Welcome to Footprints of Emergence

Re: Welcome to Footprints of Emergence

by Jenny Mackness -
Number of replies: 27

Hi Peter - this is a wonderful story and has me wondering, reflecting on what the critical factors are in a Thai Wat that enable emersive/transformational learning.

Also Roy and I have been talking today about what the differences might be between emergent learning, open learning and transformational learning and that is soemthing I hope we will all be able to explore together in this forum and in the webinars.

You have writte:  I wouldn't call it emergent, as the type or subject of the learning wasn't previously identified.

Could you say a little more about what you mean by this. I'm not sure that I fully understand.

In reply to Jenny Mackness

Re: Welcome to Footprints of Emergence

by Scott Johnson -

Hi All, wonder if receptivity to emergence can be learned or taught? An emergent outlook would be a great tool for those in the flow of change.

Thanks for sponsoring this SCoPE:-)

In reply to Scott Johnson

Re: Welcome to Footprints of Emergence

by Don Beadle -

Good morning all

This looks to be an interesting discussion.

I'll be working during tomorrow's live session, so I will be an asynchronous member of the group.

In reply to Don Beadle

Re: Welcome to Footprints of Emergence

by Jenny Mackness -

Welcome Don. We look forward to interacting with you asynchronously :-). I think Sylvia will be recording the webinars - so hopefully you will also have access to those recordings.

Jenny

In reply to Don Beadle

Re: Welcome to Footprints of Emergence

by Kathleen Zarubin -

Good morning - I too will look ofrward to the recordings :) 

 

Thanks for this most interesting topic

In reply to Kathleen Zarubin

Re: Welcome to Footprints of Emergence

by Jenny Mackness -

Christine and Kathleen - 'lurkers' or as I prefer to call them 'observers' are very welcome indeed - so welcome to you both. I strongly believe that everyone, no matter what their role in a discussion, influences the discussion and the overall outcomes and therefore has a significant part to play.

So we look forward to hearing from you if and when you want to comment, but it's equally fine to observe :-)

And Kathleen - I like 'WAITING' - even better than 'observing'!

In reply to Scott Johnson

Re: Welcome to Footprints of Emergence

by Deirdre Bonnycastle -

I've been watching my young granddaughter and her friends learn over the past three years and I think we are born understanding emergent learning. At 3 yrs old, she owns an iPad, talks on Facetime regularly and attends a Montessori school so that process continues to be supported in her life. On a recent visit, I was knitting and she fiqured out on her own how to cast on stitches through a process of repeated experimentation over a long period of intense concentration.

School may beat this natural flow out of kids but I think it's still fundamentally there.

Attachment 2013-09-25 15.12.25.jpg
In reply to Deirdre Bonnycastle

Re: Welcome to Footprints of Emergence

by Jenny Mackness -

Deidre - this is wonderful and thanks so much for sharing the photo of your lovely grand-daughter.

We are on exactly 'the same page' about this and very early on in our research considered a Montessori classroom as a prime example of where emergent learning might happen. We have written about this on our open wiki - http://footprints-of-emergence.wikispaces.com/Montessori+pre-school

Why do you think school beats this out of children - and in what forms do you think it is fundamentally there? How do adults draw on these early experiences? Or what do we do in our education systems that inhibits emergent learning?

Thank you Deirdre :-)

In reply to Deirdre Bonnycastle

Re: Welcome to Footprints of Emergence

by Roy Williams -

Deirdre, agreed. When we first formulated our framework on emergence, and developed the footprints visualisation tools, we deliberately tested our ideas against open learning - as broadly as we could, and Montessori preschools were one of the key examples (alongside higher education, etc). 

Our generic footprint of Montessori preschools is here: http://footprints-of-emergence.wikispaces.com/Montessori+pre-school

And we used Montessori (as well as the interactive space, MEDIATE) as key examples in a further paper (forthcoming, 2014, in Leonardo) on synaesthesia and embodied learning - this is the abstract: 

ABSTRACT: In an integrated view of perception and action, learning involves all the senses, the interaction between them, and cross-modality rather than just multi-modality. In short: synesthetic enactive perception, which then forms the basis for more abstract, modality-free knowledge.  This can underpin innovative learning design, and is explored in two case studies: children in Montessori preschools, and in the MEDIATE interactive space (for children on the autistic spectrum) in a ‘whole body’ engagement with the world. The challenge is to explore the rich opportunities offered by these modes of learning, and understand the transcriptions and transformations between them.  

