Building a better rhizome
The short version: JOIN! George Siemens and I are hosting a two week futures-style Open Course starting April 15th on the SSHRC challenge “Truth under Fire in a Post-Fact World,” and the question of how education should respond. You can sign up by joining this mailing list. 🙂 The longer version: JOIN! (online or in … Continue reading “What is education’s responsibility to society? An open, futures course”
What follows is an introduction I wrote for an upcoming edited book on Rhizomatic Learning. It’s not really an introduction, or a preface or a prologue. Frankly I’m not sure what it is. It is certainly a story I’ve been wanting to tell. It’s also too long for a blog post, for which I apologize. … Continue reading “Rhizomatic Learning – a somewhat curious introduction”
During a conversation in my back yard this summer with the excellent Robin DeRosa, she and I decided, once again, that most of us trying to do things differently in education all face the same kinds of issues. We also noted that as our roles become more embedded and visible in our respective institutions, it … Continue reading “A Change Sprint – workshopping new ideas in a hurry”
* This is a crosspost of Orienting, Not Informing, posted on Michael Rutter’s Higher Ed Gamma on Inside Higher Education. * For the past few years, I’ve been working on making changes within our institution’s New Student Orientation (NSO) process. For some institutions orientation is about level setting, about placement inside a program. For the … Continue reading “New Student Orientation – Orienting, Not Informing”
Sometimes ideas come from unexpected places. A recent paper entitled “The rhizome: A problematic metaphor for teaching and learning in a MOOC” caught my attention. It critiques Rhizomatic learning and the rhizo MOOC #rhizo14 in particular. It wasn’t easy to read, but one point about vulnerability stuck out for me, and resonated as something that … Continue reading “In search of a new resilience for learning”
This year I want to focus on resilience. In my day job, I’ve been working with or around transitions to university for 8 or 9 years now. At UPEI, we’ve developed and tried out a number of projects in that time, including program specific transitions courses, a couple of MOOCs (The 2013 Facebook edition is … Continue reading “Resilience and transitioning students to university”
I’m sitting on the front porch of my house, the kids just put to sleep, and wondering at the strangeness of it all. Two years ago I had this idea that I wanted to try and run a course on empty. I wanted to take the work I’d been doing on rhizomatic learning and the … Continue reading “Dear Rhizo15”
I tend to read (that is, listen to audiobooks) fairly indiscriminately in my spare time. I’m currently caught between reading fantasy novels with my son, re-reading the Iliad, two Sarah Vowell books and a pop-anthropology book called Sapiens. I know i’m not going to remember most of what i read in 12 minutes drives to … Continue reading “Content is people – exploring the myth of content”
On January 14th of this year i started a 6 week course to help me explore something I’ve been working on for most of my professional career. The term ‘rhizomatic learning’ is an approach to teaching and learning that is based in the works of Deleuze and Guattari, and presents learning as uncertain, destabilized and … Continue reading “Community learning – the zombie resurrection”
(this is a draft for a narrative submission, I’m still not a hundred percent happy with the tone, but bear with me – feedback might help 🙂 ) Oscar is my almost-eight year old son. He’s been blogging since he was four, has played around a little on twitter and has generally grown up in … Continue reading “Explaining Rhizo14 to Oscar”
