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The way in which informal learning in a Personal Learning Environment (PLE) is coordinated is poorly understood. Conversation -- with teachers, friends or family -- contributes to the processes involved in meaningfully negotiating resources. While institution-centric education creates contexts for conversations and codifies educational attainment, the institution cannot directly codify personal understanding. Through analysing patterns of personal construct-making we visualise the emergence of personal understanding, showing how this might be codified by the person, not the institution. A transdisciplinary module designed to produce personalised learning is studied. This module features dialogical activities coupled with a comparative judgement technique where learners repeatedly compared pairs of documents over time saying which they found more interesting. We visualise this data showing how it is possible to track "constructs" as patterns which emerge as learners express their judgements over time. Our analytical technique draws on the biological and mathematical theory of "anticipatory systems" alongside Kelly's Personal Construct Theory. Drawing on Kelly, we argue that meaning is attributable to patterns of anticipation. These patterns are discerned through identifying shifts in information entropy in engagement with the software alongside analysis of learner reflections over time. These demonstrate both patterns of development and differentiation among learners.

The nature of institutions is an important question for the Personal Learning Environment (PLE). Whilst the PLE has tended to focus on what is considered to be "non-institutional" technology like social software, most online tools today have a corporate/institutional foundation. How should educators position themselves with learners who have to negotiate different institutional and discursive contexts--whether within corporate social software, formal education, work or the family? Drawing on previous work focusing on how learners maintain personal coherence in organising learning between different contexts, institutional theory is used to revise the model of the learner as a "viable system", which focuses on the dynamics of transactions that learners make with different institutional entities. Data from an online Continuing Professional Development (CPD) course in acute cancer care is analysed to show how learner transactions indicate constraints bearing upon learners both from their professional context and from their formal educational study. The pattern of learner engagement suggests that the interaction of constraints creates the conditions to motivate in-depth contribution to the course forums. This finding leads us to suggest a rethink of pedagogy within the PLE, and a broader consideration of institutional and other constraints in educational dynamics.

Current approaches to digital technology in higher education teaching and learning often instrumentalise teaching and teachers in paving the way for technology. Reclaiming the teacher perspective, this article explores teachers' agency in relation to technology in higher education. The aim is addressed through examining how teachers address the technological benefits for teaching. Analysing data from Danish university teachers (n = 488), we identify eight benefits of technology use underpinned by five value categories. The results show that teaching is multifaceted and that several factors contribute to the achievement of agency in digital teaching. The study provides a more substantial basis for making choices on digital education that align with teachers' values and practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For many years there have been well-funded project opportunities for developing educational innovations, both pedagogical and technological, to fulfil the educational ambitions of national governments and European agencies. Projects have been funded on the basis of competitive bidding against themes identified by funders. Calls for funding typically exhibit bold rhetoric as to their ambition and consequently bold claims are made in response. It is not untypical for the results of these projects to fall short of their rhetoric. During the process of project delivery, there can arise what is termed "unintended functionalism" where the fulfilment of the project contract through the regulatory instruments of project management overrides critical challenge of the objectives and rhetorical claims, or reflection about theoretical assumptions. Two contrasting projects are examined to explore this: ITEC, a large-scale technological innovation and implementation project involving schools throughout Europe; and INCLUD-ED, a research project to describe successful educational practice around inclusion. An analysis is presented which draws on Searle's concept of "status functions" to explain anomalies between the declarations concerning the objectives, technologies and concepts of a project and the evidence of project outcomes. It is argued that unintended functionalism arises as a result of common constraints of project regulation which bear upon all project stakeholders. The contrast between ITEC and INCLUD-ED presents an opportunity to ask whether and how, in the light of better knowledge about the dynamics of constraints, the pathology of unintended functionalism might be avoided.

Cancel Culture is a pathology of language whose description in language risks perpetuating the pathology. At the heart of the pathology are double-bind conflicts between embodied thought and language in the conservation of community. Under the microscope, bodies are made from cells that exhibit their own kind of cancellation (apoptosis): self-destruction of "community" for the greater good of the organism. A deeper comparative analysis of the dynamics of cells and cancel culture may be instructive for understanding viable human organisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Personal Learning Environment (PLE) has been presented in a number of guises over a period of 10 years as an intervention which seeks the reorganisation of educational technology through shifting the "locus of control" of technology towards the learner. In the intervening period to the present, a number of initiatives have attempted to create or instil the dispositions of technologically empowered personal learning, to varying levels of success, but none of which have been conclusive. At the same time, developments in education and learning technology have indicated some deficiencies in the models and rationale that was used to justify the PLE. In this paper, the cybernetic model of the PLE presented through the Joint Information Services Committee PLE project is re-inspected in the light of (a) evidence from implementation; (b) changes in technology infrastructure. A refined model is presented, enriching the cybernetic argument about the control of personal tools with Bowlby's related cybernetic model of attachment. The refined model is situated against the impact of the fast-emerging real-time web, and the approach justified with reference to a computer simulation of the dynamics of the new model.

We elaborate Alfred Schutz's theory of musical communication empirically. Our technique for analysing musical communication aligns Schutz's sociological theory with the mathematics of anticipatory systems. Music, we argue, can be considered as an anticipatory system that articulates through its diachronic unfolding, fundamental symmetries which can be traced back to its initial moments. Following Bohm and Dubois, we argue that these symmetries are present in fractal structures that gradually increase in definition as the music progresses. Critically, we focus on the role of redundancy in this process of providing increasing definition. By analysing the entropy of musical data, we show how graphs of relative entropies can be produced from which a fractal is constructed. In arguing that coherence in music can be established through the alignment of self‐similar patterns, the connection between Dubois's anticipatory systems and Schutz's characterization of the dimensions of musical communication shows how redundancy underlies musical coherence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beyond the descriptions of 'viability' provided by Beer's Viable System Model, Maturana's autopoietic theory or Luhmann's communication theory, questions remain as to what 'viability' means across different contexts. How is 'viability' affected by the Internet and the changing information environments in a knowledge-based economy? For Luhmann, social systems like businesses are coordination systems that do not 'live' as viable systems but operate because they relieve human beings from environmental complexity. We situate Beer's concept of viability with Luhmann's through analyzing the way that 'decisions' shape organizations in an information environment. Howard's (1971) meta-game analysis enables us to consider the 'viable system' as an 'agent system' producing utterances as moves in a discourse game within the context of its information environment. We discuss how this approach can lead to an accommodation between Beer's practical orientation and Luhmann's sociological critique where the relationship between viability, decision and information can be further explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]