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• We evaluated long-term emergent social learning processes within transboundary river basin management in the Zambezi basin. • We found the concept of learning space helpful to evaluate long-term emergent social learning processes and outcomes. • Emergent processes in the Zambezi basin were key in the development of formal structures for basin-wide management. • Emergent processes are relevant for expediting formal processes by stimulating physical and structural learning spaces. Social learning in collaborative processes is considered important for addressing complex natural resource dilemmas and for supporting multi-actor interactions in joint problem framing, and the co-construction of solutions. While social learning is often presented as a normative approach for stimulating shared understanding among multiple actors, little is known about how long-term emergent social learning processes occur. In this paper, we analyse a long-term emergent social learning process within transboundary river basin management. To this end, we apply the concept of the learning space - meaning arenas for interaction, deliberation and re-framing - as a lens for evaluating emergent social learning processes. Results show that in the Zambezi Basin, social learning in emergent processes occurs in stages and is triggered by various factors that result in collective outcomes throughout the process. Emergent social learning processes were triggered by structural reorganization processes, natural calamities, the influences of cooperating partners and international frameworks. Over time, the spaces for interaction and deliberation led to the reframing of basin management practices and the subsequent development of new institutions. In addition, social learning outcomes included increased relational capacities of national and regional actors and trust, but also mistrust and power issues. While emergent long-term processes are difficult to evaluate, our findings reveal that the concept of the learning space provides a structure for assessing long-term emergent social learning process outcomes, and thus, can provide a broader understanding of processes needed in designing long-term management practices or institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of the present research was to clarify further the necessary and sufficient conditions that establish derived stimulus relations. Under more complex conditions (i.e., training involving four, four-member stimulus classes), past research has demonstrated that untested stimulus relations did not emerge when recently trained relational responding was extinguished. The present research examined whether such emergence was more likely under less complex conditions. In experiment 1, untested equivalence relations emerged in extinction using a training structure with three, three-member classes. In experiment 2, untested symmetrical relations emerged in extinction using a training structure with four, four-member classes. The necessary and sufficient conditions that establish derived stimulus classes seem to depend on environmental complexity. Presented are the implications of these findings for conceptualizing derived relational responding as a generalized, or higher-order, response class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Instructional designers plan current student experiences that promote future com-petence. There is a wide agreement that current instruction should allow students to "go beyond the information given" by demonstrating novel understanding. Less clear is what instructional efforts yield what specific emergent knowledge. Under these conditions, emergent learning remains an untestable, and therefore unscientific, concept. We describe a framework that creates emergent learning in both novice and experienced learners, and in many academic subjects, specifying preconditions that will yield specific emergent learning outcomes, and thereby promoting a desirable level of prospective precision in the planning of future student competence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study is to report on the nature of student learning resulting from an open facilitation approach to solo activities. Three key moments of facilitator intervention were identified at which the facilitator was encouraged to take a step back from directing the experience. They are the pre-activity brief, the mid-activity visit and the post-activity review. Findings suggest that participants' learning focused on their raised self-awareness and social relationships. Raised spiritual awareness was also identified and this was closely linked to a connection with the landscape and eco-system. Evidence was also identified for emergent learning to have occurred that is not normally identified in the solo discourse. The findings suggest that participants on solo activities do not require a facilitator to tell them what they should be learning and that they will identify for themselves outcomes that are personally meaningful and important. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Abstract: This article reports on efforts to create an administrative structure for learning and teaching multimodal composing that depends not on the leadership of a new media writing expert but on the collaboration of relative novices organized according to principles of emergent learning. Based on four years’ experience in a grant-funded program that supports new media composing in multiple disciplines, I report on the benefits of a bottom-up, emergent approach while raising questions about the long-term sustainability of such an approach. I conclude by describing efforts to create more top-down support for new media composing, while remaining committed to serving the teachers and students who are the real agents of change. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Emergent learning describes learning that occurs when participants interact and distribute knowledge, where learning is self-directed, and where the learning destination of the participants is largely unpredictable (Williams, Karousou, & Mackness, 2011). These notions of learning arise from the topologies of social networks and can be applied to the learning that occurs in educational institutions. However, the question remains whether institutional frameworks can accommodate the opposing notion of "cooperative systems" (Shirky, 2005), systems that facilitate the creation of user-generated content, particularly as first-year education cohorts are novice groups in the sense of not yet having developed university-level knowledge. This paper theorizes an emergent learning assessment item (Flickr photo-narratives) within a first-year media arts undergraduate education course. It challenges the conventional models of student-lecturer interaction by outlining a methodology of teaching for emergence that will facilitate student-directed and open-ended learning. The paper applies a matrix with four parameters (teacher-directed content/student-directed content; non-interactive learning task/interactive learning framework). This matrix is used as a conceptual space within which to investigate how a learning task might be constructed to afford the best opportunities for emergent learning. It explores the strategies that interactive artists utilize for participant engagement (particularly the relationship between the artist and the audience in the creation of interactive artworks) and suggests how these strategies might be applied to emergent generative outcomes with first-year education students. We build upon Williams et al.'s framework of emergent learning, where "content will not be delivered to learners but co-constructed with them" (De Freitas & Conole, as cited in Williams et al., 2011, p. 40), and the notion that in constructing emergent learning environments "considerable effort is required to ensure an effective balance between openness and constraint" (Williams et al., 2011, p. 39). We assert that for a learning event within a Web 2.0 environment to be considered emergent, not only does there need to be an effective balance between teacher-directed content and student-directed content for knowledge to be open, creative, and distributed by learners (Williams et al., 2011), but there also need to be multiple opportunities for interaction and communication between students within the system and that these "drive the emergence of structures that are more complex than the mere parts of that system" (Sommerer & Mignonneau, 2002, p. 161). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study focuses on the observation of learning processes as they emerge in the context of conversations among two students in three successive tasks designed to foster conceptual change in proportional reasoning. The three tasks were set according to a pre-test treatment post-test paradigm. In the pre-test and the post-test tasks, the two students solved individually several items in the presence of an experimenter. In the treatment task, the two students worked as a dyad to solve similar items; they used a balance to check their conclusions and subsequently continued solving the items when the weighing did not match their expectations. We adopt a micro-genetic approach and develop new analytical tools to observe what happened in the conversation (both socially and cognitively). Throughout the three successive tasks, we observed the interplay between tools, peers, experimenter, and task demands and how they are managed through the rules of conversation. We identified four processes that involved the emergence of new high-order strategies from coordinated actions distributed among peers, the guidance of the experimenter in coordinating actions, and ways the participation in solving a previous task was actualized in a successive one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]