Course Footprints

This morning I attended the session Footprints of Emergence, led in the SCoPE community out of British Columbia by Jenny Mackness, Roy Williams and Simone Gumtau based on their recent work published in IRRODL.

I have followed, and even worked a time or two, with Jenny, and am always interested in watching whatever she is working on. Since I missed the first session on November 19, I viewed the recording  to catch up on the ideas. Then during the session, I had printed out a footprint map and tried filling it in for the POT Cert Course.

To oversimplify enormously, the idea of the footprint is based on a kind of map for a particular course or “complex learning environment”, and the emphasis is pedagogy and course design. The base map is a circle, with more structured, prescribed learning experiences toward the center, and more “emergent” (self-directed, expansive, connectivist) elements toward the outside, with “chaos” being the ultimate outside edge. The circle is divided into four areas: Open/Structure (the space or environment and how it’s set up), Interactive Environment (the extent of contextualization and interactivity), Presence/Writing (the learning process and product, or the way the learning is realized), and Agency (self-direction and autonomy of learning). A blank map, available in Word  (I just printed out the image) looks like this:

Each quarter of the circle contains many factors that can be scaled across from more prescribed to more open (here’s one of the charts to explain each). Each can be marked on the map with a dot, and then the dots connected to make a shape. The more the shape is inwards, the more prescribed and directed the experience. The more near the edges the shape is, the more it emphasizes emergent learning. You can see other people’s examples of their courses here.

My interest at first was mapping out the design of the POT Certificate Class, because I knew that much of it is prescribed and I would like it to be more open, although that’s difficult with beginners. I would be mapping the class from the point of view of the designer. As I began, Scott Johnson, who was also in the session and has been with us at POT Cert, offered to map from the point of view of the student. Here’s mine – a footprint of POT Cert as it actually is, rather than my ideal:

Then Scott emailed me and said something about evaluations, and suddenly many possibilities occurred to me:

• POT workshops could have faculty map their courses. We could guide them through as we were being guided in this workshop.
• My students in history classes could do it, and I could see how their view compared with mine (another form of student evaluation).
• K-12 teachers could use this across the curriculum, sharing their maps with each other.
• Department members who don’t get along could map their own course to discuss differences in pedagogy.

Because what this system does, in addition to providing a way to think through ones own pedagogy, is create a presentation of ones course that can be seen at a glance and compared to others. It’s much easier than visiting a dozen classrooms or clicking through a bunch of online classes. It could spark conversations about pedagogical goals.

What it doesn’t do is dismiss the more prescribed modes of teaching and learning. Although they are closer to the centre and therefore literally less “edgy”, more controlled environments, materials and assessments are by no means considered as irrelevant. This is refreshing, as in my own experience I have found it very difficult to apply the utopian connectivist principles I love as a learner to my role as a teacher of underprepared community college students.

In the chat, Jenny commented that the idea here was balance, but perhaps it is more than that. These map lines can become fluid, changing at various times in the semester, or even for the individuals in the class. Perhaps a class begins with, for example, very limited agency, but as the course continues, that agency becomes more emergent. That’s what happens in my classes – as the semester goes on students have more and more freeedom to bring in resources of interest to them, while at the beginning things are much more instructor-directed.

Although I will undoubtedly make some adaptations, I will be using this somehow, to generate conversation by having participants actually do something (instead of just telling them to “reflect”). A light bulb went on with this – there are many places it could go.

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