I’ve committed to taking the work i’ve been doing around rhizomatic learning to the next level this year. I don’t necessarily know what that’s going to look like, but hopefully it will at least mean a few more papers and some better thinking. One of the steps that I’ve taken in the last few days is to setup a mendeley group dedicated to rhizomatic learning and seeing what we can do about gathering the scant existing publications together into one place. So far the response has been very good, and a considerable about of stuff has been gathered.

But what to do with it all?

A lit review
If you go over to the group page on Mendeley http://www.mendeley.com/groups/2055423/rhizomatic-learning/ you’ll see a number of papers, a bunch of people, a brief description of the group and a link. That link goes to a googledoc. It’s occurred to me that the only way i’m going to be able to organize my own thoughts about the papers that are being put into group is to have some contextual piece that will walk people through it. I may, over time, become familiar enough with all the papers to not need this crutch. But i will certainly need it over the short term, and it would seem that it could be useful for others.

There is something terribly ironic about applying this much structure to a concept that in some ways IS structural resistance itself. But, much like D&G suggest in their own introduction to A Thousand Plateaus, we have to do something. If i’m going to further my own work, share work with others, then we need some kind of context within which we can work some kind of exchange.

My own goal is to see if it is possible to create a practical teaching/learning approach grounded in the philosophy represented in those articles. Something that starts way over in the netherworld of french post 1960 philosophy, and finishes in someone’s classroom. I’m starting to get asked the question… “how would i do this in my school/classroom”. I don’t know if there are answers to this question, but i’m going to try and find out

The language challenge
Rhizomatic learning is based, however enigmatically, in the work of Deleuze and Guattari. They are French and, to put it broadly, difficult to define. Some would call them postmodern or post-structuralist philosophers, but they did not particularly seem to like those terms. I will not delve into that debate here, suffice it to say that they have a particular way of looking at the world, and an entire language built up around how to talk about that. Some of that language they inherited from philosophers and psychoanalysts before the, some, frankly, they simply made up or so profoundly changed from their usual meaning that they might as well have made them up.

This special language makes any work on rhizomes (and associated concepts) a very difficult one. I feel very passionately about the narrative that emerges from D&G’s work and believe that it has a very important story to tell about education, learning, complexity and uncertainty. I always tend to get caught, however, between speaking in technical terms about the philosophy behind it, and speaking in terms that people unfamiliar with the French Philosophical context will accept at face value.

Lets try… decalcomania – one of the characteristics of the rhizome

according to wikipedia it

“is a decorative technique by which engravings and prints may be transferred to pottery or other materials.”

It evolved to a surealist practice of

‘tracing without an original‘

which seems more appropriate to the usage that D&G mean for it. Awesomely, the same wikipedia entry claims that decalcomania is the root work of Cockamamy, which was a deliberate mispronunciation. It was also shortened to ‘decal’. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decalcomania This, then, is the accepted usage of the word.

According to a quote stolen from a colleague (Keith Hamon) for Deleuze and Guattari decalcomania is

“forming through continuous negotiation with its context, constantly adapting by experimentation, thus performing a non-symmetrical active resistance against rigid organization and restriction.”

I recently described it as

“They grow and spread via experimentation within a context”

Without using the term decalcomania at all.

They are similar, certainly, but its not an easy voyage from one to the other. Plus, the word shape itself (with ‘mania’ at the end) suggests that its meaning may be more esoteric and psychobabbely. This without even opening up the discussion about the actual biological nature of the rhizome.

And i’ve lost some of the deeper political meaning with my translation. I had a similar conversation a few weeks ago with my concerns over the translation of ‘war machine’ from ‘machine de guerre’. http://davecormier.net/war-machine-nom-de-guerre-french-translation

Working through the language in a group is going to be a struggle. Those of us crossing disciplines always get into trouble over this i suppose, but I’m not sure what to do about it.

A way forward
So i’m going to go ahead and keep adding to my lit review document. And whether it’s a document that i finish three years from now, by myself, or something where a bunch of others join in and we publish it somewhere with 20 authors is of no great concern to me. I’ll poke away at it, feel free to do the same yourself.

The Change11 course has brought me many realizations, but none so useful as the Cynefin framework. As i suggested in my last post, i’ve been working on bringing it into my decision making at my day job. In the last four weeks it’s occurred to me that it is also an excellent way to help clarify some of my thinking around learning as well. In trying to describe rhizomatic learning, there are two critical challenges that I’ve not been able to voice properly.

1. How is this not simply anarchy?
2. How are people supposed to understand the basics?

I certainly don’t see my classrooms as anarchic, though they sometimes slide off in that direction. In a very real sense, my job is to keep the classroom from descending into random patters of behaviour, and keep it to the topic that we are supposed to be covering. That’s the difference between having a class and simply hosting a party.

I also am not particularly interested in ‘teaching’ the basics. It’s a troubling word that… basics. I often find myself thinking that things like ‘definitions’ are basic concepts, whereas experience tells me that knowing enough about a concept to describe it is actually a pretty profound statement of understanding. By basic here i mean ‘turn on the computer’ rather than define a computer.

Still, the energy and creativity that can come from the unexpected and the toolkit that can come from having ‘acquired the basics’ are very handy to have when we are trying to grapple with a complex world. Therein lies the problem…

MOOCs as a structure – and rhizomatic learning as an approach – privilege a certain kind of learning and learner. The MOOC offers an ecosystem in which a person can become familiar with a particular domain. Rhizomatic learning is a way of navigating that ecosystem that empowers the student to make their own maps of knowledge, to be ‘cartographers’ inside that domain. It suggests that the interacting with a community in a given domain is learning. The community is the curriculum.

MOOCs offer a complex ecosystem in which you ‘can’ learn, not one where you ‘will learn.’ It doesn’t come with many guarantees. Rhizomatic learning is a complex way of learning, not the easiest way to learn to tie your shoes.

This is the germ of an idea that i’m getting out of the Cynefin Framework. Lets see if i can convince you… first, the framework.

Enter the Cynefin framework

This is the core of the Cynefin framework as developed by Dave Snowden. Five domains of decision making. Broadly speaking the framework offers a categorization for separating the different kinds of decisions that can be made, and the differing approaches required for each. The following is gleaned through pouring over the cognitive-edge website, reading through articles like this one, and watching the excellent videos Dave has online.

