Frances, I have too long a response to make a comment here, so I’ve posted the first of my thoughts to my own blog. Please jump there to continue this fine discussion. That’s a selfish request. I’m learning much.

Thanks, scholars, and Dave, I apologize for hijacking your post, but it was so much fun.

Even if we individuals are capable of this kind of independent action, this intentionality, it still emerges from the most complex, rhizomatic structure that I know about: the human mind. And I for one strongly doubt that our intentions do emerge wholly from our minds alone, as rich a muck as they are. Rather, I think our intentions are much more like the intersections of myriad lines of thought and action, perhaps mostly from ourselves, but also from our environments.

For example, I have formed intentions about this conversation we are now having—intentions that for convenience—strictly for convenience—I call mine, but I really can’t isolate my intentions from Dave’s original intentions to write this post, George’s comments months ago, or yours and Mary Ann’s comments a few days ago (and thanks for the compliments—I’m flattered by you both). If I am to be brutally honest with myself and you, my intention to respond emerges as much from the compliments as the intellectual engagement. I want to think of my intentions as pure and purely intellectual, but if I did, I’d be lying. I think most of our intentions are just this complex, just this rhizomatic.

Or did I misunderstand you? I’m just rhizomatic enough to have an asignifying rupture.

While it would be a mistake to look to Deleuze and Guattari for a pedagogical blueprint, they do refer to two principles that say much about knowledge and learning: cartography and decalcomania. These may be the least discussed of the rhizomatic principles, but they are important, especially for education.

Cartography in Deleuze and Guattari suggests a process of mapping against shifting, decentralized, adaptive, and organic reality, and then remapping, and remapping again. Always testing reality, and not looking for the right answer, but for a useful answer. Making markers, placing anchors, looking for reference points to see where they take us, all the while knowing that the anchors must sooner or later be hauled up or repositioned as the tide shifts. Of course, this is all metaphor rather than formula, but that is the attraction of the rhizome, at least to me. The metaphor of cartography, then, suggests that knowledge is never permanent, but always provisional, useful at best, and harmful when it becomes dogma. I suspect George would agree with this, and it seems quite consistent with Connectivism and other strains of post-structuralism.

Then decalcomania is even more pointed. For those who may not know, decalcomania is an art process of transferring a pattern from one place to another through some medium. Children doing handprints on paper in kindergarten is a common example. This is a marvelous metaphor for a theory of knowledge that I’m seeing in Downes’ discussions and Olaf Sporns’ work in neuro-physiology. If knowledge is a network configuration, then it is not transferred as some tiny nugget from teacher to student. Rather, it is a pattern, a function of networks, that the more or less sensitive and receptive fabric of the student’s mind echoes more or less well in and through its encounter with the teacher’s words, actions, lessons, props, classroom environment, amount of time til lunch, the attraction/distraction of the child beside, etc. Cartography is a marvelous metaphor that captures remarkably well a very difficult concept, given that most people think knowledge a packet that is encoded and packaged by a sender, then transferred to a receiver across some medium, and finally decoded by the receiver. Cartography helps me visualize how patterns can echo throughout an ecosystem (classrooms, nations, frog ponds). I think this way of envisioning the spread of knowledge is entirely consistent with Connectivist epistemology, or what I understand of it, and this metaphor can be explored in great detail with huge implications for pedagogy. For example, it renders obvious why 30 different students learn 30 different things from the same lesson. It’s like their 30 different handprints: same paper, same paint, different prints.

I’ll write more about this later, but my students have finished their assignment, and I have to get back to teaching. Later.

Flow.

Disruption.

Habituation.

Earthquakes.

Now I feel a Haiku coming on, but I’ll resist.

Thanks for the post, and for the conversation it has started.

Metaphors, like clothes, shouldn’t be worn for too long before changing them. The desktop metaphor of the Mac OS seemed pretty natural to me, until I stepped into the Amiga’s garage and approached the “Workbench”. The difference between the white collar and blue collar environments, and the loaded visual metaphors they employed, was a revelation.

We can compare unfamiliar things to things that we already have some grasp of, but we have to constantly turn it around in our hands (and in our mind) and try to see it from different vantage points and perspectives (which is easier to do with the help of others, who can report on what they see from where they stand). The best conversations happen in the alleyways between established ideas. We have to keep exploring, and we have to keep talking about what we are finding, using different languages to describe what we see, so we can avoid the trap that any one language can become.

I wonder if, for complicated concepts, the best we can do is beat around the bush together and try to come to a shared understanding of the idea of “bushness”, without expecting that we will be able to understand the bush completely. Once we think we’ve grasped it, it might have flowered, or shed its leaves, or we might have discovered that the most interesting story is underground, or that it cannot be understood as a separate, singular thing.

Let ten thousand metaphors bloom!

Mark McGuire