 

In reply to Scott Johnson

Re: Welcome to Footprints of Emergence

by Jenny Mackness -

Hi Scott - wonderful to see you here.

What an interesting question and one that raises the tension between emergent and prescriptive learning which we will be discussing in the webinar tomorrow.

I do think that certain conditions need to be in place for emergent learning to occur and that if we know waht these are, might be, then we can maybe design for emergent learning.

But being able to predict that it will happen seems a bit of a contradiction, which your question implies. Have I misunderstood?

What do others think?

 

In reply to Jenny Mackness

Re: Welcome to Footprints of Emergence

by Roy Williams -

Scott and Jenny and Deirdre ...

Receptivity to emergence can, in the first instance be lost (as children are 'socialised' into conventional schooling) - I think it's innate in young children, as in your great example, Deirdre.  

Once children become settled and successful at school, they probably have to re-learn what they prevously knew (how to trust their creative, curious instincts), but this it requires a move on their part back into a more uncertain and risky learning environment, away from the 'comfort' and 'certainty' of schooling. That's a big ask, and must be quite confusing. 

Does this make sense? 

In reply to Jenny Mackness

Re: Welcome to Footprints of Emergence

by Peter Rawsthorne -

critical factors. I believe as beings our ability to learn is hightened when traveling in places (or in situations) foriegn to us. This is a survival thing... we are cognitively built to learn with more depth and a greater rate, when uncomfortable in our surroundings. So the critical factors would be; foriegn language and environment (with an element of safety or not), being alone, having learning resources, and a little bit of fear.

I don't consider it emergent because I see emergent learning as having a plan (or design). Not that the designer knows what will be learned exactly... but the space for emergent learning can be designed into the emergent "curriculum". I actually see the learning event is designed for emergent learning, the details end up being divined from each learner with "coaching" from peers and facilitators. Good emergent design knows the subject area of learning, just not the specifics of what each learner will learn.

In reply to Peter Rawsthorne

Re: Welcome to Footprints of Emergence

by Jenny Mackness -

I believe as beings our ability to learn is hightened when traveling in places (or in situations) foriegn to us

Peter - what a wonderful expression. For me this relates directly to my experience in open learning environments. Roy, Simone and I have discussion over and over what might be the critical factors which influence possibilities for emergent learning and a key one is 'Risk'. I think this is exactly what you are describing. The environment should not be so safe that there is no opportunity for emergent learning. On the other hand it shouldn't be so chaotic that it frightens off the learner. We will be discussing our work on critical factors in the second webinar.

the space for emergent learning can be designed into the emergent "curriculum" I think we would agree with this, but I have to think further about whether emergent learning necessarily needs a plan.

Thanks for your thought provoking comments. I must go away and think !!

In reply to Jenny Mackness

Re: Welcome to Footprints of Emergence

by Christine Horgan -

. . . looking forward to this discussion.

As usual, I will largely be a lurker (but an active participant in my mind).

cheers, Chris Horgan, SAIT Polytechnic, Calgary.

In reply to Christine Horgan

Re: Welcome to Footprints of Emergence

by Kathleen Zarubin -

good morning - just as an aside I now refuse to use the term 'lurker' - for myself at least ...  I am a wait-er - as in WAITing  = 

Watching, Analysing, Investigating, and Thinking – as in WAITing (ie ‘lurking’ but I really hate that term, so I made up my own!)  :)

In reply to Kathleen Zarubin

Re: Welcome to Footprints of Emergence

by Roy Williams -

Kathleen -love WAITer.  I also use Vygotsky's 'ventriloqising', i.e. following and practising the way other people have articulated issues and concepts as a way into conversations and discussions.  

And in the footprints we first concentrated on all the interactive stuff, but then (Jenny) realised that there was a huge gap, and we needed to add 'solitude and contemplation' as a key factor in emergent learning - just as important as all the buzz and social network affordances. 

 

In reply to Jenny Mackness

Re: Welcome to Footprints of Emergence

by Roy Williams -

Peter and Jenny ...

I would like to hear more about what you mean by saying that emergent learning needs a plan (or design), Peter.  We are trying to describe what we need to put in place to encourage and enable emergent learning, which as Jenny has said above, is almost a contradiction in terms.  (If emergence is unpredictable, how can we design for it?) 