Simple issues: A relationship between cause and effect is observable. A thing can be easily categorized, and established best practice applied. See what’s coming in. Make it fit a category. Make a decision. This is ‘best practice’.

Complicated issues: There is a right answer, but it isn’t obvious. There is need to analyze. Several different ways of doing things, all of which are legitimate if you have the right expertise. This is ‘good practice’. See what’s coming. Analyze towards a solution (perhaps by contacting an expert). Make a decision.

Complex Issues: No connection between cause and effect. Safe fail experiments. If an experiment succeeds, it gets amplified. If it fails it gets dampened. Amplification and Dampening should be predetermined. Try something. See what happens. Amplify or dampen.

Chaotic Issues: Move very quickly to stabilize the situation. Any practice will be novel.

Disorder: Is the space of not knowing which of the domains we’re in. In this space people tend to fall back on their preferences for action. For the bureaucrat (simple domain) all failures are a failure of process. For the Deep expert (complicated domain), all failures are a failure of time and resources for research. For complexity workers (complex domain) all things require a large amount of resources/opinions/concepts to be brought to bear to search for a solution. For totalitarians (chaotic domain), everything is chaotic, and all decisions should be made directly by them, and immediately acted upon.

How the Cynefin framework can help people with MOOCs
If you are looking for ‘best practices’ in a given domain, the MOOC is a fantastically inefficient way of acquiring them. The simple domain described in the framework is no doubt a useful end of the educational realm… its the domain that allowed me to remember my timetables, and where to attach the wires on a light switch. ‘Best Practices’. You might find them in a MOOC, but who would know where to look.

If you are looking for ‘good practices’ a MOOC is probably a better option than for simple practices, but it’s still not exactly designed for that. Good practice decisions involved deep content experts using years of experience to offer guidance. Mentorship works like this. Working with an expert guide can be a wonderful way to learn… but it’s not how a MOOC is built. A MOOCer kinda needs to find their own way, and outside of paying for someone’s time to help guide you, it’s not built on the mentorship model.

If you are looking for a ‘chaotic experience’ MOOCs are probably a little tied tight for you. We tend to pull together materials, and have expert centred discussions that are fairly restrictive. If you’re looking for chaotic experiences where you need to put your foot in the ground and ‘do anything’ you already have the internet. You don’t need a MOOC.

The complex domain is where the MOOC really shines. If you want to try things, see how it goes, and build from that response, a MOOC is just the ecosystem you need. In it you can find people to try ideas out on, to work out the knowledge in the content domain that you’re interested in. Probe, sense, respond sounds just about right for a MOOC.

Rhizomatic Learning
And that description of how to act in a MOOC sounds just about right as a description of rhizomatic learning. The knowledge lives in the community, you engage with it by probing into the community, sensing the response and then adjust. Just like the rhizome. It is a learning approach that is full of uncertainty… not least for the educator. But its one that allows for the development of the literacies that will allow us to sharpen our ability to participate in complex decision making. Dealing with the uncertainty is what the learning is all about.

Here is an excerpt from the cognitive-edge website from a blog post written by Gary Wong

Fuzzy is better than Sharp when setting vision
Question: Which bird is a better predator? A sharp-eyed hunter that could pinpoint a specific animal 3 miles above ground or a half-blind bird that would pick up anything that moved, including rolling tumbleweed?
Answer: In a stable environment, pick the sharp-eyed bird. Hunting is easy and pickings are tasty. Ah, life is wonderful.
In a changing environment where windstorms, drought, or human intervention can drastically alter the food supply, go with the half-blind bird.

and so…
It’s that complex domain that interests me in learning. I think most of what i criticize or, at least, what concerns me about education is the movement between the complicated and simple domains. Our bureaucracies encourage simple domain learning, things that can be tracked and analyzed. Research goals seem to attempt to take things from complicated domains and shove them down into the simple one. Our world is increasingly one where complex decisions need to be made… and thats the kind of education i’m interested in being involved in.

Looking back at the worker, soldier and nomad, it seems to apply very well here. The nomad learns in the complex domain.

For five years now i’m been trying to come up with a way of summarizing what Rhizomatic learning means to me. It is one thing to have a number of students trapped in a room, or tied to me by a grade, who are forced to listen to me for hours on end until they come to some shared understanding… it is quite another to explain it to someone in the street. “Hey Dave, what’s your presentation about” “well… it’s kinda hard to explain, you see, there are these plants that live undergound… ” and then i go off and start to talk about how i want students to be nomads and ask semi-rhetorical questions like ‘why do we teach‘.

If you have been following along on my five year odyssey, you’ll have been through all these chats and will know that I haven’t always been clear about it. If this is your first time here, and by some strange happenstance you just read those three links, you might still be wondering what exactly i’m on about. The challenge is that the rhizome, and rhizomatic learning is not exactly something i WANT to define. Defining it restricts it, and stops it from being a story that is useful to others – a story they can make their own. At the same time, i’m sure there are things that rhizomatic learning ‘isn’t’. So, given that, I’ve been looking for a way of talking about it that furthers the discussion, but doesn’t go about simply retorting to George’s serious criticisms as expressed last year during my presentation for the change mooc.

Rhizomes then, are effective for describing the structure and form of knowledge and learning – bumpy, lumpy, organic, and adaptive. But they fail to describe how learning occurs, how novelty happens, and how a rhizome becomes more than a replication of itself. Rhizomes can be a helpful way to think about curriculum, to think about how we develop educational content when we are connected (dang networks again) to one another and to information sources. However, beyond the value of describing the form of curriculum as decentralized, adaptive, and organic, I’m unsure what rhizomes contribute to knowledge and learning.

Embracing uncertainty
Rhizomatic learning is about embracing uncertainty. That’s the goal. Getting to the point in oneself, or helping someone else to get to the point where they are able to confront a particular system, challenge, situation whatever not knowing the answer and feeling like they can decide about it. I try to thinking of teaching, then, as mimicking the process of being confronted with uncertain situations, that develop the literacies required to deal with uncertainty. There are alot of good words that go along with this… responsibility, self-reliance, creativity… but I’m starting to think that it all comes down to uncertainty. My students want ‘the right answer’ and i want to to be comfortable with an answer. Not because they shouldn’t work their tails off to come up with a good answer… just that it won’t be ‘the right answer.’

