Emergence is describe in the Wikipedia article by the same name in the following way: "An emergent behaviour or emergent property can appear when a number of simple entities (agents) operate in an environment, forming more complex behaviours as a collective."
The WNYC science-oriented radio show RadioLab featured a great episode dedicated solely to emergence back in 2005. One of the most memorable images of the show was the description of fireflies in Thailand that somehow glow in synchrony. The image above is a photograph of these amazing fireflies.
Capturing emergent behavior has been one of the key value-added contributions of online services like Amazon, Facebook, Google, eBay and many others.
I'm wondering where the tools for capturing emergent behavior in education are?
The idea would be this: monitor behavioral data, assessment data, and other data (learning styles, preferences etc.) over a sufficient population, and you should begin seeing patterns. Capture the patterns and publish them back to the population, and you can expect the population to leverage the feedback loop to accelerate their way toward more innovative solutions to vexing educational problems than any single expert or publisher could find on their own.
Imagine if Amazon tried to assemble a panel of experts on contemporary fiction to anticipate every type of individual and prescribe for them a recommended next book based on their expertise. Any frequent user of Amazon takes for granted that the service will recommend books based on previous buying behavior. What they likely fail to appreciate fully is the enormous complexity and data cruching required to make even a meaningful minority of those recommendations hit close to home.
Noe imagine if there were sufficient data flowing in real time about the variety of instructional modalities applied to a large population of students, each anonymously characterized by previous assessment data, learning style, age, etc. If the system could track a large variety of content, and teacher/student interactions and behavior, and were designed with a robust data analysis capacity, then emergent trends could be captured and republished for use by the population. Example: a teacher of fifth graders is suddenly confronted for the first time in her career with 5 ELL students who are having a tough time grasping fractions. The emergent trend enging could help that teacher identify instructional practices and content that have proven effective at helping similar students elsewhere and at another time.
Given the proliferation of such data-driven tools in virtually every other aspect of our lives (books, travel, health, online search, finance, etc.) it is surprising to me that the value of capturing emergent behavior in education hasn't been realized to date.
