Roy Williams

Researching 'learning in the open' or 'learning in social networks' or 'emergent learning' is an interesting and difficult business. 

Particularly because it has to address learning which is a mashup of epistemology, ontology, affect, community, serendipity and much more besides. 

So ... we are trying to find new languauge (or reconfigure old language?) to meet this emergent kind of learning (not entirely new, but taken quite a few 'new' steps forward by social media).

In Jaap's blog post (and some responses), here, questions are raised about the role of subjectivity, judgement, reflection and description. 

Any thoughts on how to take these issues forward (either with footprints or beyond)? 

Barb, sorry you could not make the webinar, but the recording will be up soon I'm sure. 

I think there are many 'closet' opportunities for emergence (via online social media, but also via f2f meetings and encounters (which might be circulated via tweets and blogs) that we miss in our teaching.  Making people mindful of the opportunities, and the 'closet emergence' going on around us could open up things, even within the constraints of compliance that are imposed on us (and on students) - it really is possible (and desirable???) to encourage 'shadow courses' alongside formal courses, and to start to connect between  them. 

And yes on both counts - i) particularly if we all take 'description' seriously, footprints are an interesting way to start a non-judgemental conversation between members of an instructional team and students, conversations which are normally compartmentalised into 'us' and 'them' (and the 'evaluators'). 

And ii) footprints are definitely a sociomaterial part of discovery - in all its aspects: cognitive, affective, professional, and various 'communities'.  In our previous work on narratives, students definitely said the 'prompted narrative' exploration of their learning was a major part of what they learnt on their course, despite the fact that it had no formal relationship with their course, and didn't 'count' for any credits. 

Hi Barb, one of the issues we faces when we started out was there seemed to be lots of designs which tried to second guess what might be good for learners, and lots of research which asked learners what their learning experience was like ...

But none of this (as far as we could see ...) treated the process as a dynamic, adaptive, changing process - it was generally treated as a single event - one experience. 

Our research and interviews with learners (in our NLC papers some time back) seemed to be telling us something quite different - that learning experience, and strategy, and response, and style could all change substantially during a learning event.  So we tried to find a way to describe that - as learners, as designers, as teachers, as researchers.  

What this yields is a series of snapshots of learning by a range of people, at a range of times.  Not the kind of convenient 'big data' that you can enter into a computer and ask it to do the thinking for you - its messy stuff that you have to engage with - preferably by engaging with the footprints (and showing your own, messy ones too) and with the people concerned.  Its a big-mulit-triangulation process, not a convenient bid-data process.  (Aside: convenient data is like convenience food - very tempting, but not necessarily good for you or sustainable). 

So ... maybe no 'one' decides what's good for your or 'them' - you ask yourself and everyone else to describe their experience/s, and then compare notes, have a conversation, and see what comes out of it.  

mmmmm.... does that i) make sense and ii) appeal to you?  

If not ... well, you might not have come to the right webinar! 

Barb, a footprint is exactly that - its what you leave behind you at a particular point in time and space. 

You can try to describe what's in your mind as it happens, but that's really difficult.  I would advise a little room for retrospection - the amount is up to you. 

Your next choice is what particular point (or points) in time you select - we advise creating a 'design' footprint (the footprint you as designer are hoping will describe the experience of most participants at the start, or the footprint you as a learner experience/d at the start of the learning event).  

You can then add a number of footprints of later stages of your experience of the event, or of most people's experience of the event (if you are a researchers, and are trying to interpret data from participants and visualise it).  How many? Depends on how many distinct phases or stages you describe. 

Painting a picture is, in our experience as describers of our own experience, a strange experience in itself, and most often surfaces things and thoughts and feelings that you (as footprint creator) were not that aware of.  So, who knows what will happen?  You have to try it and see ...

The analysis will follow?  Its an interesting dream, and a demagogical conceit of Latour's.  For us we just want to create a number of descriptions and visualizations that people can use to start conversations with themselves and with others about what 'actually' happended. We can take it quite a bit futher than that, but that's another webinar! We need to cross this bridge first!

Phillip, shaping is interesting, and works at many levels. 

If you are monitoring events, and shaping conditions, on a dynamic, ongoing basis, we would call that 'designing for emergence'. They key for us (and I guess it might be for you too) is that shaping conditions as part of a dynamic process of 'mutual adaptation' (or mutual co-evolution, in complexity terms) is quite different from 'setting' conditions, which is what we would call prescriptive design, or design for compliance.  

In systems terms, its the difference between creating a design, shutting down the design process, and then starting the event (setting the conditions and outcomes) - on the one hand, or continuing the design process throughout, on an adaptive, dynamic, co-evolutionary basis (shaping the conditions, not outcomes) on the other hand. 

Which means that both the design and the learning have to emerge simultaneously.  In principle, as soon as the design process 'ends', emergence is likely to end or to reduce drastically. 

So ... is there a straightforward way of describing and naming  'design 1' and 'design 2'?  Are they both 'design' (or are neither 'design'?).  

Perhaps the problem is that once we use the term 'design' to try and describe what we are doing, most people think we are talking of design as 'setting' the conditions (in micro-bytes of stone). 

'Heuticulture' (a mashup of heutagogy and horticulture) is the only option I have for this, but it's just too convoluted - I think it's like a joke that needs too much explaining. (Maybe it'll catch on, who knows).

There is a way to approach this that we get from Dave Snowden's work on complexity, management and leadership, namely to turn the design process upside down, which achieves much the same thing - viz: design by specifying the negative conditions (what should not happen) rather than the positive conditions (what should happen) in learning - as far as is possible.  

So specifying an outcome state (which might be stable or unstable) rather than specific outcomes might suffice too, no?