Learning about Emergent Learning, Part 2

The purpose of this chapter is to highlight the engagement, social connectivity, and motivation to learn observed in two classes of students, one a grade 9/10 information technology class, the other a grade 3 class of learners classified with learning disabilities. The common factor in the two classes was the way the teachers were rethinking literacy for the 21st century learning by simultaneously engaging students in an event of creating computer programing to address a competition task whilst also addressing curriculum demands. The chapter explores the way the teachers were learning to develop the conditions for emergent learning systems in their classrooms as the first steps to reform the current education system. Drawing on complexity theory, the authors suggest that these students are offering two microcosmic examples of where global systems are heading. The goal of the chapter is to help shift school teaching from its present disconnect between the real world outside students' classrooms and the contrived, dated world of typical school-based curriculum practices.

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Digital Transformation Projects

Digital Learning - Advances in Educational Technologies and Instructional Design ◽

10.4018/978-1-7998-4333-7.ch008 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 149-191

Keyword(s):

Educational Institution ◽

Change Agents ◽

Digital Learning ◽

Context Model ◽

Third Places ◽

School Settings ◽

Emergent Learning ◽

Core Concepts ◽

Learner Agency ◽

The Uk

This chapter looks at Ambient Learning City, the fullest implementation of the Emergent Learning Model because it looked at learning “beyond the classroom”; WikiQuals; JISC Digital projects in FE; as well as the work of several others, especially Thom Cochrane and Vijaya Khanu Bote, who have taken the core concepts of learner-generated contexts and applied them in university and primary school settings, extending our work beyond the UK post-compulsory context. A key dimension of the open context model of learning was the PAH Continuum, which showed how the heutagogic practice of enabling learner agency could be embedded in any educational institution. Each year on 23rd September, World Heutagogy Day pulls together emerging practice on a range of themes, which continue to inform work, such as creativity, resources, environment, teaching and digital learning. The authors also look at third places as change agents of learning as in the Erasmus Plus project “The Origin of Spaces”. Overall, this chapter provides a range of examples of the kind of transformation of education that digital projects can enable and exemplify.

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In-service learning in the emergent learning representative initiative in New Zealand

Union Learning Representatives ◽

10.4324/9781315868349-13 ◽

2013 ◽

pp. 113-128

Keyword(s):

New Zealand ◽

Service Learning ◽

Emergent Learning

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Planned and Emergent Learning: Consequences for Development

Essential Readings in Management Learning Essential readings in management learning ◽

10.4135/9781446211571.n6 ◽

2012 ◽

pp. 91-106

Author(s):

David Megginson

Keyword(s):

Emergent Learning

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Emergent learning

eLearn ◽

10.1145/972593.972595 ◽

2004 ◽

Vol 2004 (2) ◽

pp. 1

Author(s):

Kathleen Gilroy

Keyword(s):

Emergent Learning

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Footprints of emergence

The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning ◽

10.19173/irrodl.v13i4.1267 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 13 (4) ◽

pp. 49 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Roy Trevor Williams ◽

Jenny Mackness ◽

Simone Gumtau

Keyword(s):

3D Model ◽

Research And Practice ◽

The Past ◽

Emergent Learning ◽

Educational Processes ◽

Complex Adaptive ◽

Practical Tool ◽

Theory Research ◽

New Forms Of Learning ◽

The Relationship

It is ironic that the management of education has become more closed while learning has become more open, particularly over the past 10-20 years. The curriculum has become more instrumental, predictive, standardized, and micro-managed in the belief that this supports employability as well as the management of educational processes, resources, and value. Meanwhile, people have embraced interactive, participatory, collaborative, and innovative networks for living and learning. To respond to these challenges, we need to develop practical tools to help us describe these new forms of learning which are multivariate, self-organised, complex, adaptive, and unpredictable. We draw on complexity theory and our experience as researchers, designers, and participants in open and interactive learning to go beyond conventional approaches. We develop a 3D model of landscapes of learning for exploring the relationship between prescribed and emergent learning in any given curriculum. We do this by repeatedly testing our descriptive landscapes (or footprints) against theory, research, and practice across a range of case studies. By doing this, we have not only come up with a practical tool which can be used by curriculum designers, but also realised that the curriculum itself can usefully be treated as emergent, depending on the dynamics between prescribed and emergent learning and how the learning landscape is curated.

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Emergent learning and interactive media artworks: Parameters of interaction for novice groups

The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning ◽

10.19173/irrodl.v12i7.1028 ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 12 (7) ◽

pp. 40 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Marta Kawka ◽

Kevin Larkin ◽

Patrick Alan Danaher

Keyword(s):

Interactive Learning ◽

Interactive Media ◽

Learning Task ◽

Learning Assessment ◽

First Year ◽

Media Arts ◽

Participant Engagement ◽

Emergent Learning ◽

The Creation ◽

Conventional Models

Emergent learning describes learning that occurs when participants interact and distribute knowledge, where learning is self-directed, and where the learning destination of the participants is largely unpredictable (Williams, Karousou, & Mackness, 2011). These notions of learning arise from the topologies of social networks and can be applied to the learning that occurs in educational institutions. However, the question remains whether institutional frameworks can accommodate the opposing notion of “cooperative systems” (Shirky, 2005), systems that facilitate the creation of user-generated content, particularly as first-year education cohorts are novice groups in the sense of not yet having developed university-level knowledge.This paper theorizes an emergent learning assessment item (Flickr photo-narratives) within a first-year media arts undergraduate education course. It challenges the conventional models of student–lecturer interaction by outlining a methodology of teaching for emergence that will facilitate student-directed and open-ended learning. The paper applies a matrix with four parameters (teacher-directed content/student-directed content; non-interactive learning task/interactive learning framework). This matrix is used as a conceptual space within which to investigate how a learning task might be constructed to afford the best opportunities for emergent learning. It explores the strategies that interactive artists utilize for participant engagement (particularly the relationship between the artist and the audience in the creation of interactive artworks) and suggests how these strategies might be applied to emergent generative outcomes with first-year education students. We build upon Williams et al.’s framework of emergent learning, where “content will not be delivered to learners but co-constructed with them” (De Freitas & Conole, as cited in Williams et al., 2011, p. 40), and the notion that in constructing emergent learning environments “considerable effort is required to ensure an effective balance between openness and constraint” (Williams et al., 2011, p. 39). We assert that for a learning event within a Web 2.0 environment to be considered emergent, not only does there need to be an effective balance between teacher-directed content and student-directed content for knowledge to be open, creative, and distributed by learners (Williams et al., 2011), but there also need to be multiple opportunities for interaction and communication between students within the system and that these “drive the emergence of structures that are more complex than the mere parts of that system” (Sommerer & Mignonneau, 2002, p. 161).

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