I think lots of things about curriculum construction (or lack thereof), of how we should keep curriculum as the communities that we have, but those are really what I’ve been talking about in other places. If someone were to gather up the excellent work of folks like Tobey Steeves, Mary ann Reilly, the ‘sweedish rhizomatic folks‘, I have no doubt that you could pull together something that someone might call ‘a learning theory’ for rhizomatic learning. Others would disagree. I am not concerned.

[note: 'the sweedish rhizomatic folks include @BPJoh @tusenpekpinnar @widaeus @DanSvanbom and @perfal]

Uncertainty in our cultures has been covered by convention for many years. The veneer is peeling. To teach someone ‘the way things are’ is only to play power. Uncertainty is something that needs to be in our teaching, in our curriculum and set as a goal for our students.

The strange case of habituation
Now, saying that… there are tons of conventions that we need to have our thoughts so that we can talk about anything. I am currently learning how to make furniture. I have some sense of what people mean by a through mortise and quarter sawn oak. It took me about ten times reading through the same material before i came to understand what those words might refer to… at least enough to understand, for instance, how hard a particular chair might be to make.

I’m starting to think of this as ‘habituation’. Of getting to the point where i have become so worn down on trying to visualize what a thing might mean, that it starts to come without me thinking about it. I have a pavlovian response to that word (sign). I found myself using the word ‘mortise’ in conversation with someone today before I remembered that it was a special word that they might not know. I no longer ‘think about it’. These are the kinds of habituations that are required before and during any learning venture. They are the stuff that discussions of uncertainty is made out of… but they often need to be approached very differently.

I have to say… i’m not a hundred percent convinced on this usage of the word. I mentioned it in our Change11 conversation with Dave Snowden and got quite abruptly brought up short. He responded by talking about how cab drivers in London, after several years of remembering the streets, actually have their brains ‘changed’. I’m not talking about this level of expertise at all… the VAST majority of the things we learn never become something that we do 8 hours a day. In the case of the cab driver… the fact that streets have names, the words used for directions and the idea that times and fares are important are a more apt comparison. That is a more usual level at which we take people into new domains of thinking.

I tend to think of the habituation as best done as ‘cold water immersion’. Dive in… the conventions will become second nature as your body adjusts. You will start to become inured to the shock of the new context. Once that happens, you can bring your literacies to the point where you can prepare yourself for uncertainty.

A note on replication and rhizomes and networks as metaphor (from George’s post)
(this is really a note for myself so that when i look back at this, I’ll remember my response)

I am not troubled by the idea that we ‘replicate ourselves’ through rhizomes. Replicating ourselves is what being alive is all about. The rhizome talks to a ‘way’ of thought not to the content of it. George believes that networks are ‘real things’ in the world. I think they are conventions that we build up that allow us to talk about things. This is an epistemic difference in our views of the world. I think we wander through a sea of conventions, trying to share our experiences with each other. That we find new and more interesting metaphors that better approximate the world around us. That is, for instance, how I see science. Get a theory, keep trying to disprove it. There’s no ‘true’ in that… only current convention. George thinks things exist. For me it’s all metaphor.

The rhizome is uncertainty. That doesn’t mean it ‘isn’t’. It has no start and no ending. It is complex… and as such, it resists definition. As a model for learning, it resists ‘core principles’ or ‘final outcomes’. It is an ongoing process of growing, of surprise and of change.

I was challenged by Dean @shareski today on twitter. I’ve decided to believe that he honestly just wants a clearer explanation on what rhizomatic learning is… so he posted the Einstein Challenge

“If you can’t explain it to a six year old, you don’t understand it yourself.”
? Albert Einstein

I’m going to try and do him one better, I’m going to write an open letter to my boy… Oscar, who is five.
This is him.

This is also him… from our podcast about dinosaurs. (i swear he really does know all these words…)

http://www.youtube.com/embed/EOThtD4Bnc4

***********************
Hi Oscar,

I want to talk to you about charlottetownosaurus #3. I think you did a wicked job of explaining what we know about dinosaurs. I really enjoyed doing the examination of the dinosaurs with you… and am really hoping we can get to number 4 sometime this week. We did ramphoryncus, metriacanthosaurus and pteradactylus. I loved it so much I watched it for a third time today.

There’s something about your dad’s part in Charlottetownosaurus that has been bothering me buddy, and I want to talk to you about it. My part was mostly about asking questions… but i don’t think i did the best job I could. You know how we looked really closely at the dinosaurs to see what we could observe about their features – And we discovered that one Metriacanthosaurus had three toes and one had five? Daddy said “what’s wrong with the [five toed] dinosaur”? You gave a great answer… but i don’t think it was a good question.

I don’t think that’s a good way of thinking about it. We know what the books say about dinosaurs right? We have SIX dino-encyclopedias. And we compared our dinosaurs to those books and to the internet and we found our that metriacanthosaurus was a theropod and, therefore, had three toes. The five toed one was ‘false’. But you know the older books… how they talk about brontosauruses and about three fingered tyranosauruses? Our ideas about things change… we get more evidence… and we get a new hypothesis.

When daddy said “what is wrong with those dinosaurs” what daddy should have said was “How are those dinosaurs different from what we know about them”?

Here’s the problem. Did we talk any more about those dinosaurs after we said “wrong”? Nope. We just put them aside, and moved on. And picked up the next one and said “wrong/right” about it too.

What if I’d asked a different question… like “what would a five toed metriacanthosaurus be like?”

We could have kept talking. Made a new story… and still found out more about how toes are made, the difference between a theropod and an animal with five toes. We could have kept moving… kept talking, kept figuring stuff out.

Instead, daddy decided it would make for an easier show if we just talked about ‘right dinosaurs’ and ‘false dinosaurs’. My bad buddy. I’ll do better next time.

The problem is I should know better. All of the work you see daddy typing into the computer, when i go on trips or when i’m chatting with people on skype… this is what i tell them. We shouldn’t decide beforehand what we’re going to learn. We shouldn’t decide what’s ‘right or wrong or false’ just to make it easier. When we do that… we stop having fun. We stop making stuff up. And we stop creating.