Looking forward to exploring this (and other paradoxes) in the coming days ... 

In reply to Roy Williams

Re: Welcome to Footprints of Emergence

by Peter Rawsthorne -

Roy,

I believe emergent learning can (and does) happen with or without planning and design. I believe it can be facilitated through open space type approaches... therefore, there is "room" for planning and design. Creating the space to allow for emergence of learning is where the planning and design comes in. I believe the plan and design can create the trajectory of the learning, just as MOOCs have created the trajectory for many emerging pedagogies, etc... and it is the MOOC that brings things back to alignment with the trajectory. Emergent learning often strays, it is the plan and design that brings it back.

I come at this from a agile software development perspective and a M.Ed IT perspective. I see emergent design can also be applied to emergent learning; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergent_Design I hope this helps with the contradiction... 

A big part of my work as an autodidact / heutagogue is in encouraging my own emergence... I think solo learning is a big part of learning... a large number of people are not social and I believe this cohort learns well on thier own. And should be able to "manage" their own emergent learning... I have techniques for this.

Be Well...

 

In reply to Peter Rawsthorne

Re: Welcome to Footprints of Emergence

by Roy Williams -

Peter, thanks, you articulate it so well: 

I believe the plan and design can create the trajectory of the learning, just as MOOCs have created the trajectory for many emerging pedagogies, etc... and it is the MOOC that brings things back to alignment with the trajectory. Emergent learning often strays, it is the plan and design that brings it back..

We came across a lovely metaphor in Rose Luckin's work, on 'lines of desire' ...  

Lines of Desire

which seems to capture some of the interaction between design, alignment and emergent trajectories.  See more here ...

Next paradox ... arising from what you write ... Agreed, "a number of people are not social", but ... they too use social media, like this, to forage for nuggets that they can take away and 'think on' and 'think with', no?  I do. 

I am not a great fan of the term 'heutagogy' (although I support the concept, like you do) but I must admit that I do like playing with the mashed up term 'heutaculture', which is the best (obscure, unfortunately) term I have for designing for emergence.

In reply to Peter Rawsthorne

Re: Welcome to Footprints of Emergence

by Scott Johnson -

Hi Peter, Jenny, Deirdre

Not sure how far we can push discomfort before it overwhelms all of our senses and becomes raw confusion. Or triggers our mind to dive back into itself. Neither of which would favour learning.

Maybe we are talking about two things here? In both cases we are responding to some sort of stimulus. One contains the potential to learn, react badly or some other random activity. The other response may be orderly, purposeful and, possibly, goal directed, like learning to knit by trial and error--which I think reveals an innate human need to work things out. Is that need something we could leverage?

It makes sense to me that humans would seek order (things that work) over chaos. Though we are capable of navigating chaos it is too unpredictable as tool for causing workability to appear.

We have the functional ability to make things turn out the way we want to. And this brings intention into the mix pushing us to desired outcomes. And since not just anything will do, we make deliberate effort to direct emergence to land in a specific area and roll out as a comprehensive path called a curriculum.

But what happens here feels like feels like we are putting constraints on a system initially designed to explore first and pick viable options from the results into a model of efficient locating of a preselected outcome. How much control is too much here? Or maybe "control" is too loaded a term and I should use preferable or productive pushing which would allow us to have a purpose for learning over a strictly defined goal?

In reply to Scott Johnson

Re: Welcome to Footprints of Emergence

by Jenny Mackness -

Scott - I'll be interested to hear how others respond to these interesting comments. There's a lot here I could respond to, but I'll start with this:

It makes sense to me that humans would seek order (things that work) over chaos.

Yes - it makes sense to me too, although I think course designers might intentionally try and push learners into chaos, or at least into challenging zones of learning. This is depicted by this footprint of an open university post-graduate course in education (http://footprints-of-emergence.wikispaces.com/H809+OU+course)

Open University Post-Graduate course

This visualisation shows that the course design is a mixture of very prescriptive - controlled as you have called it (points towards the centre of the circle), combined with pushing learners to the edge of chaos, i.e. very challenging learning, towards the outer edges of the circle.

This may not make sense now, but we will be discussing these visualisations (Footprints), what they mean, and how to draw them, in our second webinar. They do raise all the issues you have mentioned.

