If you look at Morgan's book, the first thing you see will not, strictly speaking, be Morgan's. It will be a version of a design created by another student. The particular form taken by this book, as a multimodal composition, is the result of a composing process distributed across multiple heterogeneous elements distributed in time and space. The story of how the book came to have the particular form that it has cannot be told without attending to the way that multiple elements interacted. We can see this by removing any element in the network: If the computer Lionel had been working on had been placed at the far end of a long row, Morgan would have never encountered his design. Her book would have been different.

While we habitually talk about composing using subject–verb constructions like The student wrote a paper or The student made a book, the account I offer here suggests a different grammar of composing. In Morgan's case, composing seems to emerge from a complex network of relationships among many different heterogeneous elements. The elements that writing studies typically emphasizes—courses, classrooms, and teachers—make an important appearance in this account. But they constitute only a small part of a larger network. In these accounts, composing emerges from and is distributed across many different heterogeneous elements that are temporally and geographically dispersed: people, compositions, curricular structures, technologies, and many different kinds of formal and informal learning spaces.

The LMC is potentially one place where connections are made. It potentially participates in and nurtures larger networks. It seems to me that there is a more global presence here. You can't examine it directly. You can’t hold it in your hands or "visit" it. But there is something larger that includes multiple complex and overlapping networks that are continually forming and reforming. I am suggesting that this larger thing might productively be labeled a learning ecology. To some extent this learning ecology is unpredictable, contingent, chaotic. Morgan doesn’t know that Lionel will be there, that he will be working on a composition that she can use in her own project, that he will be open to sharing this project with her or that he will have the knowledge and time to help her with her book. As Brown (2005) noted, there is a "fragile" quality to the network (18).

At the same time, the RCAH and the LMC seem to operate the way they do, in part, because they are designed. The RCAH is comprised of many different spaces with many different functions, all of which are purposely made proximate to each other in Snyder-Phillips. The LMC provides access to a set of resources—people, technologies, spaces—that were consciously placed there to facilitate composing and learning. I recruited Lionel because I knew he was proficient in Illustrator and InDesign. The physical space of the LMC is structured to facilitate certain kinds of behaviors and connections. I arranged the furniture hoping to facilitate openness, sharing, and collaboration. Human agency and purpose inform and inflect every element and the connections between them.

It seems to me that in addition to designing syllabi, assignments, and classroom activities, educators might productively shift their attention to something more global. They can’t design learning ecologies directly, because, by definition, a learning ecology is self-organizing. But we can provide some of the "infrastructural" resources of learning ecologies (DeVoss, Cushman, & Grabill, 2005). Many of these resources are structures that help connections form between heterogeneous elements. These structures include learning communities, living–learning communities, informal learning spaces, writing centers, multiliteracy centers, display cases, digital papercutters, white boards, crayons, coffee, cookies. . .