You know those nasty weeds you helped me with in the flower garden? The ones you use the cutters to cut last summer? Those are a special kind of plant… just like the big ones in the backyard that daddy is always digging out…

They’re special because of the way that they spread, because of how hard they are to get rid of. You can pull the tops off them, you can dig down with a shovel like daddy does, but it doesn’t matter… the tiniest piece left in the ground will let it grow back. It’s not like a tree… You’ve seen daddy cut a tree… Is it going to grow back? Yeah… not so much. Those rhizome plants though… they just keep growing and spreading. (that’s what people call them… rhizomes. It’s the part of the plant that helps it make new plants)

That tree, that’s the way that daddy was asking you questions about the dinosaurs. Single ‘false’ questions that just ended when we were done. Daddy decided what would be easier, or what would make sense, and then asked you that question. Those questions ended the conversation. What daddy should have done was taken a lesson from those nasty weeds, follow the toes! Keep moving… follow the story. Pretty hard to stop that, we’d probably still be talking about the journey of the five toes metriacanthosaurus. You got to show that you knew the answer… but we didn’t learn anything new.

Daddy will try harder buddy. That dinosaur box is like our flower garden. We just need to fill it with rhizomes and our stories will never end.

********************

I’ll tell oscar this story tomorrow… we’ll see what he says.

I knew i wouldn’t get it done every night… but here is the second attempt at pulling together some threads of feedback and organizing them here for later. (see my intro post if you don’t know what i’m talking about)

A carving Bon brought back from her 2 years in the arctic

A metaphor too far
Terry Anderson layed a pretty heavy critique on the session from yesterday and it falls into three parts all three of which seem to position rhizomatic education and the people in the discussion as people OPPOSED to us having an education system. I don’t think there’s a single person taking time our of their day in that discussion when they could be doing anything else in the world who aren’t DESPERATELY PASSIONATELY devoted to the idea of learning, to having some kind of education system and to education as a concept.

In his critique is of the negative responses to the question “Why do we educate students?”. He notes that there were no responses that said ‘for learning’. I will note that many people in the session suggested that were positive: for innovation, creativity… stuff like that. Here is a link to the slide if you would like to make your own judgement. We were trying to get to the reason behind it… the thing that drives the ‘kinds’ of things we teach. It’s entirely possible that in doing so… we were focusing too much on the negative. A good lesson for all of us… focusing on the negative does not forward a discussion.

Educating for Nomads was being posited as a goal FOR THE EDUCATION SYSTEM

That does leave us with the unanswered question as to why such an eminently experienced, intelligent educator got the impression that we didn’t care about education. I don’t know.

George – Rhizomes, back to basics

In his back to basics post, George challenges me to help him understand why the rhizome metaphor is useful. He describes what he sees as an existing division between formal/informal and facilitated/student driven learning and asks “how is it more than this?” Now that… is a good question.

I see Formal learning is something bound tightly to objectives, outcomes and (power) systems. Informal learning not so much… I see informal learning as the stuff i learn from my buddies. It was this ‘stuff i learn from my buddies’ that had me start this whole rhizomatic thing in the first place as i was trying to understand how the informal community of practice that i was in was responsible for so much of my learning. And, more importantly, how i could devise a way to do it on purpose.

It’s super easy to learn when you find just the right people at just the right place. This, it seems, doesn’t happen everyday… so i set out to try and find a way to explain it so i could have some theory to back up what i was trying to do in the classroom… replicate the ‘learn from your buddies’ style of teaching.

The conclusion that i came to, through reading Deleuze and his rhizome metaphor, was that i was looking at the whole thing backwards. I was thinking that courses were about CONTENT and what i was trying to do was bring people together with the content. What the rhizome metaphor is meant to impart is that the learning process is rhizomatic, it moves, shift, sprouts at different times and places (and different for different people). It’s many. I used to try and restrict the knowledge in a given field so i offered fewer options to my students… now i do the opposite. By starting without a set curriculum, by thinking of the learning process (and by extension the content) as growing OUT of the learning process, i offered up all the options, the ways of seeing things to my students… allowing them to find their own paths… (to be nomads).

This, i would argue, is what the rest of life is like. Why should we teach any other way?

Rhizomes and collonization
Two excellent posts one from one of my favourite online people and the other from my favourite person. One i’ve never met face to face and one i’ve lived with for 10 years. I won’t try to restate what either of them say, but rather try and entice you to read their blog posts with a snippet from them

For instance, the metaphor of the rhizome is a fine antidote to our tendency toward reductionism. This reductionism lies in the background of the interviewers’ attempts to define rhizomatic learning, I think. Like most of us, they want a handy nugget that says, “Oh, yes, that is rhizomatic learning.” The metaphor of the rhizome, however, helps us to see that reductionism is always a fiction. No thing can ever actually be reduced to a discrete thing, or not in reality. We can think of ourselves as discrete and alone in the Universe, a train of thought that usually leads to all sorts of misery and suffering, but none of us are discrete, however convenient or persuasive the reductionist fiction might be. Keith Hamon http://idst-2215.blogspot.com/2011/11/change11-defining-rhizome.html

and this one

We live in a culture and time where our minds are colonized by education. Most particularly, by education as a system. We go to school, almost all of us, and are taught from an extraordinarily young age that school equates with learning. Our cultural concepts of education and learning are intrinsically interwoven with notions of schooling. Bonnie Stewart http://theory.cribchronicles.com/2011/11/09/the-rhizomatic-learning-lens-what-rhizomes-are-good-for/

Broad responses from me
It’s been an incredible few days of learning for me. I’ve heard from many thoughtful voices on ideas i’ve spent a lot of time thinking about… some supportive, some critical all well thought out and focused. I really appreciate the time and effort people have taken to interact with the subject and with me.

There are tons of other cool blog posts and links out there… but i trust you have other ways of finding them. Search for the hashtag on google, follow the daily, follow the tag on twitter, join the Facebook page. There is little that is more rhizomatic than a MOOC

So I’m facilitating this week of discussion on some stuff i’ve been talking about… and people are talking back. This openness stuff is for the birds

Wow. some kind of a day. I make no promises of being able to do this all this week… but i’m going to try. I know if i don’t make some comments about stuff right away, I will lose it. And there have been some amazing things created yesterday and today. (don’t know what i’m talking about? I’m fascilitating an open course this week… see the course page)

Giulia Forsythe (and cogdog)
First nod has to go to the breathtaking bit of work pulled together by Giulia Forsythe. If you ignore her overly kind bio, you’ll see a stunning piece of artwork describing her feelings about rhizomatic learning. She’s challenged people to add a new soundtrack.. AND Cogdog took her up on it. If you’re unfamiliar with what a ‘remix’ is… this will clear that up for you. I’m working on my own overlay for Giulia’s work which i hope to have done by the end of the week… but i’d like to address something in Cogdog’s video.

