Doug over at Borderland is delving into some very interesting issues and ideas that cluster around the concept of emergence. If there’s any theme/meme that is more central to so many ostensibly disparate conversations than that of “emergence” I’ve yet to see it.

When it comes to education, it is clear that many volumes discussing emergence have been written, and many more will be. It’s no surprise since matters of authority and freedom are central to the concept of teaching and learning, to the point that those two pairs are often implicitly and somewhat paradoxically linked: learning represents freedom while teaching represents authority.

I was amused by the first (what I characterize as) conservative response to Doug’s post, which hypothetically posited the “hippie facilitator” vs the “educator with a mission.” It’s no surprise that talking about “give and take” is represented by this person in the question “Did you get your way with your sixth grade teacher?”

My own response was relatively trivial– as midday comments when I am at work tend to be– but necessarily so. I don’t believe there is a single answer to the dilemma, only a series of answers that have to be worked out in practice and in tune with the given teaching situation. It’s strange, though perhaps it shouldn’t be, that the greatest freedom is attained through understanding of restraint, just as the greatest art is that which breaks the rules. But that isn’t the only thing art does, just as freedom is not exercised merely through observation of boundaries. In this sense, conservative commentator #1 is not just on the Right path, but– perhaps incidentally– on the right one as well.

I will be following these discussions attentively. Emergence as a concept is something I am most familiar with in techno-cultural terms… I am particularly fascinated by how it reflects (and reflects on) technologically mediated communities and knowledge-bearing networks, which of course is all tied to my continued feeble attempts to keep adding bits to my own theories of everything.

I should point out that Stephen Downes’ response morphed into an entry in his unfailingly interesting Half an Hour blog. I will note that while I admire his poetic closing, looking at the sky rather than the ground can be a sign of confidence and freedom, but it is also the domain of the sleepwalker and the one who follows easy, well-known paths. That’s the problem with the necessarily symbiotic relationship between the concepts of freedom and authority, space and boundaries, self and other– they work together like one of those visual illusions that continuously flips from one picture to another in the inverse. It’s the very heart of the postmodern condition and the post-postmodern derivative and the endless string of baubles that issue therefrom.