If you can't wait for the webinar, we have an open wiki where we share further information. See http://footprints-of-emergence.wikispaces.com/

In reply to Jenny Mackness

Re: Promoting Emergent Learning

by Glenn Groulx -

I think that offering learners an activity to track back their own reflections from the outset of an independent project/assignment to follow their own lines of thought and activities, their strategies and outcomes, would require them to "learn by thinking back, then thinking forward" to apply their learning to new learning trajectories/goals. The assignment/project might have started as a prescriptive, pre-set goal assigned by an instructor, but as the student follows back their incidental learning paths from the past to the present, the emergent learning that occurred alongside the prescriptive learning becomes clearer, and this lays the transformational learning framework needed for learners to more proactively engage in a different perspective towards learning: creating improved current learning pause-points to better keep track of their learning journeys for future reference.

This was my own perspective as I began to be more retrospective and future-oriented, more aware of the impact of my work on self and others. It informed me better of how to add details, tags, commentaries, links, etc, to embed more context and make it essentially more meaningful for me at some future point in time when needed.

In reply to Glenn Groulx

Re: Promoting Emergent Learning

by Jenny Mackness -

Glenn - thank you for your two posts with very interesting ideas. It seems to me that you are really trying to unpick the tensions between prescriptive and emergent learning.

Re clusters and factors - we will be discussing these and working with them in the second webinar - but what we have found is that the process of considering these to reflect on a learning experience in any given course or reflect on a course design, can throw up some unexpected results.

We also recognise that using the factors and drawing the footprints is not always intuitive and requires a bit of work. It also requires a bit of prior thought about what we mean by emergent learning, which is why we have planned two webinars and two weeks of discussion.

Looking forward to hearing more about your work and hopefully you will be able to draw and share a footprint with us next week, which visualises your experience with emergent learning.

I would also be interested to hear more about how you think transformational learning might be recognised. How would you define transformational learning?

Jenny

In reply to Glenn Groulx

Re: Promoting Emergent Learning

by Roy Williams -

Glen, lots to think about in your post.  A few things (in no particular order) to add to your and Jenny's discussion ... 

1. I work a lot with articulating tacit knowledge (through narratives and through footprints), and find it useful to think about what seems to be what you are describing, using the metaphor:  "We live life forwards, we make sense of it backwards".

Perhaps we could say that we work with, and through, tacit understandings, which emerge but stay tacit during the learning process, and then, in retrospect, we can reflect on the process, go back to our emerging tacit understandings, and make some of them explicit.  

My only qualification would be that this is too 'cognitive' a model, and in practice the cognitive, affective, ontological and social are all mashed up, and we might more usefully describe tacit as having (at least) these four different aspects or dimensions.  

If we can do this, (and your work seems to demonstrate that we can), we might be able to better describe the process of learning. 

2. The way you are unpacking time, transformations, and way-points is facinating.  Can you give us more detail of an example?  We too are looking at transformations, and trying to find ways to describe (and to better articulate) the process.  I suppose we started, in CCK08, from our fascination with transformations, and the way different people explored and exploited the new social media affordances: for learning, networking, cooperation and collaboration.  

We also worked with metaphors and images of the bazaar, the front porch, the forum, etc - as transformative and as liminal spaces. 

Any thoughts? 

In reply to Jenny Mackness

Re: Welcome to Footprints of Emergence

by Scott Johnson -

Jenny, in the footprint you show for H809 I see a pulsation between prescribed content and chaos. Imaging how this might work is to balance the safety of returning to the familiar from the edge in a predictible way. The flipping from compreshesible to chaos and back crosses the emergent zone where learning can normalize the the extremes. Without the picture I can still feel the push and pull and a kind of allowance zone where high and low stimulation can result in processed and retained learning.

This analysis comes to me from processing information like an art student when I see or think about the footprint image. Why this comes to me as a "solution" in an emergent way I don't know. What does seem right is the feeling of push and pull as a way to drive learning. The power of contrasting to stimulate thinking at work here.

Illness has put me beyond the ability to understand a few times. At some level the confusion (for me) creates illusions that are interesting, frightening and not subject to control. As we might be able to manipulate learned things, the mind can't really work with these stories except to observe them. I mention this just in passing and not as any principal and to propose that thinking past some point is no longer thinking but a kind of data flow or dream state. It could be possible the constraints you've mentioned are meant to prevent our drifiting out beyond our ability to recover sense from what we experience?