Roots vs. Rhizomes.
When Deleuze and Guattari chose the ‘rhizome’, and the reason i find it appealing, is that it is always a multiple. There is no ‘plant’ (singular) or tree or some single entity that starts and ends. No roots of a tree that serve that single tree. A rhizome moves and expands twists and turns, throws down roots and pushes up shoots as the context allows. When you look at a patch of japanese knotweed or aspen… you are seeing something that is many. I think this distinction is important

Motivation
Several comments in yesterday’s post inquired after ‘motivation’ in rhizomatic learning. What encourages the learner through the process… what gets them to engage? This is certainly a challenge. Of course, its a challenge for any model. The big obstacle, i think, is that most students are accustomed to an entirely different model. Some general comments

1. ‘successful/good’ students have decided, in many cases, that their motivation is ‘doing things right’. My classes are a struggle for those students.
2. In the best cases, motivation is something that is part of the learning process. It is the REASON the student is there… but this is not usually the case.
3. I’ve found that rhizomatic learning motivates those not motivated by ‘doing it the right way’.

Facts Facts Facts
suifaijohnmak wrote a very interesting, penetrating response to rhizomatic learning. There is a point at which we started talking about facts… and i have funny feelings about facts.

Basically… i don’t believe in them. I know that’s an odd statement… but i mean it directly. I don’t BELIEVE in them. I don’t think that the things we point to as simple components “WWII started in 1939″ or “Two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen” exist on their own. Implicit in them is a whole bunch of things unsaid. What does it mean to start a war? War for whom? Does it make sense to call it a World War? Do we actually understand what is happening inside an atom? etc…

Yes. They are good shorthands for everyday conversation. Getting students to be able to repeat this ‘facts’ allows them to be part of a discussion that could allow actual learning.

Community vs. Peer Review
There were a few comments about the validity of ‘just getting stuff from the community’. Many, many people in my community get their research peer-reviewed. Some of them also apply equivalent rigour to the work that they post on their blog. Some of their blogs are reviewed (mine certainly is toughly enough by times) by the same people who do the peer reviewing for journals… except that it is done in public. ALL KNOWLEDGE is created by people. Saying that you are getting your curriculum from the community doesn’t mean, in any way, that what you’re working from has less rigour.

Challenge in rhizomatic learning
A couple of comments about this… which i can’t seem to find right now. The model breeds challenge… lots of it. Come out to see the event tomorrow…

Grading
I love the title of this blog. Music for deckchairs. A nice (if tangled) set of comments on the reality of the standards agenda and how this conflicts with rhizomatic learning. Yes. There are realities that we are bound by… this is how i handled grading during the last ‘graded version’ of a course like this.

phew…
I read lots of interesting posts today, many of which i did not do a good job keeping track of… sorry for those folks who didn’t get cited here. I’m sure there are some i didn’t read, but there were lots that i read and pulled together for these responses… lets see what tomorrow brings.

It’s my week at #change11. My topic? Rhizomatic Learning.

Rhizomatic learning is a way of thinking about learning based on ideas described by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in a thousand plateaus. A rhizome, sometimes called a creeping rootstalk, is a stem of a plant that sends out roots and shoots as it spreads. It is an image used by D&G to describe the way that ideas are multiple, interconnected and self-relicating. A rhizome has no beginning or end… like the learning process. I wrote my first article on the topic ‘rhizomatic education: community as curriculum’ in an article I wrote in 2008.

I’ve been talking about rhizomes and learning for about five years now. I have spent the better part of the last three months trying to collect all those thoughts together and organize them ‘properly.’ The problem with that, of course, is that the whole idea of rhizomatic learning is to acknowledge that learners come from different contexts, that they need different things, and that presuming you know what those things are is like believing in magic. It is a commitment to multiple paths. Organizing a conversation, a course, a meeting or anything else to be rhizomatic involves creating a context, maybe some boundaries, within which a conversation can grow. I’m going to try and create some context for a conversation about rhizomatic learning by offering four questions about education… and explaining how i’ve tried to answer them with this theory.

• Why do we teach?
• What does successful learning look like?
• What does a successful learner look like?
• How do we structure successful learning?

Why do we teach?
I refuse to accept that my role as a teacher is to take the knowledge in my head and put it in someone else’s. That would make for a pretty limited world . Why then do we teach? Are we passing on social mores? I want my students to know more than me at the end of my course. I want them to make connections i would never make. I want them to be prepared to change. I think having a set curriculum of things people are supposed to know encourages passivity. I don’t want that. We should not be preparing people for factories. I teach to try and organize people’s learning journeys… to create a context for them to learn in.

What does successful learning look like?

the rhizome pertains to a map that must be produced, constructed, a map that is always detachable, connectible, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits and its own lines of flight. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 21)

It is that map that I think successful learning looks like. Not a series of remembered ideas, reproduced for testing, and quickly forgotten. But something flexible that is already integrated with the other things a learner knows. Most things that we value ‘knowing’ are not things that are easily pointed to. Knowing is a long process of becoming (think of it in the sense of ‘becoming an expert’) where you actually change the way you perceive the world based on new understandings. You change and grow as new learning becomes part of the things you know.

Sounds a bit like networked learning…? The rhizome is, in a manner of speaking, a kind of network. It’s just a very messy, unpredictable network that isn’t bounded and grows and spreads in strange ways. As a model for knowledge, our computer idea of networks, all tidy dots connected to tidy lines, gives us a false sense of completeness.

What does a successful learner look like?
In a recent blog post i tried to offer three visions for ‘what education is for’ to help provide a departure point for discussion. Workers take accepted knowledge and store it for future reference. They accept that things are true and act accordingly. The soldier acquires more knowledge and becomes responsible for deciding what things are going to be true. The nomads make decisions for themselves. They gather what they need for their own path. I think we should be hoping for nomads.

Nomads have the ability to learn rhizomatically, to ‘self-reproduce’, to grow and change ideas as they explore new contexts. They are not looking for ‘the accepted way’, they are not looking to receive instructions, but rather to create.

