The Chaos Theory is featured in a newsletter this week by SEO marketing gurus at Bruce Clay Inc. The piece, honoring the passing of Edward Lorenz, explains for its search engine marketing clientele a principle that educators can use to great benefit. To use the SEO lingo, that edu principle is: academics who are expert on a subject can give juice to a webpage by linking to it and by commenting on excellent Net assets that they respect for their area of expertise. Here is why doing so nudges order from chaos, from the Bruce Clay SEO newsletter:
This idea [Chaos Theory] has been dubbed ‘The Butterfly Effect’, derived from Lorenz’ example that a butterfly’s wings flapping in one area can make changes in the atmosphere so strong that they could force a tornado to develop somewhere else. His ideas have altered the way that we look at most scientific fields, and we would be wise to understand its importance in our endeavors as well . . . .
As for chaos theory specifically, search engine optimization is also directly tied in with the observation and management of minute changes within the system. Tweaking is often the term used in this regard. These small changes, when applied correctly, can prove to have vast effects on the system as a whole.
For instance, depending on the status of the rest of the system, it is possible that if one were to do something as small and insignificant as adding a specific word to the title tag of one of their pages, a large effect on rankings for that term could occur. This would then have a huge effect on the system itself. Obviously, in order for one page to increase in rankings, it must displace a page above it. Let’s say that your page was before in 50th place, and has now displaced pages above it to become number eight. . . .
A hypothetical example of applying this to open educational resources: There are 20 webpages on hypothetical molecule OERX. Professor Smith, who is the world expert on OERX, comments in his blog about one of those 20 webpages, and hyperlinks in his post to that webpage. Within a week, the page he commented on moves to the first page of Google SERPs (search engine result pages). A laboratory chief where OERX molecules are studied reads Smith’s blog post, writes about it on his own blog and links to the page Smith liked. The next week that page is at the top of the Google SERPs. Particularly for an academic subject as small as a particular molecule, just 2 jolts like these of academic juice can dramatically affect SERPs ratings. In this example, teachers and students who searched for OERX would find a page at the top of their SERPs that is respected by 2 leading OERX experts.
The image above is from a work in progress on my Learnodes.com website about how edu can use network tools to morph searching for learning into emergent findability. As educational resources are released into the open Net (as I have tried to suggest in the image), educators can ply to wonderful educational advantage, the SEO tools explained by Bruce Clay Inc. and other online marketing experts. The butterfly effect for academic experts can become to juice the emergence from the online chaos of the nodes that they respect.