In reply to Scott Johnson

Re: Welcome to Footprints of Emergence

by Jenny Mackness -

Yes Scott - we are not saying that emergent learring is good and prescriptive learning is bad or vice versa - more, we are interested in the balance between the two, which you have nicely described in terms of push and pull.

Sometimes simply drawing the footprint helps to make this balance - or lack of balance - explicit and then you can act on it. It is not uncommon for people to be surprised by the result of drawing a footprint. So here are two examples:

- The Masters Degree in e-Business and Innovation course (which we wrote about in this paper - http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/1267/2307). The leader of this course realised that there were aspects of the course which were over-challenging - near the edge of chaos - and that this was inhibiting learning - so he pulled aspects of the course back towards the prescriptive zone, where learners would feel safer.

- In a workshop we ran one of the participants drew two footprints - one of her Masters course in Mexico and the other of her PhD course in the UK. She superimposed the PhD footprint over the Masters footprint and it became really explicit that her PhD was significantly more prescriptive than her Masters, which she had experienced as more open. This was really interesting and unexpected for everyone. Unfortunately we do not ahve a copy of the footprint.

Finally - we have written in the past about the importance of constraints, i.e. we do not want our learners to fall off the edge of chaos - but what is challenging for one learner is not for another learner -so the application of constraints is not straight forward. The bottom line is that constraints determine what should NOT happen, rather than what should happen - if that makes sense!

Can you think of examples where the balance between prescriptive and emergent learning has or hasn't worked?

Thanks Scott

In reply to Jenny Mackness

Re: Welcome to Footprints of Emergence

by Scott Johnson -

Jenny, like the idea of emergent learning being appropriate to prescriptive out to the limits of open ended exploration. Recognizing learning is malliable and not chopped up into "types" is a refreshing thought.

I can think of a project that fell to peices involving working with master mechanics to improve their diagnostic skills. My role was very peripheral but the process, disaster or not, was full of unexpected learning moments and is actually going to be repeated so it's worth writting down and it can be turned into a board game:-)

Names and locations will be changed and I wonder about context. In hindsight there's lots of obvious mistakes but in the excitement of the original cause and effect were not so clear. My preference would be to write from within the "live" experience and then compare this to the aftermath. See what I can do this week.

In reply to Scott Johnson

Re: Welcome to Footprints of Emergence

by Roy Williams -

Scott and Jenny, push and pull (as you know, Jenny) was a central aspect of how we started to think about learning experience and design, and it's interesting (and reassuring) that you are thinking about it in this way too, Scott. (Looking forward to what you come up with this week). 

Acknowledging the push and pull within designing/teaching/learning forced us to shift completely from a 'zero-to-max' model (and graphic) to a 'two value' graphic - which is really quite a big jump, conceptually, for people used to reading 'radar graphs' or 'spider graphs' as 'zero-to-max' perspectives. 

Once we had made the shift to a bi-value visualisation, and started to explore the balance between the central value (prescription, comfort, stability) and the more peripheral value (emergence, innovation, creativity, edge-of-chaos), we also realised that the spectrum for each factor was precisely a vector - a 'force with direction' rather than a score on a spectrum of zero-to-max.

And a final step was to add that the 'vectors' work in both directions, and can (and sometimes must) reverse direction too, as in the Innovation course (which you refer to above, Jenny). 

That's quite a mind-ful. 

Working with bi-directional vectors which push and pull in both directions started to give us a more nuanced and detailed 'thinking structure' to describe our own experience of learning (in CCK08) and to describe the learning of others (in CCK08, preschools, interactive installations, teacher training courses, MAMLL, etc). 

We then added the 'landscape', which gave us more metaphorical, underpinning, 'tools' to envisage the dynamics of the learning (and the designing-teaching) process. The 'slopes' within the landscape add (?) to the way the dynamics of change operate within a course. 

The question is, does the visualisation tool work? - for different people, contexts, courses, dynamics, and all the different aspect of learning (cognitive, affective, ontological, social, etc).  Its quite ambitious, and its an ongoing project - but hopefully making some progress ... 

And ... this changes the epistemological assumptions of our learning and design research, which moves away from 'the learning experience' (singular) to the changing dynamics of the learning/teaching/design process.