How do we structure successful learning?
Establish a context
As we approach any new endeavour, we need to understand how we can speak about it. We need to learn the language, our timetables… the shortcuts that allow us to be part of a conversation. This goes into our memory. This is good. It helps us see the local context. It is not what i think of as learning… it is one of the building blocks of learning. I think of this as an open syllabus.

Community Curriculum
Gone are the days where we need to painstakingly collect information, package it up in time to send it to the printers and await the return. A curriculum for a course is something that can be created in time, while a course is happening. The syllabus becomes a garden space, a context setting within which learning can happen and the curriculum is the things that grows there. The tidiest example of this I’ve done are live slides which attempt to give room for the learners to create slides for a presentation.

Activity.
As an activity for this week I’d like you to take a piece of your own practice and think on it rhizomatically. Does it mesh with what I’ve described here? Are there goals that you want to accomplish that would not be served by a rhizomatic approach? Is there a way to change what you are doing to make it more rhizomatic? What impact would that have? Good? Bad?

I need not tell anyone that they are free to critique these ideas, they are in the open, and critique is one of the biggest reason that I post my ideas. So please, critique away.

Postscript
I am one of many who found Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of the ‘rhizome’ as a useful framework for talking about learning, education and what it is to know. Appropriately, I suppose, there is no ‘rhizomatic learning’ that you can cite and define specifically. You could take Maryanne’s view or like Glynis Cousin use it to critique the VLE or delve into this interesting series of journal articles from 2004. I should probably apologize to these scholars for not having cited their work… but, to be honest, i didn’t know about them until sometime this summer and I have been exploring the rhizome since 2005. For those of you interested in broader exploration of Deleuze in education, google is your friend. I have none of those smart people to blame for these ideas… it’s all me borrowing and twisting some of the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari, and, really, from all my network, for my own ends.

This is the first draft of the thinking I’ve been doing lately, it draws on a recent article from the gates foundation about learning being like working. It also relies very heavily on the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, particularly through a thousand plateaus.

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The why of education should be the first question that we answer in any discussion in the field. The answer to the ‘why of education’ question should be debated, mulled and hammered, on and on, and be at the centre of the work that we do. Sadly, it seems to be very difficult to say anything about “what learning is” and “why we educate our children”. We tend to end up saying something like the following

• We are preparing our students for the future
• We need to get them ready for university
• We are trying to make good citizens for our society
• We are trying to instill cultural values
• We are trying to teach them to learn

There are any number of ways to say this, and, by saying it, say nothing. These answers have content, maybe, for the people saying them, but there’s no way for me to know what you mean. What are the cultural values you’d like to pass on? Is it likely that a vast majority of people are going to want to pass on those particular values? What would a good citizen do in our society? Are they law abiding or do they fight injustice? I’d like to think that they are both, but it’s pretty tough to create a system that both trains people to do what they are told and to also critically assess their culture.

I’m going to propose three different outcomes from an education system. They are, of course, meant to be exemplars. Any person would likely have bits of each, but the question is, which is the one that we value the most. It is easy to say that we want to have our children to ‘have their own minds’ but harder when confronted by uneaten broccoli. We want them to have their own minds, but come to the conclusions that we want them to come to. This is a subtle business. For now lets accept that we have many different parts and look at the landscape that our three outcomes live in.

Memory
Memory is the representation of the things that we ‘know’ as a culture. It is a repetition of the patters that we have established, the rules that we have made the ‘way things are done’. It is the status quo.

The worker
The worker was the original goal of the public education system. How can we create a workforce that will show up to work on time, accept tasks and complete them. The worker needs to remember things without understanding them. They need press a button at 2:15pm. They don’t need to know what happens when the button is pushed. They just need to press it.

The worker is easy to measure. You develop expectations and then you ensure that people can meet those expectations. This is one of the outcomes of the Gates vision of education.

At Microsoft, we believed in giving our employees the best chance to succeed, and then we insisted on success. We measured excellence, rewarded those who achieved it and were candid with those who did not.

Learning for a worker is about compliance. Assessment is an assessment of compliance. The worker collects facts and information that it can then trade with other workers. Our education system currently does a very good job of creating workers.

The soldier
In order to create this kind of model, where the employer (or teacher) decide what excellence means, and then measure someone against it, you need a separate class of people who are responsible for creating the measurements. The temptation here is to call those people ‘managers’ but i’m calling them soldiers here for a specific reason. They are the defenders of memory. They are the ones who establish what things we currently know that the worker should remember, and then establish the system by which we will measure that knowing.

They are the ‘we’ from the quote above. They decide which parts of the past will be valued. One of the sad side effects of this is that the soldiers really can decide what they want to have valued. There are any number of cases where we see this in curriculum now, where we are ‘valuing’ things like intelligent design as science.

Soldiers defend the status quo. They check for compliance. When you learn the rules and why they are used, you move from worker to soldier. These people KNOW MORE. We have a number of paths through our education system where you can learn enough to be someone who can check for compliance.

Nomads
The nomad is trying to do what I call ‘learning’. Not the recalling of facts, the knowing of things or the complying with given objectives, but getting beyond those things. Learning for the nomad is the point where the steps in a process go away. Think of parallel parking. If you think of the steps, perform them one at a time, you almost inevitably end up on the sidewalk. There is a point where you stop thinking of facts or steps and understand the act.

It is what Wynton Marsalis calls ‘being the thing itself’. It is the difference between playing a succession of notes, thinking of one after the other, and playing music.

In order to create an educational system that allows for nomads we can’t measure for a prescribed outcome. The point at which a new idea (even if it’s only new to that person) forms is going to be different for each nomad. This is about encouraging creativity over compliance.

Rhizomatic learning
Is an educational model whereby we create an ecosystem where nomads can learn(create). Where facts and data and knowledge and connection are pulled together in order to allow the nomad to create their own understanding. It is designed for a world where there aren’t ‘things people should know’ but rather ‘new connections to be made’. The knowing of things is there, but it is not the thing of importance.

If we want a society of innovators, of creatives, we can’t think of success as an act of compliance. Success is a break from the past. A new idea, a new context, a new vision.

This is what i want. From what i’ve read from the Gates foundation, they seem to want better workers. What i find so confusing, is that this was not the path that Gates himself took. He was (and maybe still is) a nomad.

This past week, there have been several references made to how the long debates over what knowledge is, what we mean by knowledge and what we are trying to do with learning is, well, garbage. This has lead me, naturally, to dig in further. I decided to dig back into my Deleuze and Guattari and refresh my understandings of why i think rhizomatic learning/knowledge matters to education and how exactly I think the breathtaking claims of some of my betters… well… might be misguided.

