Ray Keeps Expanding My Reading List

I’ve been out of state for several days, staying with a child who does not yet have internet installed in her new apartment, so now, back home, I am wading through both CSU homework assignments and backed-up eduMOOC items. One paragraph on something that struck me while negotiating the currents of electronic data streams:

Ray Schroeder provided yet another link to a fascinating article, “Emergent Learning and Learning Ecologies in Web 2.0 (Williams, Karousou & Mackness., 2011)” in the International Review of research in Open and Distance Learning Vol 12, No 3 (2011).

Three things in the article really resonated with me. First, the definition of emergent learning, which perfectly describes our eduMOOC, as “learning which arises out of the interaction between a number of people and resources, in which the learners organize and determine both the process and to some extent the learning destinations, both of which are unpredictable.” Second, by validating
“retrospective coherence” as a learning type, they made me feel better about the way I am learning via this MOOC; I prefer knowing the big picture and seeing where my current chunk of learning fits into it, whereas the MOOC forces me to hoard links, look up references to practices, adopt new technologies in order to access new info, and to form online relationships, with a realization of what I’ve learned only becoming clear after I’ve learned it. Third, it answered (for me, anyway) the question of the validity of constructing formal learning objectives for oneself at the start of each week (or for the entire MOOC) by, instead, urging one to “creatively [use] retrospective coherence rather than trying to force compliance and predictability where it might not be appropriate or even possible, particularly in performance targets.”