In mythology, chaos is said to be “the nothingness out of which the first objects of existence appeared.” (Chaos Mythology). True to this, in the beginning the class was submerged in chaos and from that chaos we emerged as the cohort we are now. Some of the members of the class enjoyed the chaos of the class and others didn’t understand where they fit into the class. In one of her blogs on the wiki, Caitlin describes how she embraces the chaos: “a conversation with a classmate, a smile from a stranger, a fabulous song or piece of art … all things that would not exist without glorious, unpredictable people - that I have come to realize that I don't love these things despite the Chaos that brings them into my world, but that I love the Chaos because it brings these things into my world.” Kris on the other hand had a little more trouble with the chaos of the class, in one of his blogs he wrote “On any ordinary basis, I wouldn't have had a problem with jumping right into the chaos and voicing my opinion about this or that, but this time I didn't know how to jump in or contribute aside from my mere interjections of realistic pessimism.” The chaos of the class left him feeling a little confused he wanted to participate but was not sure how.

Another aspect of chaos that the class and the wiki followed can be taken from a quote by M.C. Escher, “Chaos is multiplicity without rhythm.” The wiki represented the multiplicity without rhythm in the beginning, new pages were sprouting everywhere and none of the pages were connected to each other. Everyone started their own home page and it took the class a while before we started tagging and linking our pages together. Since there was not much linking on the wiki, there was no order that comes along with repetition. Chaos theory states that “the behavior of chaotic systems appears to be random; because of an exponential growth of errors in the initial conditions however there are no random elements involved” (Chaos theory, Wikipedia). The wiki followed this aspect of a chaotic system as well; there was an exponential growth of pages which made the space seemed very random. However, the class was not behaving randomly. The chaos of the class and the wiki was just part of the process. Before the classes started to tag and link their wiks together, the class gave the impression of being very fragmented. Each class member had their own chunk of wiki to work on making it very hard to view the wiki as a whole. All of the pieces of the wiki were their; they just had not been linked together in the right order yet.

Trey introduced new ideas to the class; things, like the wiki, some of us never heard of We had to learn to think outside of the box in order to use these aspects of the class, however some of us didn’t want to let go of our conventional ways of learning. By the second week Brian came up with a good analogy in regards to dealing with the chaos of the class, he did not directly apply it to the class but it fit well. Brian wrote “I trudge on with my toolkit of presuppositions until I encounter a roadblock … at which point I reach into my toolkit and pull out the presuppostion(s) necessary to effect a way around or over or under or through” it and as a class we dug into our academic tool kits and tried to traverse the wiki and the chaos of the class. For some of us it was harder than others; some of the members of the class were confused and did not have the tools needed to work on the wiki, I know I didn’t. We all sat in our boxes looking out at each other, with a look of perplexity on our face, trying to figure out what to do. As Brian calls it, it was a “blessing disguised as a curse.” It was necessary for “a good samaritan with a different toolkit to offer me a way out,” in our class that good samaritan was Trey. He offered us tool after tool and explanation after explanation until we were able to traverse the wiki on our own. And although we have new tools in our tool kit to traverse the class and the wiki, the class was still turbulent about these things.