The foil.

The fact that academics are incapable of recognizing that 99-some-percent of all the learning that happens in the world is pure and simple knowledge transfer is what leads people to believe that we live in ivory towers disconnected from reality. David Wiley – http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/1882

The claim, then, if i’m to understand it, is in almost every instance the learning process is a question of taking something that is absolutely, clearly, factually true and handing it to someone who hasn’t had access to this information yet.

My initial response
I believe that the vast majority of the things that we teach are approximations, half-guesses, short-hands and generalizations. That, my friends, is what I think our lives look like. There are a few things that I am comfortable in saying are right. I’m typing on a keyboard. Yup. that’s a keyboard… i’m not making some silly ‘disconnected’ claim here. I’m saying that communicating the human experience is VERY, VERY difficult. Talking about the things we know is very hard. Trying to get someone else to be able to do them is even worse.

Think about a driving test. Real simple right? STOP means stop. A full stop i might add. And you parallel park: signal light, pass the car, shove in reverse, wiggle steering wheel one way and then the other, stop. But if you can parallel park you know that if you stop to think about when you should wiggle that wheel, it makes it harder. There’s a flow and a rhythm there, a sense, an expertise, a habit a something… that is actually what parking and what driving is all about. THAT is learning. The facts are so much wood and nails for your house. Yup… you need them, but they aren’t your house.

The submission of the line to the point
Now, i tend to believe that David’s interpretation of the world is the more common one. It’s certainly a more comfortable way to look at the world and, if it were true, the process of education would be WAY easier than I think it is. If it were the case, checking for what he calls ‘knowledge transfer’ is easy… in 99% of the cases, all i have to do is check and see that the learning objective “learn how to parallel park” has been transfered to the learner by seeing if they have received the transfer of this information. I’d probably test for it by asking them to do the “signal light, pass the car, shove in reverse, wiggle steering wheel one way and then the other, stop” thing. Teacher training, too, would be the simple process of finding the best ways to transfer this information from teacher -> learner once i’d identified that the teacher themselves ‘had’ the correct information.

This viewpoint is what Deleuze and Guattari call arborescence, or, if you like “the submission of the line to the point” (Thousand Plateaus, p. 293) . The word arborescence, as they use it, is meant to summon the idea of the tree (also graph theory, but I’ll leave that ’till next time). The idea of the free standing piece of knowledge. The point. The fact. The item. The thing you need to know. The way a thing is done. The right decision to make. Things that we can point at as real and right and in front of our faces. The tree of knowledge as it were. The thing that is the answer. A whole thing.

The line, in their view, is the wiggle from our parallel parking from earlier. (Something similar to what i called ‘curvy knowledge‘ talking about open content as imperialism.) It is the rhizome. The anti-tree. If you’ve ever cut down a tree, and, sometime later that day, try to weed a rhizome-weed from your garden, you’ll know what i mean. It’s not ‘a weed’, not something you can point to and cut and get rid of. It’s a distributed organism. I think of the spaces between the things we can identify (the points) constitute real learning and the best kind of knowledge. There’s a reason why doctor’s intern before they operate. Why practicing parallel parking is more useful than reading about it. Why I tell my son that i don’t want him to obey because there are ‘rules’ but to understand why there are rules, and why, even as approximations, they make life easier to live.

I challenge you to look at the things you teach other people… and to search out the ‘points’ of knowledge and the ‘lines’. I remember a friend of mine telling me that twice in his academic career, once at the beginning of his PhD (in Chemistry) and once when he started working in the field, did he realize that the things taught to him as ‘true’ before were approximations, ‘lies’ in his words. Our own habit of seemingly purposefully misunderstanding the word ‘theory’ in the scientific sense leads to all kinds of craziness. Is global warming ‘a proven theory’? Well yeah, in a manner of speaking. The vast majority of scientists are vastly almost sure of it. But that’s as close to true as we ever get with anything. Remember the Bohr Atom? Or phlogiston? The Atkins Diet? The Food Pyramid? These are all points. The lines are elsewhere.

A theory of knowledge, of subordinating the points to the lines
I’ve been trying to get my father to teach me to sharpen knives for 15 years. Now… i haven’t always been the best learner. And he, by his own admission, sucks as a teacher. He once started out a lesson by explaining that the way i’d seen him sharpen knives for 25 years was the wrong way, and try to show me the right way. His knives are like razor blades. I can think of several people offhand who wont let him sharpen their knives because they’re afraid to hurt themselves. I know the details, the points of the matter, the angle of the sharpening steel, the direction, when to use a sander, a stone… but i don’t have it. I may never. It’s a frickin’ line. As he clearly has demonstrated, following the ‘rules’ is actually mostly not necessary. Yes, you need to have a knife. Yes, you need something to sharpen a knife… those are facts. The real learning is somewhere else.

What I have accidentally fallen into (with Edtechtalk… and MOOCs) and consciously tried to do (with my own courses) is subordinate the point to the line. I want people to focus on the feel of the knowledge. I don’t care if they learn how to use a certain tool, whether they remember what it was, or what they used it for. It sure is easier for them if they do… but those are just points. They’re approximations. The tools themselves are shorthands for ways of thinking, for approaches, for knowledge. In the world we live in, the points are becoming more available, and they are getting more changeable. Two weeks ago, if you did a search for “MOOC” online, you would not have seen the critiques of the last few weeks, you would have seen a few articles, a few videos, and some reflections from people who had taken them. Now that with the influence of David Wiley have weighed in on them in the way they have, you will get a different impression. The ‘point’ of MOOC has changed. And will probably continue to do so until people forget about it and move on.

Why?
It is the belief in the point that makes standardized testing possible. (among other things) It is the commitment to the line that led me to be involved in edtechtalk and MOOCs and lots of other cool stuff. Points produce replicable models. Lines lead to creativity. The way we feel about what knowledge is, about what we are trying to impart/share/reveal, is the WHOLE of the project of education.

Finally a few minutes with me putting down my new guitar attachment, the cottage plans and the general fun of having a two and a five year old and a partner doing her phd to talk about some of the interesting work coming up. I haven’t been engaged in much of the debate around where the ‘massive open online course’s (MOOCs) and am going to try to not get too chippy here. Actually, I’ll get that out of the way in the pre-amble.

