Roy Williams

Scott and Jenny, push and pull (as you know, Jenny) was a central aspect of how we started to think about learning experience and design, and it's interesting (and reassuring) that you are thinking about it in this way too, Scott. (Looking forward to what you come up with this week). 

Acknowledging the push and pull within designing/teaching/learning forced us to shift completely from a 'zero-to-max' model (and graphic) to a 'two value' graphic - which is really quite a big jump, conceptually, for people used to reading 'radar graphs' or 'spider graphs' as 'zero-to-max' perspectives. 

Once we had made the shift to a bi-value visualisation, and started to explore the balance between the central value (prescription, comfort, stability) and the more peripheral value (emergence, innovation, creativity, edge-of-chaos), we also realised that the spectrum for each factor was precisely a vector - a 'force with direction' rather than a score on a spectrum of zero-to-max.

And a final step was to add that the 'vectors' work in both directions, and can (and sometimes must) reverse direction too, as in the Innovation course (which you refer to above, Jenny). 

That's quite a mind-ful. 

Working with bi-directional vectors which push and pull in both directions started to give us a more nuanced and detailed 'thinking structure' to describe our own experience of learning (in CCK08) and to describe the learning of others (in CCK08, preschools, interactive installations, teacher training courses, MAMLL, etc). 

We then added the 'landscape', which gave us more metaphorical, underpinning, 'tools' to envisage the dynamics of the learning (and the designing-teaching) process. The 'slopes' within the landscape add (?) to the way the dynamics of change operate within a course. 

The question is, does the visualisation tool work? - for different people, contexts, courses, dynamics, and all the different aspect of learning (cognitive, affective, ontological, social, etc).  Its quite ambitious, and its an ongoing project - but hopefully making some progress ... 

And ... this changes the epistemological assumptions of our learning and design research, which moves away from 'the learning experience' (singular) to the changing dynamics of the learning/teaching/design process. 

Glen, lots to think about in your post.  A few things (in no particular order) to add to your and Jenny's discussion ... 

1. I work a lot with articulating tacit knowledge (through narratives and through footprints), and find it useful to think about what seems to be what you are describing, using the metaphor:  "We live life forwards, we make sense of it backwards".

Perhaps we could say that we work with, and through, tacit understandings, which emerge but stay tacit during the learning process, and then, in retrospect, we can reflect on the process, go back to our emerging tacit understandings, and make some of them explicit.  

My only qualification would be that this is too 'cognitive' a model, and in practice the cognitive, affective, ontological and social are all mashed up, and we might more usefully describe tacit as having (at least) these four different aspects or dimensions.  

If we can do this, (and your work seems to demonstrate that we can), we might be able to better describe the process of learning. 

2. The way you are unpacking time, transformations, and way-points is facinating.  Can you give us more detail of an example?  We too are looking at transformations, and trying to find ways to describe (and to better articulate) the process.  I suppose we started, in CCK08, from our fascination with transformations, and the way different people explored and exploited the new social media affordances: for learning, networking, cooperation and collaboration.  

We also worked with metaphors and images of the bazaar, the front porch, the forum, etc - as transformative and as liminal spaces. 

Any thoughts? 

Peter, thanks, you articulate it so well: 

I believe the plan and design can create the trajectory of the learning, just as MOOCs have created the trajectory for many emerging pedagogies, etc... and it is the MOOC that brings things back to alignment with the trajectory. Emergent learning often strays, it is the plan and design that brings it back..

We came across a lovely metaphor in Rose Luckin's work, on 'lines of desire' ...  

which seems to capture some of the interaction between design, alignment and emergent trajectories.  See more here ...

Next paradox ... arising from what you write ... Agreed, "a number of people are not social", but ... they too use social media, like this, to forage for nuggets that they can take away and 'think on' and 'think with', no?  I do. 

I am not a great fan of the term 'heutagogy' (although I support the concept, like you do) but I must admit that I do like playing with the mashed up term 'heutaculture', which is the best (obscure, unfortunately) term I have for designing for emergence.

Kathleen -love WAITer.  I also use Vygotsky's 'ventriloqising', i.e. following and practising the way other people have articulated issues and concepts as a way into conversations and discussions.  

And in the footprints we first concentrated on all the interactive stuff, but then (Jenny) realised that there was a huge gap, and we needed to add 'solitude and contemplation' as a key factor in emergent learning - just as important as all the buzz and social network affordances. 

Peter and Jenny ...

I would like to hear more about what you mean by saying that emergent learning needs a plan (or design), Peter.  We are trying to describe what we need to put in place to encourage and enable emergent learning, which as Jenny has said above, is almost a contradiction in terms.  (If emergence is unpredictable, how can we design for it?) 

Looking forward to exploring this (and other paradoxes) in the coming days ...