Earlier in this story, we introduced the thinking of four people who might, we hope, illuminate the meaning of this journey at a deeper level. The last person mentioned was Karl Friston, the neuroscientist.
At the core of Friston's work is the question about how things, all things, evolve and adapt, learning in the most basic form – what, we might call, the essence of 'creative learning'.
Perhaps, we wonder, if we are able to connect this understanding back to what is being experienced by students who are unleashing their creative genius, we may have a deeper appreciation of what we are experiencing as schools come alive.
The DiG framework is challenging students to take a base and scrambler and discover something personally meaningful. This journey sends learners into an unknown where they struggle to find something that they, nor anyone else, has predefined. It's a difficult and at times frustrating journey. But, because of the other people in the pod, they are pushed and encouraged to keep digging – deeper and deeper into an unknown until something wonderful is found.
Each learner interprets the world through a unique perspective that is based on their personal story, what they know, and what they have experienced. When they are asked to venture into an unknown, they venture forth from the context of their known.
But as they venture out, they find things they didn't expect that have the feeling of 'surprise'. Learners are encouraged to follow that surprise into a new area of discovery. Some paths are dead ends, others begin to connect. They are then challenged to explain what they discovered to others – to make meaning.
The role of 'surprise' is paramount for Friston’s theory of emergence. The surprise happens when an internal cognitive model is confronted with something that doesn't fit into that model. To re-establish order, the model has to update, something he calls a Bayesian Belief Update. It's in the moment of this updating – reestablishing the sense of order – that there is deep learning and the joy of Eureka Moments is felt.
Piaget, in his constructivism theory, identified this process. What Friston did was apply mathematics to actually explain this fundamental nature of learning and develop what has been called by others the 'maths of sentience'.
To summarize, the DIG learning framework leads learners safely into an unknown, guided by their passions and intuition. This unknown is an Emergent Whitespace in which there is emergence of the unexpected, where surprise happens. They are then challenged to find a pattern of meaning in this surprise, a pattern that creates an update of their mental model – their Semantic Network – an experience that is life-giving and awakens new wonder.
An experience of creative thinking that brings them alive as learners.
Next: Sense Making
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