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.

Black swans
I thought i might want to do something a little different this year… I want to talk about Black Swans. A black swan is a suprise event that changes the whole nature of a conversation. They are events that, in hindsight, EVERYONE wants to say they saw coming, but no one (or few people) predicted ahead of time. They are usually dramatic events, though it’s not the level of the drama that’s important, but rather the impact that it has.

As we look into the future, speculating about black swans is useful in two ways. The first is that it is a nice way for us to discuss issues that are important to us in a new landscape. It provides a new context to talk about important ideas. In this sense, the content of the black swan is less important than the conversations that the black swan event allow us to have. Too often we are caught up in the minutiae of a discussion and can’t see what it is about our work that is important to us. The second, and maybe more obvious things about black swans is… they might happen.

edit: i should probably add that black swan’s were first described in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Swan_(Taleb_book)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/0ystercatcher/5900455514/sizes/m/in/photostream/

About this list
I’m going to propose seven black swan situations that could happen in 2012. I’m not suggesting that these things will ACTUALLY happen, but thinking about change can sometimes help us conceptualize it in our own lives… even if nothing dramatic comes around. I’m going to avoid any of the really nasty events… no wars, meteors or volcanic eruptions… sorry. There’s lots of change out there to talk about.

Note: this post was edited rather significantly after chatting with Jeff Lebow and John Schinker on Edtechtalk.

Black Swan 7 – Free WORKING LMS for learning
What happens if we have a system that actually works? One piece of software that does all the writing, all the games, all the learning and all the measuring you ever wanted. It works on all the computers, in all scenarios, and offered to us for free from Google. Not far from reality… just a few more steps and we’re there. What happens to Blackboard? We’re learning… lets use google. End of story. It works on tablets, on phones. It has scholar, docs, mail. What if we added google textbooks? We’d save a fortune on training… and give more power over to one company.

Black Swan 6 – Copyright Bans Open textbooks in the US
I can’t imagine how the textbook companies could pull it off, but when a billion dollar industry is threatened, there are lobbying dollars to move around. There have been some excellent initiaties at the school level all over the united states, but in this scenario, all classroom textbooks MUST be paid for. Perhaps to ‘preserve quality.’ Maybe the argument is even less rationale than that. Does this move us more towards a different country to lead us? Can we get Finnish textbooks?

Black Swan 5 – Oil his $400/barrel
Changing directions entirely, what happens in the price of oil hits a crazy high number. It sounds unlikely, but i never thought I’d see the prices we had a few years ago either. If it costs a fortune to drive, does that change things? Does that move us towards online education?

How can we, in canada, rationalize heating a building all winter long just to put kids in it?

Black Swan 4 – US government invests in Analytics
Doesn’t sound crazy? Seems pretty normal eh? Think your way through it. A few years ago NYC invested $80 million in a student tracking system. Imagine the US government investing $80 billion in a system that tracks every student grade, up to the minute, and giving them a dashboard that told them how each school was doing… right now. Think testing is rampant in the school system now? Imagine what would happen in this scenario.

Imagine the Kahn academy for the whole education system. At any given time, you’d be able to send ‘at risk’ students to the right tutor who could put them back on track. We’d know oodles about what kinds of things helped people ‘learn’. If that’s what we wanted Would it be worth it? Maybe we could refocus school time on projects… and art… and music. Or maybe we all stay home and press buttons on our computers.

Black Swan 3 – International students stop coming
There are any number of reasons why this could happen… Out here on the east coast of canada, most schools are over 10% in their ratio international students to Canadian students. This is important for beefing up enrolment, but its also important for the extra fees paid by those students. If governmental regulations or incentives changed in any number of countries in Asia this could have a dramatic effect on Higher Ed. Would we try and teach them online? Would schools start to close? Would we try to attract students from other countries? The ‘international student’ has become a critical part of the fabric of higher education.

Black Swan 2 – Free books for everyone!
There is a battleground, right now, for content in higher education. We have billion dollar companies selling what amount to pretty average textbooks, and schools and different communities trying to create their own. What if the Thailand Government decided it was willing to put 10 billion dollars on the table to create free textbooks for everyone. One country (pick whichever one you like, could be Luxembourg or Saudi Arabia) offering free books, edited by renowned experts to the world. Would we take them? Is the content so transferable that we wouldn’t care who created them?

Black Swan 1 – MIT accredits MOOCs
MIT seeing Stanford pulling ahead in the free openness sweepstakes, decides that it will work to provide accreditation for open online courses. They themselves are safe in the knowledge that people will still come to MIT to work with the people/resources they have there, but they’ve decided that they are going to hire 10K tutors to evaluate people in the new MOOCs they plan to launch this year. 1 million students, 10000 tutors. What would that do?

