Roy Williams

Colby, sounds fascinating.  Can you talk us through an example?

Mapping emergent learning (or, more specifically, mapping the balance between emergent and prescriptive learning) is, to start with, an individual reflective exercise - would each person generate their own framework, layers and sectors?  And what would 'content' of learning process look like?? 

I have worked with mind-maps (and more specifically CMaps) to get people to generate mapppings of concepts and fields, and - most importantly - to map out the (layers of ) relationships between them, and I guess we started with a mind-map kind of format for visualising emergent/prescriptive learning.  

But then it developed into something a bit different - one person said, when we showed him a footprint of a course that he was familiar with: yes, that looks like that kind of course. We took that as confirmation that the shape, the gestalt, the footprints as a whole (the way the 'blob' is pulled this way and that) - can make sense at that, immediate, and hopefully intuitive - level (as well as at more detailed levels of granularity).  I'm wondering how all these different kinds of mappings and frameworks, and generative processes align - or resonate.  

Any thoughts? 

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 ... 

Barb, you got it!  For sure.  The footprints as an actors (or a tribe of actors) with their own agency, and role in collaborative sense-making - we couldn't have put it better. 

:))

Scott, the Meyer Land & Baillee (2010) is an updated on previous work on threshold concepts: 

They describe learning firstly as substantial epistemic shifts, or shifts in conceptual content, clustered around their notion of key threshold concepts, which are transformative, integrative, irreversible, and troublesome. They emphasise the disruption that this entails, when common sense frameworks are overturned (transformative); hidden relations are exposed (integrative): irreversibly - you may reject the learning, but you can never erase the learning experience: previous ideas – and learning - may have to be discarded (in a process of decay and even grieving), all of which is, not surprisingly, often troublesome. 

(from an article - still WIP -  on emegence and transformation) 

You have reminded me again - thank you - that "unravelling of the self is not an affordance for learning at all".

Learning can be a fragile business, indeed.  The market place approach to xMOOCs just doesnt do it for me for precisely that reason. 

Barb, looking forward to seeing the next stage of your visualisations. 

I too am sceptical, if not downright critical of courses that offer not much more than what I call "blind-dating-in-the-dark. There are some reasonable alternatives, from 'quad-blogging' onwards. And ModPo (Al Filreis's modern american poetry course) is a great example of what I called "a collaborative conversation which just happens to be taking place in a MOOC".