Love the anatomy of Babel fish - and yes, we do need universal translators, and yes, no need to ostracise the strange language of academics.
Jutta (in Austria) will be running her next workshop using some of the images in the new mapping sheet - although I dont know in detail how she want to use them - it'll be interesting to see, and interesting to find out if the images 'travel' or not.
Scott, your question about emergence and diagnosis ...
Might it be that although the process of intervention - in mechanics - might be very specific, with little room for the luxuries of 'emergent thinking', the process of arriving at a diagnosis (and even tentative prognosis) might be of a different nature, and might involve tacit, fuzzy, decisions about not what specific interventions to employ, but what metaphors or homologies to employ in thinking about the diagnosis.
This reminds me (I hope this is pertinent) of a piece of research into mis-apprehensions in problem solving in science, in which the root of the mis-apprehensions was in the misapplication to either a calorific or a Brownian conceptualisation of heat, which led to 'bugs' in thinking through the problem, and that in turn led to an inability to think through a strategy to achieve the solution. It was only when the two frameworks were made explicit, and discussed openly, that both students and the teacher realised that the two frameworks / metaphors / models were appropriate to different kinds of context.
Maria ...
The JRR Tolkien piece on the 'degrees of freedom'/ agency in applications (high) and allegories (tends to zero) is very instructive. And from the footprints that we and many others have created so far, and taken into a range of conversations, its clear that learners have a keen, instinctual feel for pedagogy (or heutagogy - if you must), and a keen, instinctual aversion to the abstractions of pedagogical discourse.
In the Nested Narratives project (which overlaps with footprints to some extent - see the link to the BJELT paper, here, for details) we got students to engage in complex layers of reflective practice (using prompted narratives), which they loved, but only because they learnt reflective practice by doing, not by instruction. All we told them was that we wanted them to tell us stories about something they had learnt which was important to them - no mention of pedagogy, and we deliberately did not mention 'reflection', as they had told us they would tell us stories only on condition that it would involve no reflection, and no critical thinking - both of which they found deadly boring.
So ... why are we constructing a footprints tool that is immersed in abstract pedagogical discourse? - a good question. (Best answer I have, and its a poor one, is that we started off this developmental process as researchers, exploring the wonders of pedagogical, psychological, neurological, ecological, sociological, etc discourses - particularly me - I love the stuff!).
However ... tools of 'mapping and consent' (involving real choice) must ensure that there are some clear entry points into 'doing' footprints that are unencumbered by the requirement to first learn pedagogical abstraction - alongside entry points for the specialists who want to engage through (and with) pedagogical abstraction too, no?
Barb - if you are folllowing this thread, this might resonate with the concerns you raised about course designers who demand that participants 'learn (the technical, software skills) by doing' alongside learning the content and conceptual tools of the course itself. Food for thought.
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 ...