All the first year classes taught by 10 central institutions… what then?

I am struggling to see utility and practicality, just like Keith Hamon. I would like to ask:

In what way does your theory of rhizomatic learning change the way you teach?
It’s hard to remember, now, how it ‘changes’ the way i teach, as it IS the way that I teach… but there are some central ideas that I hold onto.
I think of curriculum as an output of a course rather than an input, so i enter a course with an outline of study, or a syllabus and focus on helping students build their own curriculum. This allows them (i hope) to construct themselves as Nomads. If you think of learning as a process of ‘becoming’ then it can’t be something that is enforced. It is a change that is individual and hard to track.

Change11 is about change, and you are part of Change11, so what do you want to change?
I think of the “change11″ to be about looking at change that is happening, rather than changing things. I am hoping to support uncertainty and responsibility in learning (among other things). I am particularly interested (as are many others) in supporting an educational approach that provides critical skills… not replicable ‘knowledge’.

Did the rhizomatic learning theory and reading Deleuze change your way of living?
Absolutely. It has made me accept multiplicity as an integral part of the human experience. I used to see opposing viewpoints as things that needed ‘sorting out’ now i’m willing to accept them both as valid.

In what way does it change your parenting and being a father?
I try to engender the same openness to complexity in my kids. It’s hard though… because the subtlety can be difficult for the kids. Not that they can’t get it… the problem is that the rest of society isn’t prepared for them to speak from that position. It’s hard to be a post-structuralist parent. Saying “that’s wrong” is much easier than saying “think about how that thing is not supportive of the kinds of things that we value”… but i think the latter is more useful to my kids in the long run.

I am an educational journalist and my readers are non-academic teachers who want to improve their teaching. So please do not use academic language, be practical.

What advice do you give to new teachers?
Be courageous. Strive hard to not be the knower. I would tell them that no one really ‘knows’. We are all on the same journey. Bring your students with you.

Could you explain the magic trick to a teacher of bookkeeping, welding, or farming?
I grew up as a lobster fisherman, spent time working in a lead silver refinery, and have been in academia (in one way or another) all my adult life. I have not noticed any difference in the ability to apprehend complex issues between any of these groups. Rhizomatic learning confirms the suspicions of many. There is no ‘right way’ to ride a boat through a storm, to use a crane to carry a 20 ton kettle down a floor or to write a paper. There are lots of wrong ways . These are things that we learn as we absorb ourselves into a thing. As we come to understand its context. As we become part of a context.
I say the same to everyone. There are basics, in every field, that you need to know. Basic language, basic techniques. These are not ‘important’ in a profound sense… but they are required. After that, we make our way. It is not possible to simply GIVE someone the answer to how it is done… everyone must come to it in their own way. This is something many people understand instinctively, be they tinker, tailer, soldier or spy. It is only when we come to formal education that we somehow believe the rules to change.

What do you tell teachers with a history of teaching? Do you want them to change the way they teach? Please do not explain your theory, but tell them ways to improve their teaching and the learning of their students.
I would never tell anyone to ‘change the way that they teach’. We all have different strengths, and it is dangerous to try and remake someone else in your own image. My message to the experienced teachers is the same as to those that are starting out… we do now know things for certain… do not tell the students that we do. Be open.

Your theory of rhizomatic learning is it important for students in vocational colleges?
It can be… insofar as people are actually learning. Many vocational programs are also very much tied to specific kinds of testing… and i wouldn’t want them to be distracted from them. They will have time for rhizomatic learning when they are on the job.

If you could introduce new fresh students at the start of their time in college or univ how would you do that?
I do and have. And i tell them the same thing. There are conventions that you must learn to survive in any field, academia more than many. Remember them. Learning is something else, it is yours to control. Care about it. Be open etc…

What advice would you give your children in learning? I bet you do not tell them “… the intensive becomes hidden under the extensive and the qualitative. …” (DeLanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, 119)
My last blog post was very much about this. I struggle with it. It is tempting to default to true/false with children. I try to create open ended exploratory learning… and sometimes fail.

Do you discuss your view on learning with the teachers in the school of your children? What do you talk about with them?
My children are still very young, so the conversations with their teachers have been fairly simple on this topic. I have iterated, many times, that i’m not concerned about them getting the right answers, or performing, but rather am concerned about how they explore, how they feel about being in class… but that’s as far as it has gone. I am very suspicious of the system… but so far my kids are learning a great deal. They are learning in a language that is not the language spoken at home… so there is much for them to learn. I’m not sure what happens after that. I imagine i will have deeper conversations with their teachers at that time.

