Okay, I’m starting this comment over. My first attempt had all the preachy, cosmic overtones of a Sunday School lesson.

I think the emergence and cultivation of community is a common problem faced, for instance, by most successful religions. I’ll speak of Christianity as I know more about it, but I suspect the patterns are similar.

It seems to me that most religious communities that explode rhizomagically are kicked off by the exhilaration of a new vision, a new way of framing life, to use Lakoff’s term. Rhizomatic learning shares some of this exhilaration as many Rhizoers, but certainly not all, form a new frame for education. (Yes, I recognize that comparing rhizomatic learning to early Christianity is a bit over the top, but as Flannery O’Connor noted, if you draw with large, bold strokes, people get the point.)

The danger with exhilaration is that it tends to surround people with the halo of the primary group. Like a honeymoon, sooner or later the glow fades and the enamored couple have to figure out how to live a stable, productive life with each other. Rhizo14 has to figure out how to do education in the day-to-day world of well-meaning, but too often dull organizations.

Early Christianity, as I understand it, figured out that service to the local community works—service freely offered (think OER) to men and women, free and slave, legal and outlaw, rich and poor. The hot exhilaration of a new frame joined with the regular, even dogged, delivery of service to the community is an explosive, potent combination, and it worked for Christianity for a couple of centuries—at least until politics co-opted the energy of service and twisted it into what Buddhists call a near enemy: proselytizing, often at the point of a sword. Near enemies are activities similar in expression but radically different in motivation and in outcome, and they highlight a tension in the life of an emerging community.

To my mind, the most important consideration in cultivating a community is service, free service to the local community, both f2f and online. I’ll make this personal: how can I serve my writing students rhizomatically? How can I serve my school? How can I serve my professional community of writing teachers? And how can I serve without proselytizing, without trying to make people convert to rhizomanity (I am quite certain that I will regret coining that term—tomorrow)?

I want to avoid proselytizing because I think its motivations and results are so different from those of service and eventually undermine service. Service is motivated by the other and results in helping, collaborating, and cooperating. Proselytizing is motivated by self and results in building a stronger, bigger group (connectivists, say) to compete with other groups (we will wipe out all those behaviorists and cognitivists and assimilate the constructivists, both social and non-social).

So I think we will soon learn if the Rhizo community has real legs if we continue to open spaces where people can discover for the first time, or can rekindle, the exhilaration of dancing education in a new way. Seasoned Rhizoers will have to be sensitive to those open spaces and forgo the great wickedness of telling newbies, “Yeah, well, we did that last year.” Let the newbies dance, and applaud.

But exhilaration fades, so we must sustain it with a practice of rhizomagic service to our local communities, and this is the practice that will tell in the long run. If we are doing good things, people will come see. If we aren’t, they won’t, and we will rightly fade away. Scott Johnson seems to suggest to me that we should let it run to see what emerges. So what value and values are we bringing to the table? I like the Rhizo MOOC, but I want to explore how to bring some of that rhizomagic into my classroom in a very conservative school.