Hi All - I'll come in at this point in the 'space' - hopefully it will be at the right place (and I cant help thinking of the metaphors in Phillip Pullmans 'Dark Materials' trilogy (which I have finally made the space to read) - the metaphor there is using the 'subtle knife' to cut through to different worlds - it keeps appearing in my mind (but that's just me).
Intentionality (Joyce), opening space and holding it (Brenda), Ba as virtual space (Ila) ... (Stephen Downes, in the MOOC research JAM, yesterday, said he preferred 'presence' to 'space', but I think the terms overlap) and purpose (Scott) all really open up new thoughts and challenges for me - thanks. And I also love the idea of 'emergence as the embodiment of the unexpected'.
Where does this go? For me, it opens up a new train of thought which goes something like this:
1. Emergence is often characterised as the co-evolution of structure (see 'space') and agency (of the participants).
However ...
2. This rather assumes that the intentionality is on the side of the participant, and the structure (and the given) is on the side of the provider/designer/ teacher.
What strikes me in all this discussion is that it might be better to see 'structure' as having its own intentionality (open, closed, challenging, comforting, consolidating, innovative, and so on ...) alongside the intentionality of the participant.
This then shifts the model to ...
3. The dance between the implicit intentionality of the structure / space (which has its own 'presence' if you take Stephen Downes view) and the intentionality of the participant. Wow. That moves things on very interestingly, though I am not sure where it will end up ...
Perhaps one trajectory would be ...
4. Learning which is open to transformation (that's another theme, opened up in posts above) is the co-evolution of these two clouds (?) of intentionality.
But maybe I'm getting into metaphor overload here ...