Jenny Mackness

A big thank you Sylvia, for offering us this opportunity to share our work on emergent learning with the SCoPE community and others. Roy, Simone and I are looking forward to the webinars and discussion.

I have been wondering how people have experienced emergent learning and whether it is obvious to people when it has happened. What stories of emergent learning can we share and tell?

My most recent experience of emergent learning has been in the Modern & Contemporary American Poetry MOOC which I have just completed. I joined this MOOC principlally to see what an xMOOC was like and I had been told that this was a good one. I was surprised by how good it was, but the emergent learning came through the poetry itself. I never expected to find so many links between poetry and teaching and learning. I have written about my experiences in a recent blog post - http://jennymackness.wordpress.com/2013/11/15/capturing-the-learner-experience-in-modpo-and-open-learning-environments/

Looking forward to hearing about other people's emergent learning experiences.

Jenny

Thanks Ian for your comment. I think it's more than a question of time - it's something to do with having an open mind to new ways of thinking about teaching, learning and possibilities for education.

What we have learned from running workshops about drawing these footprints is that they are often counter-intuitive for people who like 'answers', like tidy outcomes, like to be in control and so on. Although people will readily acknowledge that learning is a messy process, somehow they can't seem to equate that to the messiness of emergent learning, and for emergent learning to occur we need environments in which there are multiple paths that students could take (along with many other factors that we have identified in our footprints framework).

We have found though that once people have got over their initial resistance to the 'messiness' of the footprints, and begin to discuss the factors in depth, then they are a bit of an eye-opener. Some people find that the footprint they have drawn is not what they thought their course was like. So the drawing process and more particularly, the discussion of the factors is what is value.

We are still working on/developing these ideas and we would be very keen to develop some software that would automate the drawing process, so that the focus can be firmly on the discussion.

Any thoughts?

And as far as a tool that helps show lecturers how they can let go - I think drawing footprints is a start.

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.

Roy and I will be presenting our workshop - Learning in the Open - at ALT-C 2013 on Tuesday next week (10th September) at 3.oo pm.

For more information about the ALT-C conference see

http://www.alt.ac.uk/alt-conference/altc2013/conference-programme-and-speakers

Sorry - I'm struggling to catch up here and maybe this has already been discussed - but what counts as a badge?

So does my MA count as a badge, or is it the assignments that I did for the MA that count as badges. Or is the the number of open online courses/seminars I attend?

For me there is a huge difference between these two and there are numerous other possible examples. If badges are only awarded for non-university accredited courses, how will they be 'recognised' - or is this not the point?