Found Doug Holton’s link to scaffolding very useful. Thinking about what I do when encountering a new idea either some kind of recognition of what my brain thinks it might be encountering or I run away. Without structure or some realization that help or accompaniment is available (the presence of a sense-making companion maybe?) novelty can be pushed aside as noise. Novelty is very important but things that are unrecognizable also trigger a defensive mechanism that protects us from nonsense or non-meaning. The least conservative of us still recoil from things that disassemble the structures we’ve built to understand the world. The fact that many participants in the cMOOC genre repeatedly appear in the “same” experimental learning projects like this suggests to me that encountering the new connects us to trusted companions to both leverage the learning and be braver than we are.

Looks like a great course.