Roy Williams

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. 

And ... Maria 

I sometimes wonder (or dream) of just giving participants the title and the image, and asking them to respond: Risk (with the image of the boy 'jumping the skyline) or Tranformation (with the image of the butterfly and larva) [not 'liminality' that's too specialist]. 

This would cause more or less confusion, and make it more or less accessible? 

Risk ?

Transformation ?

Maria, very interesting -  degrees of freedom and the way you map different aspects of maths and gaming (and the overlap between the two).  Please let us know how you get on with adapting the footprint metaphors in your math ed communities. 

How do you approach the movement of math ed participants across different degrees of freedom, and abstraction, and how do you (and the participants) work with the homologies between maths and gaming? Gaming is embodied (or vitrually embodied) algorithms, no?  Or is there also a homology between algorithms and programming in gaming? 

And the fractal of hands is quite disconcerting. We might use it as an icon sometime - with you permission. 

And ... time, paticularly when it is short - does that engage participants in new ways?  I am particularly interested in the link (and transition) between embodied, intuitive engagement (/learning) virtually embodied learning, and abstract learning.  We have a follow up paper dealing with some of these issues, with some links to emergent learning coming out in Leonardo journal next year - see the abstract here ... 

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? 

Phillip, key texts / ideas from Clancy or Shaw?  Tell me more, please.  I agree that emergence is forever iterative, and have written extensively on affordances in much the same light (see here ... ).

Horticulture is possibly more 'hands on', but I take my cue from Montessori education, in which 'hands off' (and silent demonstration) are key. So a mashup of the two, perhaps. 

I had not realised that Lamark forumulated the idea of evolution pushing biology 'up the chain' of complexity, and in effect countering the hegemony of physics, and the widespread epidemic of 'physics envy' that is still prevalent in social science, and in learning research.  The misapplication of the second law of themodynamics has a lot to answer for. 

I'll join you in the red wine conversation - always a useful prop to have for emergent learning. 

Design - sure, I only realised recently (perhaps I should have read more Kant, and less Barthes) that the discouse of design is largely colonised by people who see it as something that ends before the learning starts. Emegent learning, emergent design, co-evolution of structure and agency, or should we just say co-evolution of design and learning - that feels much better to me, maybe we should change the name of the first quadrant to that Design/Learning?