I was thinking some more last night about Stephen Johnson’s new position that there are separate types of clustering and adaptive emergence as I was reading Albert-Laszlo Barabasi’s book Linked (which I am enjoying immensely, by the way; more on that in a later post). I suddenly had a flash of intuition that what Johnson […]
emergent-learning
Yet Another Take on Emergence
This piece by Richard Seel (found by way of the Wrede article referenced in the previous post) is yet another version of emergent learning that seems to live roughly in the same neighborhood as Kathleen Gilroy’s and Godfrey Parkin’s (though I’m not suggesting that he precisely agrees with either of them). Seel suggests a small-group […]
What Steven Johnson Really Said About Howard Dean
Kathleen reminds us that Steven Johnson himself supports her analogy of the Dean campaign as an example of emergent learning. “In fact”, she tells us, “Johnson was quoted in Wired magazine as saying that ‘Dean is a system running for President.’” Except that, as far as I can tell, Johnson didn’t exactly say that–at least […]
Emergent Emergence
Godfrey Parkin blogs: In the E-literate blog, Michael Feldstein has recently had a couple of jabs at the burgeoning interest in emergent learning, as enthusiastically promoted by Jay Cross and others. I suspect that he’s overthinking it and just doesn’t get it. If so, it wouldn’t be the first time. However, at the risk of […]
More Emergence Hoo-Ha
I got an email this morning calling my attention to the existence of something called the “Emergent Learning Forum.” I don’t know this group and I don’t know what they mean by “emergent learning”; my previous posts on emergence were in response to articles that have appeared in eLearn and the echoes of them that […]
Credit Where Due
I should have pointed out in my last post that Stephen Downes has already made the point that the term “emergence” is being misused in the context of “emergent learning.”
"Emergent Learning" Is an Oxymoron
In the introduction to Steven Johnson’s oft-referenced but seldom understood book Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software, he describes emergent systems as follows: In the simplest terms, they solve problems by drawing on masses of relatively stupid elements, rather than a single, intelligent “executive branch.” They are bottom-up systems, not top-down. […]