e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: emergent-learning

  • Is Johnson's "Clustering Emergence" Really Small-world Network Formation?

    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 now refers to as “clustering” emergence in the Dean campaign and other political grassroots events may just be the formation of a small-world network.

    Here’s the evidence:

    • The Dean campaign achieved incredibly rich, fast, and robust communication with its grass roots, just as you would expect in a small-world network.
    • The Blog For America site acted as a network hub, which is just the kind of catalyst you need to turn a normal grassroots network into a small-world network.
    • The sense that this powerful, organic “system” suddenly “emerged” is consistent with the kind of sudden and dramatic phase transition that is typical at the moment of small-world network formation.

    Intriguing, huh?

    It might be interesting to graph the Dean campaign’s network of support web sites, blogs, etc., and compare it to the other campaigns. Did Dean’s support web conform to a power law? Did Kerry’s? Bush’s? One aspect that makes this harder is that, with MeetUp factored into the picture, the network extends outside the Internet in some significant ways and therefore might be a lot harder to map.

  • 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 brainstorming method that he calls “emergent inquiry.” It has the following process elements:

    • Everyone speaks with many others.
    • Relevant and ‘irrelevant’ inputs
    • Many short ’rounds
    • Safe, egalitarian environment
    • Clear question, tight time-keeping
    • Relevant topic, desire for answer
    • Wait for the question…

    Some of these aren’t explicit in their meaning, but you can get the gist. Now, this looks like a fine way to do brainstorming. But it seems to reduce the concept of “emergence” to good ideas that come out of a well-functioning group discussion. Yeah, sure, some ideas come from the product of conversation; they don’t belong to any one person in the group. And yeah, sure, it seems like magic when that happens. But it’s not a new phenomenon that’s just been discovered or newly explained by some paradigm-shifting theory, and I’m not sure what’s gained by calling it “emergence.”

    My understanding of emergence is phenomena like the one described in Jay Cross’ eLearn article:

    You’re witnessing bottom-up decision-making in the swift turn of a school of fish but we’re not used to seeing it in business. MIT Professor Tom Malone equipped an audience with hand-held paddles whose position could be read by a computer. On the screen up front, he projected a flight simulator. A hundred people jointly took the controls of the plane and, against all expectation, flew the plane without a pilot and without a crash.

    This is surely emergence and it is surely not emergent learning. In fact, there doesn’t appear to be any learning going on here at all. Nobody is claiming that the individuals who entered the demonstration not knowing how to fly a plane left the demonstration ready to jump into the cockpit. Nor would the speed at which the group arrived at their collective piloting judgments indicate that they were consciously teaching and learning from each other; that would have taken much more time. In fact, we have no reason to believe that there was a single skilled pilot in the room or, if one was in the room, that he or she directly influenced the judgments of the non-pilots. What is emergent here is knowledge, and the reason that it is emergent is not because the people in the group learned from each other (they didn’t) and not because they came to an explicit consensus through discussion (though it may be fair to say that they pooled–not transferred, but pooled–tacit knowledge in the moment) but because the group as a whole was able to exercise judgment that was better than that of most or all of its individual members. You could say that piloting skill “emerged” from the group because the group members did not individually posess the skill either before or after the exercise.

    I’m probably beating a dead horse here, but I just feel like we won’t benefit from the insights of new scientific discoveries if we’re not careful to characterize them correctly. Seel’s method is probably dandy; I just don’t think that what it cultivates can be fairly called “emergence.”

  • 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 not in the way that Kathleen means.

    I had no luck finding the quote in the Wired archives. However, I did find the quote (or something close to it) in a Frank Rich editorial in The New York Times (sorry, the NYT archive requires registration and a fee to read their archives):

    ”The term blog is now so ubiquitous everyone has to use it,” says the author Steven Johnson, whose prescient 2001 book ”Emergence” is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand this culture. On some candidates’ sites, he observes, ”there is no difference between a blog and a chronological list of press releases.” And the presence of a poll on a site hardly constitutes interactivity. The underlying principles of the Dean Internet campaign ”are the opposite of a poll,” Mr. Johnson says. Much as thousands of connected techies perfected the Linux operating system’s code through open collaboration, so Dean online followers collaborate on organizing and perfecting the campaign, their ideas trickling up from the bottom rather than being superimposed from national headquarters. (Or at least their campaign ideas trickle up; policy is still concentrated at the top.) It’s almost as if Dr. Dean is ”a system running for president,” in Mr. Johnson’s view, as opposed to a person.

