Ey… [link to post]

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In our Youth Voices work, students now maintain a flickr account and post images to be shared in a Youth Voices group on flickr. This past week, one of my students came to me with a baffling issue. Her work had been discovered through tags by a another group on flickr. Someone in that group sent her a note saying they admired her photography and invited her to post to the group to enrich the work of that group. One of my students now has a desktop background image that is a photograph taken by a student in Utah whose work my student admires and follows.

Last week, a past student came into my room during a digital photography class and was shocked at why the room was so quiet and why everyone was so engaged with their images. He saw the difference between when students are completing assignments and when they are developing their own aesthetically challenging problems and creating personal statements. I’d like to blow apart school all together so this happens inside and outside of school and different students come and go from school according to their own personal schedules. That would be scaffolding!

One of our first students to ask to participate this spring in Virtual High School is a competitive swimmer. She has been juggling her swimming practice with traditional school for years. No one needs to tell her that the traditional idea of school is outdated and probably useless compared to what she learns everyday in her own personal challenges at excellence. I’m afraid that it’s still going to be another two generations though, before real change happens but wouldn’t it be nice if we could enjoy a little part of it now…. oh and Google Wave… thank you Google! – That may help….

“A dynamic two-way flow of power and authority, based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology”

http://www.wirearchy.com/what_is_wirearchy/what_is_wirearchy.html

When our status, value, and position within a group depend on the number of people we can encourage to connect to us and collaborate with us, as they do in a network/rhizome, then we must learn and use very different skills than when our status, value, and position within a group depend on the number of people we can climb over and put beneath ourselves, as they do in a hierarchy. What literacies do I learn to encourage people to connect and collaborate? Well, “it is better to give than to receive” comes to mind, and it has a certain pedigree, but it sure runs counter to hierarchical structures, both mental and physical.

Perhaps one of the first literacies we need to develop, and one that I still don’t have, is to determine what constitutes a rhizomatic structure. Hierarchies are very well equipped for defining who is inside and who is outside the group, and gatekeeping is a core hierarchical literacy and function. Rhizomes are different. If you show up, even accidentally, then you are in the group. You may leave when you wish, though you will leave behind whatever energy you created in the group. No gatekeeping. To the hierarchical mind, this is no organization at all. If anyone can join, then … well, the hierarchical mind simply stops in the face of such nonsense. Either you’re a Christian or not, an American or not, an employee or not, a student or not, a Phi Mu or not. The rhizome says otherwise.

I think I’m beginning to see this shift in structure in my college classrooms as people drop in and out of the class like virtual angels through blogs, work on gDocs, RSS feeds, chats, Facebook. When students really begin to develop a PLN/PLE, then the hierarchical identity of my classroom is subsumed in the assemblages of all those different networks. When the class works, then the rhizome intensifies, elaborates, far beyond the classroom. What do I call that? How does my university account for that? Who gets charged? graded? And do those various hierarchical functions become anachronisms? If they are, then what functions replace them? If I as a teacher no longer spend my time as the sole, authoritative gatekeeper of knowledge or as the rank-orderer and signifier, then what do I do?

What will happen to me as a teacher when I can no longer rely on command-and-control structures to force students into my classrooms and must, instead, rely on connect-and-collaborate structures?

Dave, I need these new literacies much sooner than do my students, who are already developing them, though they are seldom conscious of it. Let me know what you find out.

…there is no more button to push @davecormier ‘s blog [link to post] > I believe in what he writes here.

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I like Tomasz’ conception of technologies as tools or processes. So many emphasize technology as literacy with terms like digital literacy or digital literacies and this shifts our focus from function to form.

Can we communicate with others and understand what is being communicated around us? This needs to be the focus. Again, regardless of what tools are available to us. In this way, the ‘we’ doesn’t matter. I have yet to encounter a culture that doesn’t communicate in one form or another

What do we need for #education beyond factories? A call for human literacies: [link to post] by @davecormier via @lasic #homeschool

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