem then provides a contextual analysis of therole search engines play in the broader ‘‘informationecology’’ constituted by contemporary ICTs. Elgesemis able to connect the search engine dilemma withKant’s second formulation of the CategoricalImperative, ‘‘Act in such a way that you treathumanity, whether in your own person or in theperson of another, always at the same time as an endand never simply as a means.’’8Here, Elgeseminterprets Kant to mean that by ‘‘humanity,’’ Kantrefers to our ability to reason as the central propertythat makes us human. The simple point, as empha-sized in Kant’s famous example regarding lying, isthat failure to provide truthful information is a primeexample of violating the CI because false informationmakes it impossible for the recipient to exercise herrationality. By the same token, Elgesem argues that abiased search engine likewise makes it impossible forusers to exercise their rationality, and thus likewiserepresent violations of the CI.