Roy Williams

Glen, love to hear more on ITI's.  

It might not be transferable, but there is a wonderful example of 'research-based' learning in a book by Lada Aidarova: Child development and Education, in which she got her first grade Russian speaking pupils to go out with a notebook and research linguistic practices - what we would now call Hallidayian linguistics.

She started by getting them to tell her what 'researchers' were, and did, and then sent them out to describe, for instance, how people in their families and neighbourhoods said 'hello' in different contexts.  She built up from there to getting them to set their own comprehension tests at the end of first grade, which included many items which the 'curriculum' had reserved for grade 3 or even 4. 

So they built up their own data-base of empirically found and validated texts, and their own assessment bank. She had an interest - (see one of the discussions, above) which guided all of this, which was a sophisticated understanding and love of applied linguistics, but she never had to mention the word linguistics to them - she just got them to do it - to their and her surprise. 

Peter, if we are talking about the 'new open' space (forget about MOOCs for a moment, they are wonderful, but can be a distraction) ...

1. Its not so new - as in your example, and the variety of case studies we - and others - are exploring in terms of emergence. 

2. Redefining:  open / the new open / social learning / ... add to taste ... 

requires us to shift away from outcomes, goals, aims etc - certainly as they have been colonised by the bureaucratic administration of 'schooling' - which in the UK now includes the requirement that all PhD students report - in person - to their supervisors every one or two weeks - reimposing physical space on a hybrid, networked world - can you beat that?  

And 'an interest' that both opens up the space and invites people in, and 'holds' the space is a really neat way to reconceptualise / reconfigure that pedagogical discourse, thanks. 'Holding space' is such a tentative balancing act, full of paradox and ambiguity, no? 

Hi All - I'll come in at this point in the 'space' - hopefully it will be at the right place (and I cant help thinking of the metaphors in Phillip Pullmans 'Dark Materials' trilogy (which I have finally made the space to read) - the metaphor there is using the 'subtle knife' to cut through to different worlds - it  keeps appearing in my mind (but that's just me). 

Intentionality (Joyce), opening space and holding it (Brenda), Ba as virtual space (Ila) ... (Stephen Downes, in the MOOC research JAM, yesterday, said he preferred 'presence' to 'space', but I think the terms overlap) and purpose (Scott) all really open up new thoughts and challenges for me - thanks. And I also love the idea of 'emergence as the embodiment of the unexpected'. 

Where does this go?  For me, it opens up a new train of thought which goes something like this: 

1. Emergence is often characterised as the co-evolution of structure (see 'space') and agency (of the participants).  

However ...

2. This rather assumes that the intentionality is on the side of the participant, and the structure (and the given) is on the side of the provider/designer/ teacher. 

What strikes me in all this discussion is that it might be better to see 'structure' as having its own intentionality (open, closed, challenging, comforting, consolidating, innovative, and so on ...) alongside the intentionality of the participant.  

This then shifts the model to ... 

3. The dance between the implicit intentionality of the structure / space (which has its own 'presence' if you take Stephen Downes view) and the intentionality of the participant.  Wow.  That moves things on very interestingly, though I am not sure where it will end up ... 

Perhaps one trajectory would be ... 

4. Learning which is open to transformation (that's another theme, opened up in posts above) is the co-evolution of these two clouds (?) of intentionality.  

But maybe I'm getting into metaphor overload here ... 

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?