Metaphors for emergent learning

Re: Metaphors - light - for emergent learning

by Maria Droujkova -
Number of replies: 1

Yes, people need to bring - or to make - their own content. As you explain, the main challenge in such designs is to integrate everybody's experiences into a coherent whole. We want to avoid the feeling of Babel - everybody speaking a different language! 

How can some common analysis of big WHYs happen? How can I look at your footprint and you look at mine in ways that we can see similar big SO WHATs? Your footprint looks like a butterfly and mine has a big protuberance in the southwest - so what does it mean for the compatibility of our dreams and beliefs?

Most citizen science has citizens collect data, which is then analyzed back at the ivory tower. How can citizen scientists analyze data, too? Say, how can parents in my math clubs compare notes on how they help their five-year-olds with scavenger hunts for nonlinear functions? One parent helps by providing examples, another by asking questions, another by dispersing hugs. Different footprints; how can people analyze results together?

In reply to Maria Droujkova

Re: Metaphors - light - for emergent learning

by Roy Williams -

How can citizen scientists analyse data (or should we say create data) too?  mmmm...Your examples of comparing notes (on asking questions, providing examples, and dispersing hugs) is a great start. Let me try and think it through a bit further ...

So ... if we can provide the tools (graphics, free association exercises - what words, what texts, what images, what sounds, what smells do you associate with this graphic, when you think about what happened when you were learning? -

...  or vice versa: we could ask: What graphic would you associate with "risk", and the way it affected you and your learning? - and if we could provide  an app for them to replace the label 'risk' with a thumbnail of their own graphic for risk, which they could double click to expand (and reduce) it, so that they could show it to others in a discussion, and tell the story of how and why they chose it, and what 'risk' means to them) 

plus:  ... we could provide different degrees of freedom for low, medium or  high "risk': i.e. i) select from a given, small, set of images, or ii) find their own images, or iii) make their own images - in collages, in new graphics, etc. 

and if ... participants (learners, designers, teachers) created footprints on that basis - 

Then we could invite them to join in a conversation in which they could all compare notes: gestalts and icons and stories about how they arrived at their particular footprints.  

They could do this on paper.  It would be more fun and more interesting it they had ipads, or laptops, or mobile phones (?) or interactive tabletops, sure, but what a conversation it could turn out to be! 

And ... we could add an app that allowed participants to i) superimpose, aggregate, etc, their footprints with other footprints or ii) play-back a series of footprints created at different stages of a learning event, to show the underlying narrative dynamics? 

and so on ...