    What is “emergent” here? Kathleen suggests that it’s Dean’s strategy: “Dean’s strategy could be characterized as emergent because it drew its power up from the grassroots, rather then being superimposed by national headquarters.” But I read Johnson somewhat differently here. I read Johnson as saying that Howard Dean himself, as knowable figure through his campaign message, is emergent. The voice of the campaign, rather than being directed by a central force, emerges from the dialog of various participants on the campaign weblog.

    Is this an important distinction? Kathleen suggests in her post that all this language parsing is “trivial” and “misses the point” of her paper. But I think the definition of “emergence” does matter here, for the same reason that the definition of “effective” matters when Kathleen writes, “the principles outlined in Steven Johnson’s book were effective for Dean (until the meltdown).” In what sense were they “effective”? Dean got demolished in the very first primary. I would argue (and will argue in a future article) that, partly because of this highly networked grassroots system that Kathleen calls emergence, the Dean campaign believed its own hype. The media, which is also a headless social network that often runs on no more than “pattern recognition” of the most primitive sort, made the same mistake.

    So to sum up, I still don’t believe that “drawing power up from the grassroots” is the same thing as emergence, I don’t believe that Steven Johnson ever supported the idea that the Dean’s campaign’s strong grassroots support can be simply translated as emergence, and to the degree that “drawing strength from the grassroots” is what the Dean campaign did (whatever you want to call it), I don’t think it is unambiguously a good thing to be unhesitatingly imitated.

  • 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 compounding the error of “overthinking it,” I’m going to try to parse through Godfrey’s definition of “emergent learning.” Because he’s right about one thing: I don’t get it yet.

    Godfrey claims that I’m misunderstanding the conversation:

    He’s using “emergent” in the Steven Johnson sense of the increasing collective smartness of dumber parts, as in smart hives of dumb bees or smart brains of dumb neurons. And by that rather narrow use of the term, he’s right — emergent learning is something of an oxymoron. But “emergent learning” is not used in that sense, at least I have never heard it used that way. Those talking about emergent learning are not talking exclusively about how groups of people get smarter by being connected with each other, though it’s part of the discussion. And they are certainly not talking about rapid consensus-building.

    Part of the problem is that he and I are clearly participating in different conversations. He attributes the “emergent learning” meme to Jay Cross, while I was primarily responding to Kathleen Gilroy. And I know Kathleen was talking about “emergence” in the same sense as Steven Johnson because she explicitly references his book.

    More importantly, I think Godfrey misreads Steven Johnson’s position when he claims that Johnson talks about “increasing collective smartness of dumber parts, as in smart hives of dumb bees or smart brains of dumb neurons” (though I understand where Mr. Parkin may have gotten that interpretation from reading my own post). Emergence really isn’t about smarts; it’s about behaviors. And because the emergent behaviors that are most interesting and worthwhile to study are usually adaptive behaviors, we mistake them for “smarts.” This was really my point when I said that emergent learning is an oxymoron; to the extent that we equate emergent adaptive behaviors with smarts, we are making a category mistake.

    So, given Parkin’s understanding of emergence in the sense of the scientific phenomenon, it’s understandable that he has missed Jay Cross’ hints that he, too, means to invoke the research that Johnson writes about (though possibly in a very different way than Kathleen does). In CLO Magazine, Jay writes:

    Businesses are complex adaptive systems. In a complex system, independent pieces join together to form something entirely different and unexpected.

    The best metaphor for a complex adaptive system is a living thing. Take a complex system apart, and you no longer have a complex system. As Verna Allee writes, “Cut a cow in half and you don’t have two cows. You have a mess.”

    In their book, “It’s Alive,” management theorists Stan Davis and Christopher Meyer make a compelling case that business entities are living, complex systems. Many nodes-brains-come together to form something new-the corporate body. As my friend David Grebow says, it even has a Corporate IQ and, according to author David Batestone, a Corporate Soul.

