Participatory Design for Emergence: Connected Learning as Transformative Professional Development in an Open Networked Collaboration

• In Event: Educators and Mentors as Connected Learners

Abstract

Invoking applied semiotics (Halliday, 1978; Hodge & Kress, 1998; Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2001; Prior, 2010) to understand the texture of participatory open learning (Jenkins, 2006; Ito et al., 2012; Thomas & Brown, 2011), in this paper we frame massive online open collaborations as communicative happenings--networked distributed events where meaning is mediated through a host of tools including words, images, sounds, space, time, and bodily gestures. While many learning organizations and institutions have designed these kinds of communicative happenings with end-users in mind, few have engaged a process of participatory design that engages a critical number of those users as participants in the negotiation of codes that define the curricular happening itself.

This contemporary understanding of participatory design recognizes the human and non-human actors (bodies, technologies, textual objects, etc.) in the communicative happening of the networked learning collaboration and pulls on notions of “Thingness” that constellate cultural, social, ideological, and material realities (Latour, 2002) under an “infrastructuring strategy” (Bjögvinsson, Ehn & Hillgren, 2012) that is intentionally fragmentary and incomplete, uncertain and unspecified, allowing for the possibility of new constellations of personal and communal meaning making and learning pathways to emerge. Thus, the infrastructuring strategy was a curriculum as an “event-in-the-making” (Roth, 2013), designed to engage a broad and diverse international group of teachers-as-makers in remix as professional learning practice, refusing notions of learning that are reproductive, static, hierarchical (Authors, 2014).

To better understand the unfolding of the network’s “event-in-the-making,” data was collected during two intensive month-long summer cycles where interaction surfaced across online platforms. To date, 2923 educators self-selected as participants, composing and distributing compositions using Twitter (n=18656 tweets), a Google+ Community (n=1658 members), and personal websites (n=133 blogs), resulting in approximately 1600 publicly shared and distributed artifacts about writing-as-making. Drawing from visual rhetoric and circulation methods (Gries, 2013; Farman, 2012) by way of an digital collaborative, interactive visual mapping tool, we analyzed the relationships between participants’ makes and posts through a transliteracies framework (Author 1 & Colleagues, 2014); i.e. looking for emergence across varied scales of activity, resonance among artifacts and ideas, and participants’ uptake of each other’s work and ideas.

Following Grabil (2001) and Spinuzzi (2005), this paper illustrates how the organizers of an open, networked learning collaboration used participatory design as a methodology to: 1) surface and interrogate tacit and explicit knowledges about learning through play; 2) promote ongoing iteration through making and remix practices that operate across socio-material domains; and 3) enable reflexive collaboration to blur boundaries between participants and designers, affording the co-construction of a shared space. Moving learning into online spaces is an opportunity to expand communities of learners; however, we cannot simply move work online without considering the implications of replicating offline inequities (Shah, 2013; Watkins & Shor, 2013). What we have found is that when we bring connected learning principles to educators’ professional learning--learning as interest and production driven, peer-supported and academically-oriented--we begin to see how such inequities might be shifted by allowing for co-construction of the open spaces themselves (Seely-Brown, Shah, & Schmidt, 2013).

Authors

• Stephanie West-Puckett, East Carolina University

• Anna Smith, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Christina Cantrill, National Writing Project

• Mia Zamora, Kean University