Did your theory change the way you learn and study?
Definitely. I’ve stopped looking for the proper/right way of doing things and am more willing to accept interpretations that are outside of convention. I was non-conventional before… but am now so without the rebellion… with a more open mind.

“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.

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

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.

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.

Don’t know what the Change MOOC is?
If you’re just getting to the course now, and you’re wondering what all the fuss is about, the change MOOC is a 35 week journey through a particular cross section of educational and technology. All of the topics/people covered in this course are suggesting or pointing to some kind of development or change in learning. The course is an attempt at pulling the people responsible for those ideas together in the hopes that between the 2000 or so of us, we can create new connections and ideas. Each week a different speaker will come in to talk about their ideas.

Sound like a nice idea? Not sure what to do about it? Watch this video

The first five.
We’ve had five speakers so far. We’ve talked about mobile technologies, academic research going digital, collective learning, open content and practical approaches to technology implementation for better teaching. If that sounds interesting to you, you can go and check out the weeks that have passed, on the main course site at http://change.mooc.ca or, if you like, you can follow along with our ebook creation at http://change11.info.

What have we learned so far
We’ve definitely seen a willingness of participants to engage with the ideas of the speaker. As you can see from the group response (in the ebook) for the week hosted by Zoraini Wait Abas, there was significant critical response. I think this is one of the most interesting results of the kind of openness represented by a MOOC… people feel like they’re engaging directly with the ideas.

I think the most eye opening week for me was the career description that we got from David Wiley during his week. I have had the pleasure of meeting David at several conferences, but was not familiar with his earlier work. There’s something nice about getting the context for someone’s career that can round out your understanding of their perspective. He’s been ‘iterating towards openness’ for a long time now. His pragmatic approach has been very influential to me, and, clearly, to lots of others.

I was a little disappointed with the lack of response to the activities presented by some of the weeks. It’s a strange balance, i guess, to try and suggest some activities to provide structure and i wonder if it somehow conflicts with the self-regulation that we are suggesting as core to the MOOC model. I’ve also had a difficult time trying to track the responses to the given weeks. It may be that I have missed on an easy way to do that, if someone knows how, let me know.

I’m going to have to take some serious time to think about how “the collective” suggested by Allison Littlejohn interacts with my own work. It seems like a natural fit, i suppose, but its always a struggle trying to nail down how the language works. Her description “By ‘collective learning’ we mean how people learn through sourcing, using and making sense of the collective knowledge – the knowledge stored in people, resources, computers, networks etc.” rings familiar, but i’m a little concerned about ‘knowledge’ being ‘stored’. I’ve been thinking lately that ‘memory’ is what’s stored and that knowledge is something that needs to be negotiated…

I found Tony Bates talk rang very true for me as well. He discussed various ways in which they have researched the impact of really bringing real technologies into real classrooms. We did similar (if not as broad based or as thorough) research at my university with similar results. Administration is very supportive of the incorporation of technologies, but we’re not as far along in terms of figuring out how to use them to positively impact teaching (whatever that might mean). Really, the disagreement about what a ‘positive outcome’ might be has a great deal of influence on the reluctance or inability for institutions to address this issue.

I was fortunate to actually be at the discussion Martin Weller had re: digital research. I’m probably most familiar with Martin’s work of the five presenters and still found lots to learn from his presentation. I find myself nodding in agreement on most of this things that he says, so I’ll spare you the ‘wow, he’s so right’ in this review and just link to his presentation

How to find stuff
This may seem like very simple advice, but simply putting an author’s name into google followed by ‘change11′ is enough to find pretty much anything you need if you’re looking to catch up on the last five weeks.

Join the ebook team!
We are still pluggin away on the ebook. It’s something we’re all doing off the side of our desk, but I’d love to have more people involved. If you want to be on the team, just let me know in the comments of this post. No pressure, but if you do want to, I’ll send you a username and password and you can just pickup work from the worklist on the homepage.

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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.

If everyone has the ability to post what they think, and everyone can comment on that, then each individual has a voice that can be heard in our society… making our society democratic.

After spending much of the intervening years working in social spaces i am now willing to confirm that this is utter nonsense. There are a hundred reasons why this doesn’t make sense, but I’ll just drop three on you in a hurry.