1. No. MOOCs wont do everything. I would never do an ‘academic writing’ mooc, nor would i do one for beginning singing. Some things need lots of feedback and guidance because there’s a very well established “RIGHT WAY” that you should understand before you go breaking the rules.
2. I, at least, don’t know what i’m doing yet (assuming i ever will) with MOOCs. Criticizing the concept because i haven’t done it right yet is like hating “friend of the devil” because you heard me play it on the guitar.

So what are we trying to do when we teach?
In my last post I was talking a little about how the learning experience is heavily impacted by how we feel about knowledge. I used the example of the new food plate (which has replace the food pyramid) for two reasons. First, it shows how the things we would like to think of as ‘true’ tend to change over time. It’s also a really good example of how we tend to ‘bureaucratize’ what we know in order to be able to market it. We all know that there are people who are vegetarian, who can’t eat wheat or milk, or who, for some reason or other, don’t fit into that generalization about food. There is a vast, wide ranging field of opinions around food and eating, and the food plate represents the a sort of broad concession. And while I agree that following the ‘food plate’ is better than eating chips and soda for breakfast, it doesn’t exactly invest us with the power to make our own decisions does it?

So what are we trying to do when we teach?

A. Are we trying to pass along the arcane habits of academic writing or do, re, me… these are things that have accepted standards, the knowing of which is necessary for some things. This is accepted knowledge we can point to.
B. Are we trying to encourage people to come to know something… about themselves, about the world. This is the kind of thing that will be different for everyone.
C. Are we trying to do B by acting like it’s an A thing? Are we trying to have people come to know about themselves or the world, to have an opinion or get their mind around a concept by pretending that there is a ‘true’ way to do it.

To go back to our food plate example. The food plate is an A type piece of knowledge. It says ‘eat this way’. I, however, would say that there is no ‘right way’ to eat. Different things work for different people. We all have different bodies, different budgets, different families, different lifestyles and different climates… all these things impact what we should, can and will eat. Eating is, by our chart here, a very B type activity. What the government can’t do, though, is have that ‘tell me about yourself’ conversation with every single person, so they resort to the C approach, they shove some of what we know into a chart and send it out across the country… into schools. We take the network of knowledge, shove it into a graphic, and send it out. This also makes things much easier to assess whether someone ‘knows how to eat”… but i’ll leave that to my next blog post.

Why MOOCs
My first post on ecologies for learning comes is from 2007. In it i describe how a coffee shop that i spent alot of time in at university ended up being the place where i learned the most. I was thinking of that coffee shop as a metaphor for Edtechtalk, which, six years in, continues to be an ecology in which teachers come to learn every week about themselves, about others and about how people feel about issues and technologies in the field of education. It is a place where that B style learning takes place. There are many people in those discussions who are considered experts and others with very little experience, but there is no ‘right way’ of what and how to learn established there. It’s messy and sometimes difficult and I can’t imagine how you would measure it, but most people agree that they learn lots.

And it’s a community. I can’t just tell it what to do. I can’t say “look, I want to focus on this particular topic over here for the next ten weeks in order to further my understanding of that field.” It resists being directed not out of spite, but just because it’s not that kind of thing. Imagine trying to tell all of your friends that instead of heading to the movies, you’d like them to sit around for six hours and read Foucault. For ten weeks. Well… maybe your friends, but i don’t think i could get away with that here… So… MOOCs

There are times when you want to focus on a certain thing and when other people want to learn about a certain thing. This is why we have schools and courses and stuff. There is a demand to learn something, and other people fulfill that demand. The problem is… I want things to stay like they do with edtechtalk. I want people to be able to come to the ‘course’ and get out of it what they want to get out of it, and possibly come to conclusions very different from mine. But, at the same time, I want to keep on the topic long enough to understand how i feel about it.

During our PLENK2010 course last year, this is exactly what happened. After about five weeks of writing blog posts, I finally understand how I felt about the idea of “personal learning environments“. As you can tell from the comments in the blog post and the ones previous to it… not everyone agreed with me. And that’s just as it should be… for most things.

MOOCs provide an ecology for sustained engagement with a topic without resorting to bureaucratizing knowledge

That’s only for experience learners
In two blog posts… David Wiley positions the challenges to MOOCs very nicely here and here. I encourage you to see George Siemens’ response over on his connectivism blog… I am only going to take up one part of David’s comments. David seems to be suggesting that it is the job of an teacher to both present a structured view of a domain or field AND present it in the way that bear the most resemblance to an INDIVIDUAL learners existing knowledge network. In his words…

Hiding inside the word instruction is structure. This is what teachers are supposed to do, I believe – present a structured view of a domain. Even though there is more than one way to invision the structure of the network, that doesn’t mean that novices are ready to deal with that level of abstraction right away. They need a help. A great teacher is someone who manages to present the view of the structure which bears the closest resemblance to a learner’s existing knowledge network.

This could only be possible if… 1. Every learner had the same knowledge network (or, say, life) 2. The teacher had an unlimited amount of time to figure out what each individual learner had going on in their head (assuming this is even possible) 3. The thing that people needed to know was very easy to pin down.

I would contend that as we can’t modify the learner, or the time, what we do is MAKE the knowledge easy to pin down… and break it in the process.

If the MOOC challenges anything, it challenges the idea that a teacher can decide what people need to know, how much they currently know and what they should get out of the learning process. You can’t. You just can’t do it, not consistently, not over time, not for the majority of your students, not for millions of teachers. The solution presented by the MOOC is that the learner should begin to take control of how and what they are to learn.

I don’t think that the MOOC favours “sufficiently prepared” learners. It actually really irritates and confuses lots and lots of people who are considered VERY prepared learners. And, well, i guess I’ll find out how that works out when we do our “MOOC on Basic Skills for university” in the fall. It’s specifically intended for the people I think David is talking about. Success in a university is partially about knowing what some things mean (see the videos we’re making). They need to know what a syllabus is, what a professor is, what social contract they are getting into. But the path of their success is something that will be very individualized. I can’t tell 30 people, at one time, what is going to make them the most successful. There are broad generalizations that are helpful… going to class is better than not going to class… but they really need to find their own strategy.

The learner needs to develop their own path. MOOCs, hopefully, provide enough structure, an ecology even, in which they can do that. At least… that’s what I’m trying to do.