Jenny Mackness

Phillip - thanks so much for taking the time to provide such detailed response to these questions. They are all fascinating and worthy of attention (the questions and your responses), but I'm going to select two of your responses that have jumped out at me.

1. I would venture that all learning involves a transformation of identity. I completely agree. Learning is about learning who we are and as Etienne Wenger has so eloquently written - learning, meaning and identity are all intertwined. I would be very interested to hear more about what you mean by transformation. How would we recognise this transformation? You may have noticed that one of the factors we use in drawing footprints of emergence is Identity. When I am reflecting on learning, I think I can recognise when my identity has been 'changed' in some way by the learning event, but it's difficult to pinpoint what caused the change or exactly what the nature of that change has been.

2. I believe (as do others) that we have learned all we need to know by the age of 4-5. I would love to know who the others are, because this feels so counter-intuitive to me. How does it fit with the fact that our brain cells are growing and developing until we are into our 20s? And this thought has made me wonder whether there is a difference in the way little children experience emergent learning - to the way in which adults experience it. My experience tells me that little children, in their play, experience emergent learning all the time - and I think this also relates to embodied learning.

Thanks for your thought-provoking post Phillip. Plenty for me to chew on here :-)

It seems that these initial questions have sparked off a whole load more! Following Sylvia's advice (thanks Sylvia), I thought it might be helpful  if I gathered them together - so see the list below - which might help us gather our thoughts. We seem to have moved from thinking about whether we should assess emergent learning to wondering whether we should completely rethink education :-) Wonderful! Thanks to all.

A new question: Do you think we have missed any significant questions in relation to assessing emergent learning and if so what might they be? 

• 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?

• Would it be possible to ask for emergent learning as a result of a course? Would EL be expected when a student is doing synchronously two courses in different fields? 

• What is the purpose of the assessment? To provide meaningful feedback to the learner?

• Why the need to measure?

• Is diagnostic reasoning the same as emergent learning? Can we afford to have our doctors' knowledge be emergent as they practice on us? 

• Does the act of 'measuring/assessing' destroy what it is trying to 'measure/assess'?

• One thought I have is that ‘learning’ overall is about some kind of change .... So maybe somehow the question is ...  Can the Change be 'described' / measured / reported ....? 

• I prefer the notion of assessing learning against self, but how could this work from a teacher/trainer's point of view?

• I would venture that all learning involves a transformation of identity. As it is mostly gradual this is not sufficiently recognised. Take a moment to think about it in your own terms.Then think about the absurdity of assessing that change against externally imposed criteria. Who are you working for when you do that? Whose agenda?

• What happens when the "emergent learning artefact" is a behaviour, or an attitude, or something so ingrained that the artefact is the learner?

• Does emergent learning have to produce something unique or odd?

• The difficult question is What is New or what is Unique.

• How do we get to the person as product of themselves over person as "product" of education. Before we claim that something we did caused learning we need evidence they were listening to us. Would this be an Artifact?

• "just tell me what I need to do . . .".  This is not only the attitude of students but professors - rubrics so that they can quantify the learning in some way and they tell themselves they are moving from subjectivity to objectivity - and what happened to expert opinion?  How to get to the "rethinking of education?"

Thanks for your thoughts Phillip and Scott.

I wonder if encountering the world as it is rather than as it is modeled to be forces us to realize a wider spectrum of working strategies?

It occurred to me that maybe one of the affordances of the web is that is helps us to encounter the world as it is, much more than we've ever been able to in the past - and so we are having to realise a wider spectrum of working strategies - through cross-cultural/global discussions such as this.

I think it's more a case of determining why we become stuck in certain ways of doing things.

This directly relates to our work on emergent learning. Being stuck in certain ways of doing things is not going to be conducive to emergent learning. There must be so many context dependent reasons why people become stuck in certain ways of doing things, but one reason that we have discussed a lot is risk - How safe do people feel in the learning environment ?  How safe is too safe? How risky is too risky? Responses will be individual - which make the design process all the more difficult. So ultimately we need to look at a whole variety of factors that can be balanced - which is what we have tried to do with the footprints of emergence.

Looking forward to discussing this further in the webinar tomorrow and over the coming week.

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?