Sorry, Scott. Sometimes I write wrong. My thoughts got all tangled up in the Christianity analogy, which saddled my comments with unnecessary baggage. I’ll try to correct myself.

I was trying to agree with most of the other comments, including yours. Rhizo14 did a great job helping many people reframe their view of education, and I think this is what most found so exciting about it. Many of us have continued this excitement, this exhilaration, beyond the end of the six-week event, and we want to continue this excitement even further. Dave, then, asks: “how do we get to the next step of this course (if we even should)? More specifically if we care about community learning, how do we integrate new people into an existing community learning ecosystem? How do we keep the zombies from eating them?”

Guiding emergence of a community is a very tricky issue. Simon, I think, suggests that we not guide it when he says, “No it to keep.” You rightly note the issues that arise when a group begins to define itself from the outside, risking becoming boring and predictable and undermining the very grounds for its initial energy and excitement. Alan Levine cautions against trying to reproduce last year’s dance. All well said and wise. I don’t think any of us want to devolve into an argument about whether or not rhizomatic learning is or is not a legitimate learning theory.

But then Rebecca Hogue asks just as wisely, “what gap does Rhizo fill?” I think her question gets to what I was trying to say about service, though her answer is better. First, Rhizo14 provides spaces for community-building, or communion (yes, I know, that term edges dangerously close to the religious again, but it’s a good term). Those who question the current educational frame can find good energy in Rhizo14 spaces, with plenty of room and encouragement to explore and activities to enjoy. My own thoughts about service were about how to push the Rhizo14 spaces into my current instructional and professional spaces. If Rhizo14 has real value, then how do I open that value to others, but without proselytizing and becoming an apologist for Yet Another Learning Theory (YALT—though YELP would be more appropriate, I couldn’t make it work).

For me, the key is Rhizo14 spaces, in the plural. Let’s continue to explore rhizomatic learning in multiple spaces, including a 6-week Rhizo15, without privileging any one space and declaring it definitive. Let’s open new spaces for whoever wants to play. We can make our spaces as big as we want, as many as we want, and welcome all interested parties who want to play. AND we can each be an offshoot of Rhizo14 into our local, non-rhizomatic spaces. I think we can do all this without defining ourselves as a learning theory or a cult and without behaving as a learning theory or a cult.

I do hope this mops up some of the confusion my first comment caused.