Footprints of Emergence: Welcome to Footprints of Emergence

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?

Re: Welcome to Footprints of Emergence

by Jenny Mackness - Saturday, 27 November 2021, 12:09 AM

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

Re: Welcome to Footprints of Emergence

by Scott Johnson - Saturday, 27 November 2021, 5:09 AM

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.

Re: Welcome to Footprints of Emergence

by Roy Williams - Monday, 29 November 2021, 1:18 AM

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.