1. Given free time, most people will not blog, it takes alot of time and burns alot of creativity
2. Given a chance to express themselves, people will normally talk about the things that interest them… this is more likely to be coffee, knitting or sex rather than politics.
3. People do not generally frequent the ideas of people they don’t agree with, unless they wish to ridicule them

But you said this was about how to use it to help me vote
Yes. blogging, for everyone, is not the answer for improving our democracy. Twitter on the other hand, just might be. And no, i don’t care if its ‘actually’ twitter, but anything that works like twitter. In a twitter like conversation everyone starts on more or less even territory. No one can grab the mic, it’s difficult to interrupt, and there’s no place to hide. If someone isn’t answering your question, you can just ask it again. We’re all in the same basket and if you’re asking a politician a question in the main stream (identified by hashtags) everyone will see and notice the fact that said person will no answer the question. You can passively watch how a canditate (or their rep) interacts, and get a chance to see all the things they think are important, be those links to things like videos or writing they have done themselves, debates they’ve had with other candidates, or what they had for dinner. Each individual in our democracy doesn’t need to write a blog, we just all need access to the same place where we can have a little chat.

I answered our local CBC radio call out for people who would follow our provincial elections only through social media this fall. I’m fairly cynical about the electoral process. I don’t like the fact that debates and townhalls are as controlled as they are, I absolutely HATE hearing people speak from talking points, and the potential conflict of interest between media and politicians (in the sense that both need the other to do their business) combined with the need to condense discussions into sizes that consumers can actually take in, means that i rarely seem to get answers that i want from media interviews. I have, mostly, given up on knowing what is going on… figuring that there is no way to find out.

Enter social media
Politicians, or at least their handlers, have been told that they need some kind of social presence online. With the massive success that Obama had with social media in the 2008 elections combined with the amazing number of dancing cat videos that people watch these days it’s becoming an avenue to connect to voters difficult to ignore. We here in PEI have seen any number of politicians and political activists turn their attention to our twitter streams and start to talk to us. And that’s nice and everything, but so far they are saying the same things they say in the press releases. The trick is… we need to start talking back. We need to get together and start using our social spaces, controlling the discussion in our spaces to make honesty, civility and transparency something of value, rather than talking points, prepped speeches and obfuscation. It might be a little late to get it done for our election here on PEI… but certainly worth a try.

1. Call out everyone who makes claims and does not identify themselves.

This may seem picky… but i’ve seen too much ‘Those guys are liars’ online. If I don’t know who you are… why should i take anything you say seriously? It could be that someone is a voter with an opinion… or even facts about an issue. It could also be a political operative trying to scam you. If people need to maintain anonymity… they can go to the press. Social media is a reputation economy. Tell us who you are.

2. Call out people who are mean, nasty or simply taking potshots at others.

I called out two executive secretaries to party leaders early in the campaign here in PEI for just sniping at each other. I was shocked when they stopped. If we can publicly shame our politicians into being nice to each other that would go a long way towards me taking them more seriously, but i can’t speak for you. I’m not saying they shouldn’t criticize each other, or dig in… just be civil. We can enforce this in our social media spaces. This, of course, needs to apply to other citizens as well… mindless nagging is not going to raise the level of the discourse.

3. Ask politicians questions, and keep asking them until you get an actual answer

This is something i haven’t tried yet. If you look at the twitter stream for our election, anything tagged with one of the three twitter tags tends to be seen by everyone. If you ask a politician a question they are unwilling to answer, ask it again. Ask others in the party to answer. Ask the party’s central account. Ask other parties. In a townhall your question can be skated over or ignored, in social media that’s ALOT harder.

4. Do research and post it.

One of the nice things about having lots and lots of people involved in a discussion is that you can get access to more information. If a question has been asked or a claim has been made… count up the numbers, figure out the figures and post them. The more people do this, the close we get to facts that can help us vote.

5. Reward politicians for being open and honest

If a politician has gone out of their way to answer a question, to make their positions clear or to be available, let people know about it. There needs to be value in being open for our politicians to do it. If they see their cred improved by the fact that they are doing these things, they will do them. We need to set expectations and reward them when they are met.

conclusion
Politicians, ostensibly, work for us. We need to make it clear what we expect and hold them accountable (and reward them) for the response to our expectations. Discourse in social media can be one of the ways that we can set those expectations. Civility. Honesty. Transparency. Facts. These are not things restricted to one side of the political spectrum… these are the things we need as voters to make decisions about our politicians.

I’ll be honest, I’ve not seen a political government in canada be able to fulfill the promises they make on specific issues… and no wonder. They are suspeptible to world markets, to internal struggles, to challenges unforseen. I see this as normal. What i want to know about the people who represent me is who they are, what they think about the things that are important to me. These are things that social media is really good at letting us know. We could make that happen. Maybe.