Dealing with Uncertainty and Chaos can eventually lead to positive Emergent Practice. Always?

I would like to start by thanking some educators that have helped me dig deep into some ideas I had about my messy teaching and learning process. 

I am so grateful for Shelly Terrell for her invitation to collaborate as moderator at 2014 EVO Crafting the ePerfect Textbook. 
I was working towards the creation of my students Ebooks, when this whole process of uncertainty I was undergoing, led me to that point I had to do something about it. I struggled to answer the question “Have I driven my students to failure?” that was hovering over my days and nights.

I also want to thank Alec Couros for ETMOOC, where I somehow found myself interacting with educators who were sharing their work in process rather than their end products which eventually helped me understand the learning and teaching process as an open process. 

And I specially want to thank Dave Cormier, who assisted me on a late evening on Twitter, not only answering but by asking questions which inspired me to explore uncertainty in learning and how it can lead to Emergent positive results.

How it all started
I have had this project in mind for a couple of months: “Create your own e-book.”. Given the fact that I teach one to one, either face to face or online, and we don’t follow a textbook, neither a strict syllabus, if I have to be very literal, no syllabus at all, but just a kind of agreement of goals and/or themes my students want to give it a try, I though it would be great to collect all their productions in the form of an ebook.
Most of them were excited with the idea, I think they had this feeling that they were becoming writers and that someone out there would even be able to see what they are doing in English. I felt a kind of achievement as an educator at this stage,those seeds I tried to spread about the importance of connecting and sharing were beginning to blossom. 
The project seemed simple, it was going to be a copy and paste it thing and I would help them find a tool to put it together.

Chaos was our first guest 
We collect all productions in Google docs. 

#1 Google docs were messy, full of links, some of which led us to discover that we had lost recordings, videos we have watched (some websites close, others keep the material for time and then the material is deleted like Vocaroo, isn’t that awesome?). There were assignments we never finished or in between the assignment we were jumping to other issues, like one day when we were learning dealing with a Ted talk about technology being the solution to all problems and my student came up with questions like: Is it possible that two caucasian parents give birth to a dark skinned baby, Is dwarfism common in all ethnicities?. We stopped all the tech talk to see if he could find the answers, which was great as I helped him contact another student who is a medical doctor and there was an interesting interaction between them.

#2 I should have foreseen that as they were collecting their learning(s) after a whole year of learning, students would realise they had made some mistakes they were able to recognise at this point. So, they wanted to re edit their productions.

#3 Images we had used had no attribution. We had to learn about Creative Commons. And eventually we lost some images as we were unable to recover the sources.

A twist in the project
The journey turned out to be a powerful process of self assessment and growth. To my amazement they were proudly assessing their work without much intervention from the teacher.  I only assisted them by asking questions which could help them get unstuck. But their productions continued to be their own work, better though.
Only one student was able to finish her e-book, most of students are still engaged in assessing. 
However I don’t see it as failure, I see it as a stage in the process. We might not have been ready to deal with crafting ebooks yet. 

A cry out in the night
Quite exhausted with editing and re editing that night, I was trying to plan my lessons for the following day when I got totally stuck, I was uncertain on how to move forward, I looked at my calendar and I didn’t have a clue on what I was going to be teaching.
That was when I remembered #ETMOOC and one participant asking Alec Couros why he was doing this MOOC on his sabbatical year. That was a good question! And the answer was: “I would like to know how people learn better“, said Alec with a smile on his face.
At that point I decided to google if he had posted any answer on that awesome, yet difficult question. But I was so stuck that even googling for right answers was challenging. Right answers, do they really exist? How can someone be certain about how people learn better?. 
I could only think of a question: What does learning mean? I thought that if I could get closer to answer it, I would unstuck.
I asked for help: