Roy Williams

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, 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. 

:))

Colby, great to meet you here.  Welcome. 

See my reply in the conversation with Maria, above: 

"Bringing their own associations and experience in, to add richness to the images is a very sound workshop technique. It might take longer, but it would be so much more grounded in their own sense-making, rather than asking them to 'detour' through the obscurity of pedagogical theory (which very few people have a taste for - even academics, lets be honest ...) and trying to use such abstract terms for their own sense-making. 

In other words it might answer your and Nick's challenge to make the 'ivory tower thinking' more accessible -  not by editing and reconfiguring it, but by destroying it, and getting the learners to build their own versions of the mapping sheet instead, just from the images. Wonderful idea!" 

As you say: "...so that individuals can contribute to the HOW something gets built has been quite key to how they adopt it into practice".

We are trying to find ways /partners / funding to make the footprints more interactive, and more of a creative, building, exercise than a tool-using exercise. 

And a spin-off of this reseach and development is a paper on another related theme, 'creative synaesthesia', exploring some of Ramachandran's research on neurology, with links to emergence and embodied learning.  The paper is coming out in the Leonardo journal, but only mid-2014.  Read more here ..., and if you want a copy of the paper ahead of publication, send an email to one of us (see our emails on the wiki here ....) 

Sure ... please share what you have / come across. 

We are starting to use the hashtag #emfeet to try to aggregate some of this stuff - early days, but it should allow everyone to contribute and to take stuff and run with it - in other work or other aggregations.  

Add other hashtags too ... 

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".