Jenny Mackness

Hi Everyone,

In next Tuesday’s webinar (Tuesday, 26 November 18:00 GMT, 10:00 PST) we are hoping that everyone will have a go at drawing a footprint of emergence (See our open wiki for some examples).

To get the most out of the webinar, there are one or two things you might like to do beforehand.

1. Have in mind a course that you have designed, taught or experienced, that you would like to explore/reflect on in terms of its potential for emergent learning.

 2. Have the following documents either printed out or downloaded onto your desktop:

• Palette 2.0.1.png. This is for printing out and drawing by hand. It can then be scanned and either uploaded to the wiki or sent to one of us for uploading.

• Palette new template 2. Docx. This is for downloading to your desktop and working on, on your computer.

• Mapping sheet 2013. You will need to refer to this as you draw, but we will also talk you through it.

3. UPDATE 25-11-13 - New Mapping Sheet for Visual Learners - Hot off the press!! This has the same content as the other mapping sheets, but includes images.

4. You may also find it helpful to watch the video that is on the wiki (8 mins)

If you have time to look at these documents before Tuesday that would be great, but don’t worry if you don’t have time. We will go through everything in the webinar.

Looking forward to continuing our discussion and seeing you in the webinar.

Jenny, Roy and Simone

(Edited by Sylvia Currie - original submission Thursday, 21 November 2013, 2:30 AM)

Hi everyone - my head is spinning with all the ideas that are coming out of these forums.

Just to let everyone know, but Phillip and Nick in particular (whom I have quoted) - I have just written and published a blog post about how the discussions here relate to other discussions I have been having this week - See http://jennymackness.wordpress.com/2013/11/23/lassoing-the-coltish-concepts-of-emergent-learning-and-moocs/ Credit for the title goes to Nick :-)

I am still trying to digest everything that has been posted, but if we are coming to the conclusion that emergent learning can't be 'lassoed '- then how do we, in concrete terms recognise/value it - or don't we need to?

The second question which might be interesting to discuss is:

Is it possible to assess emergent learning? How do you 'capture' learning that is not expected? How do you measure or value it? Are these the right questions or are they flawed?

We would welcome your thoughts about these and questions in the other forums.

Many thanks everyone for a great start to the discussion about emergent learning. Although we have by no means finished discussion in the other forum and we can continue there, there were some questions that came up in the webinar, which perhaps we could discuss further.

One question is:

Can we design for emergent learning or is that a contradiction in terms?

This is the title of the workshop we will run at ALT-C 2013 next week. In this workshop we will share the work we have been doing on drawing footprints of emergence and encourage people to draw their own footprints. Here is an example of a footprint

and here is a link to our Executive Summary on our open wiki.

The footprint above shows that for this participant the learning experience in OLDsMOOC was very open, to the point of being chaotic for some aspects of the learning experience, but that opportunities for self-correction, negotiated outcomes and identity development were more limited.

We are now so familiar with the process of drawing footprints, that it is sometimes difficult to remember all the stages we went through to get here.

We would be interested in your first impressions of the use of footprints of emergence for investigating learning in complex learning environments.