    Emergence is the key characteristic of complex systems. It is the process by which simple entities self-organize to form something more complex. Emergence is also what happened to that “utopian dream” of e-learning on the way to the future. Simple, old e-learning has combined with bottom-up self-organizing systems, network effects and today’s environment to morph into emergent learning.

    The phrases “complex adaptive systems” and “self-organize” are dead givaways; Jay is clearly invoking the same “emergence” that Johnson means and not simply the broader dictionary definition.

    So it seems we have at least three different definitions of “emergent learning;” Jay’s, Godfrey’s, and Kathleen’s. I’ve already made clear what I think about Kathleen’s definition: it’s an oxymoron. I’m not sure that I’m fully wrapping my head around Jay’s definition yet. Reading the passage above carefully, it seems he’s not necessarily talking about learning that is itself emergent. Instead, he seems to refer to the organization itself as exhibiting emergent behavior. Read this way, “emergent learning” might mean, roughly, “learning in the context of emergence” or “the learning strategies that make sense when dealing with complex adaptive systems.” I’m not sure if I’m reading Jay correctly on this; perhaps he will be kind enough to post a clarification in his own blog.

    At any rate, back to Godfrey. He writes:

    More typically, they are using emergent in the sense that most dictionaries would define it — coming into being or coming into notice. What they are looking at is how emerging technologies (and unexpected applications of them) are changing learning strategies, learning organization, learning implementation, and generally changing the way we go about learning as individuals and as organizations. Learning, and the way it is promulgated, is evolving visibly as it becomes a persistent survival skill. And we need to understand what is happening so that we can recognize it, influence those developments, or leverage any emergent opportunities. (That is, opportunities that are coming into being or becoming recognizable). One of the challenges of emergent learning (and I guess of business generally these days) is to recognize what among all of the chaos coming at us is significant and to exploit it before it is a speck in the rear view mirror

    In some ways, this is not so different from the stab I made above at interpreting Jay’s version of “emergent learning.” One of the interesting things about emergence (in the Johnsonian sense) is that it really screws up some traditional accounts of causality. You can’t really do a top-down analysis and hope to understand why some things happen. Forget about looking for that pacemaker cell directing the others; if you want to understand how slime mold cells work together, then you have to look at the behavior of each individual cell and how the whole turns out to be greater than the sum of its parts. This, in turn, seems to fit well with the theme of “unexpectedness,” which is a major point that Godfrey emphasizes, i.e., things are chaotic and moving fast; therefore, our learning strategies must enable us to recognize change and adapt to it quickly.

    Naturally, you don’t need the concept of complex adaptive systems (in the rigorously defined sense) to accept the point of view that we need to have rapid response capabilities built into our learning strategies. But without that concept, I’m not sure that there’s much left beyond an obvious assertion about the state of the world we live in. Sure, change is a constant. So what are we going to do about it? By itself, Godfrey’s definition of “emergent learning” seems to say nothing beyond “we need to deal with this.” Which is fine, as far as it goes, but it doesn’t seem to be a new kind of learning. It says we need a new kind of learning, without saying what that kind of learning is.

    It’s possible that adding the more rigorous notion of emergence into the mix will get us somewhere different. At the very least, it suggests more specific places to look for answers (theoretically speaking). But I’m not sure yet. Jay himself seems to acknowledge that we don’t have a clear idea of what “emergent learning” is at the moment:

    Emergent learning implies adaptation to the environment, timeliness, flexibility and space for co-creation. It is the future. We haven’t figured it out yet. Or, from the perspective of complexity science, it hasn’t figured itself out yet.

    As I mentioned to Jay in an email, I’m a recovering philosophy major. I don’t do well with fuzzy definitions. So yeah, Godfrey is right. I don’t get it yet.

  • 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 I have seen in the blogosphere. For the record, I’m quite open to the possibility that the concept of emergence can be used fruitfully to improve our efforts at organizational learning and other forms of knowledge sharing. However, emergence is also a particularly hard concept to wrap one’s head around, and that the conversations about it that I have seen so far haven’t yet gotten to the heart of the idea.

  • 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. They get their smarts from below. In a more technical language, they are complex adaptive systems that display emergent behavior. In these systems, agents residing on one scale start producing behavior that lies one scale above them….[emphasis added]

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