Footprints of Emergence: Welcome to Footprints of Emergence

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.