Roy Williams

Excellent!  Just the right kind of 'light-touch' scaffolding. Thank you so much for pointing the train of thought in this direction.

Let me see if I can take it further ... 

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!

So ...

If we go back to your design principle of always making a range of degrees of freedom available (and perhaps add a range of modes too), we could offer mapping sheets based on: 

• Scoring (we started with a scale of 1-30 (and up to 40 for factors that fell off the edge of chaos).  We later decided to move on, beyond 'scores', to emphasise the push and pull of the factors (as dynamic vectors, rather than discrete scores), but why not keep them available for people who want to use them?
• Mapping sheets:

1. 1. Our current 3.0 version, with graphics and text
   2. A new version, 4.0, with just graphics - but with collaborative exercises to generate associations and texts and more images (maybe a range of images for Risk, for example, from low to high risk, or comfortable to uncomfortable risk?) We could do this with graphics selected from the web, or created in collages, etc. 
   3. A version 4.1, with graphics and factor titles only (perhaps a bit simplified, if possible) 

That could be crazy and unmanageable, but it might allow precisely the range of degrees of freedom, and the range of light to heavy scaffolding which could provide an inviting entry point for just about everyone.  It might increase the workshop team though, to support all these options.  Mmmmm. 

This might wreak havoc with comparisons between footprints, but perhaps not - if the factor points are kept in the same places, and if there is a reasonalbe commonality of meaning across various people's and various groups' self-generated factors, the footprint 'gestalt', comparisons between footprints, and collaborative conversations about them would still work. 

And of course one of the underlying principles, namely that the footprints are visualisation tools for the learners (and designers and teachers) to explore their OWN experience of the learning, would be fully aligned with the practice of asking them to flesh out, and enrich their OWN sense-making of the factors. 

Any thoughts? 

Maria, thanks for the detailed reply and the examples. 

The embodied exercises, and an infinity of elephants (etc) makes it all so concrete, embodying the abstract. I can really see it working.  

In a sense all abstraction is, by definition, emergent, or derivate from the embodied and the concrete, but without these kinds of exercises, and without a range of degrees of freedom, abstraction is often too big a jump, and appears to have no 'grounding' and therefore no utility.  

What strikes me too is that the footprints thinking needs to emphasise the value of offering a range of degrees of freedom, as a range of entry points - exercises, inquiry, (edge of) chaos, which ideally should be available simultaneously, all of the time.  

This could be difficult to deliver, but its a key element of really open learning design, because if there is no suitable entry point, or point of engagement, no amount of emergent learning design will mean anything to that student. And as you correctly point out, "different people have different personal preferences for each of these mixtures, and these preferences change from day to day, or from minute to minute" - that's a challenge, and its an important one. 

My experience of mathematics is much more limited - but this is in principle so similar to the work I did in LOGO (with kids)  many years back, which provided the opportunities for kids to use complex variable programming to draw beautiful shapes - they were concentrating on the shapes, and iterative variations in shapes, and had no idea they were learning about variables and functions. 

Barb (and Scott), looking at you own footprints (shared elsewhere in these forums) confirms that this is not the same kind of 'data' that we usually get from our students in feedback and evalutation forms, to wit ...

1. The learner is, really, the primary researcher, and in working through the process of creating the footprint, they are researching reflexively: i.e they research both the course and their experience of it (which is why it can feel quite different from filling in a questionnaire).  You, as a faculty member (or researcher) are really a secondary researcher, researching their research, no? 

2. The footprint is a 'gestalt' of the learner's experience at a particular time, there is a limit to the extent to which an individual factor 'mapping' can make sense on its own (as Scott points out in his reply to you in much more detail, below) - the factors interact with each other.

3. However much I can make sense of your footprint (particularly now that we are asking footprinters to use and share the 'my comments' column - borrowed from Jutta's group), the footprint+comments doesnt yield many answers, but it does yield lots of questions that I would like to discuss with you. 

4. #3 changes everything, and establishes a space for collaborative sense-making ... 

4.1 Epistemologically, it yields opportunities for exploring sense-making, but provides little in the way of conclusions at the footprint stage, although it does provide, intuitively(?), a gestalt of that point in the event.

This inverts the usual process too - it starts at the gestalt (synthesis) and then proceed to analysis - and in all likelihood, returns back to a quite different - possibley collaborative - gestalt.  

4.2 Methodologically, it pre-empts premature evalution (excuse the pun), particularly if everyone focuses on the work of description.

And it sets aside the evaluative and normative process and judgements until later.    

4.3 Ontologically, is changes the status of the people in the conversation - the learner and designer (can) become collaborators in making sense of what happened / is happening - particularly as the learner (or learners) have rich, complex 'data' - better data than the designer or facilitator has - at their disposal. 

Scott, Lisa, devils advocate question: 

If you (Scott) can describe the course and its (many points of) value so elegantly, who needs footprints? 

On the other hand if you do create a footprint (each: Scott and Lisa?) and then share them with each other (and we would love to see them too, but only if you are comfortable with that) - how would that be different to just describing the course in text?  Would it prompt different conversations, and if so, how might they turn out? 

It's and empirical question, and I would love you (both), and Jenny and me, and the forum participants to be able to explore it together ... 

Scott, you do highlight what for me are the crucial points of emergent design and learning: identity, agency, presence, trust, and people 'remaining intact in themselves' (what a wonderful way to put it).  

We have recently revisited some of the Meyer and Land stuff on transformation and thresholds, and I was taken by their description of loss ('discarding a piece of themselves') and even mourning (if I remember correctly). But achieving growth of agency, identity, presence, within trust is would make for an infinitely more elegant design, and makes me question the underlying assumptions that I now see (?) in Meyer and Land's conception of learning - with 'loss' as a necessary condition for learning - unless I have that quite wrong. 

Lots of food for thought.  Thank you. 

Barb, great, many thanks. The issue of providing a point (or more accurately a process) of engagement is an interesting one.  If you are thrown in at the deep end (the edge of chaos) you will presumably only learn what you have to learn - that can be good, and efficient, or it could be bad and a waste of time, time which could better be spent on the 'meat' of the course itself. 

You said there were 'two courses' here - how would the other one differ? Presumably there was a software learning course, and a culture and digital media course.  If you mapped them both, and superimposed them, what would that show you (if anything?)  And over the time of the course, would these two adjust relative to each other, and relative to the your degree of skill and comfort in using the software?