Jenny Mackness

Brenda, Ila and Scott - this is such an interesting conversation and the perspectives you are sharing about open space are so helpful Brenda. I really like the idea of 'holding' space to prepare for emergent learning.

If you have had a chance to look at the factors and clusters that Roy, Simone and I have been working on to consider when drawing footprints of emergence - http://footprints-of-emergence.wikispaces.com/Factors+and+Clusters - you will see that the first cluster is open /structure. I think 'holding space' fits here. We have discussed this cluster a lot and whether the descriptions we have used are really what we want to say.

I haven't yet had a chance to look into 'ba' - but that also sounds intriguing.

Thanks Brenda.

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

Glenn - thank you for your two posts with very interesting ideas. It seems to me that you are really trying to unpick the tensions between prescriptive and emergent learning.

Re clusters and factors - we will be discussing these and working with them in the second webinar - but what we have found is that the process of considering these to reflect on a learning experience in any given course or reflect on a course design, can throw up some unexpected results.

We also recognise that using the factors and drawing the footprints is not always intuitive and requires a bit of work. It also requires a bit of prior thought about what we mean by emergent learning, which is why we have planned two webinars and two weeks of discussion.

Looking forward to hearing more about your work and hopefully you will be able to draw and share a footprint with us next week, which visualises your experience with emergent learning.

I would also be interested to hear more about how you think transformational learning might be recognised. How would you define transformational learning?

Jenny

Scott - I'll be interested to hear how others respond to these interesting comments. There's a lot here I could respond to, but I'll start with this:

It makes sense to me that humans would seek order (things that work) over chaos.

Yes - it makes sense to me too, although I think course designers might intentionally try and push learners into chaos, or at least into challenging zones of learning. This is depicted by this footprint of an open university post-graduate course in education (http://footprints-of-emergence.wikispaces.com/H809+OU+course)

This visualisation shows that the course design is a mixture of very prescriptive - controlled as you have called it (points towards the centre of the circle), combined with pushing learners to the edge of chaos, i.e. very challenging learning, towards the outer edges of the circle.

This may not make sense now, but we will be discussing these visualisations (Footprints), what they mean, and how to draw them, in our second webinar. They do raise all the issues you have mentioned.

If you can't wait for the webinar, we have an open wiki where we share further information. See http://footprints-of-emergence.wikispaces.com/

Many thanks Sylvia for organising all this and all your help and advice.

Jenny