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This discussion paper was originally posted in the “International Journal for Innovation and Quality in Learning” which is now not on the internet. With the “learning resilience” Open course starting up in a few weeks (you can sign up at that link if you like), I thought it might be interesting to repost this and see how it sounds 2 years later.

Key message
By creating an event like a MOOC we are potentially radically redefining what it means to be an educator. We are very much at the beginning stages of our learning how to create the space required for community to develop and grow in an open course. These field notes speak to the my own journey in the design of ‘Rhizomatic Learning – the community is the curriculum’. They are, in effect, a journey towards planned obsolescence.

KEYWORDS: rhizo14, rhizomatic learning, MOOC,

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 a house where his parents have made a fair chunk of their career out of blogging and working online. It is with this as a backdrop that he walks into the room yesterday and asks

Are you in charge of ALL of rhizo14, i mean, all around the world?

You see I received a box in the mail yesterday that had a card, 4 t-shirts and a magnet that said #rhizo14 on it. The artwork, the hashtag and the tagline “A communal network of knowmads” come from a Open Course that I started in January of 2014 now called #rhizo14. The package Oscar was looking over had a stamp from Brazil on it which I explained came from Clarissa, an educator who participated in Rhizo14. She sent everyone in the family a t-shirt with the rhizo14 logo on it.

Rhizo14
So… are you in charge of it? My son not being accustomed to me being lost for words, was confused by my lack of response. In that simple question lies much of what I have struggled to explain about the event that is/was #rhizo14. What does it mean to be ‘in charge’ of a MOOC? What was my role in something that was very much a participant driven process?

If I am ‘in charge’ what does that mean in terms of my responsibility towards the quality of the experience people have as part of rhizo14?

What was the course now called Rhizo14
I say “now called” because the original title of the course was “Rhizomatic Learning – The community is the curriculum” but the people who are still participating refer to it by the hashtag. It was a six week open course hosted on the P2PU platform from January 14 to February 25th. The topic of the course was to be about my years long blabbing about rhizomatic learning. I wanted to invite a bunch of people to a conversation about my work to see if they could help me make it better. Somewhere in the vicinity of 500 people either signed up or joined one of the community groups.

What I was hoping for
Fundamentally i was hoping that 40 or 50 people would show up to the course and that by the end there would still be a handful of people interested in the discussion. I thought it would be a good opportunity for me to gather the work that I had done and make it better than it was before. I find the pressure of having an audience is very helpful in convincing me to get things together. I was not precisely hoping that we would get enough people for the course to have MOOC like characteristics, and I certainly didn’t put the time into advertising it in a way that was likely to lead to that. I was hoping that after 6 weeks I would have a better grasp on my own work, and that a few participants would have had a good quality experience.

In the more macro sense, I’m always hoping that a course that I’m working on leads to some sort of community. My work since 2005 has focused on ways to encourage people to see ‘the community as the curriculum’. I’m always hoping to organize an ecosystem where people form affinity connections in such a way that when the course ends, and I walk away, the conversations and the learning continues. I think of this as one of the true measurements of quality in any learning experience – does it continue.

How the course was designed
I made three different attempts at designing rhizo14.

The first was around my own collection of blog posts about rhizomatic learning. This was, essentially, the content of 7 years of thinking about the rhizome in education, broken into six week. In retrospect, it seems difficult to believe that I was considering so instructivist an approach, but it is very much following previous models of open courses I have been involved with. I think that this course design was prompted by my concern that people would be unfamiliar with the use of the rhizome in education and would need structure to support their journey with the idea. If you have content to present, you can ensure a certain minimum quality experience. It was also easy to just use the stuff I already had :).

Two days later, I had almost completely discarded this model for a new one that was more focused on the process of learning and connecting in an open course. The idea in model two was to ‘unravel’ the course from a fairly structured beginning to a more open and project based conclusion. This design was meant address my concerns about new participants to open/online courses. Over the years we’ve seen many complaints about the shock of a distributed course and, I’ve always thought, we didn’t see the vast majority of the complaints of participants who just couldn’t get their feet under them and didn’t complain publicly. Here I was trying to ensure quality from a process perspective.

Two days before the course started, I threw that out the window as well. In discussions with the excellent Vanessa Gennarelli from P2PU she suggested that I focus the course around challenging questions. It occurred to me that if i took my content and my finely crafted ‘unravelling’ out of the way I might just get the kind of engagement that could encourage the formation of community. The topic I chose for week 1 mirrored the opening content i was going to suggest but with no readings offered. I gave the participants “Cheating as Learning” as a topic, a challenge to see the concept of cheating as a way of deconstructing learning, and a five minute introductory video. This is the format that I kept for the rest of the course, choosing the weekly topics based on what I thought would forward the conversation. Here the quality of the experience is left up to the participant to control.

■ Week 1 – Cheating as Learning (Jan 14-21)
■ Week 2 – Enforcing Independence (Jan 21-28)
■ Week 3 – Embracing Uncertainty (Jan 28-Feb 4)
■ Week 4 – Is Books Making Us Stupid? (Feb 4-Feb 11)
■ Week 5 – Community As Curriculum (Feb 11-Feb 18)
■ Week 6 – Planned Obsolescence (Feb 18-?)

What happened during the course
Saying that I lost control of the discussion creates the false premise that I ever had control of it. From the get go, participants took my vague ‘cheating’ prompt and interpreted it in a dozen different ways. There were several strands of ethical debates regarding cheating. There were folks who decided to discuss testing. Others focused on how learning could be defined in a world of abundance. Still more took issue with the design of the question and focused on this. There was a varying degree of depth in these discussions, and, frankly, a certain amount of debate on what qualified as valid discussion.

My response was to (as i had promised) write a blog post explaining my intention with the question and surveying what people had written. This was the only week that I did this. As the course developed, and new challenges emerged, it became clear that these review posts were being created without my help. They were, in essence, me trying to hold on to my position as the instructor of the course. A position I had not really had from day 1. By the end, I only formally participated as instructor in posting the weekly challenges with a short video and by hosting a weekly live discussion on unhangout. The community has become its own rhizome, in the sense that it had created space for multiple viewpoints to coexist at varying levels of discussion.
What happened after the course

My ‘planned’ course finished on the 25th of February. On the 26th of February, week 7 of the course showed up on the Facebook group and the P2PU course page. This week entitled “The lunatics are taking over the asylum” was the first of many weeks created by the former ‘participants’ in the course. This new thing, which it is now safe to call #rhizo14, is currently in week 11 of its existence. In week eight, the community chose a blog post that I wrote several years ago as a topic of discussion. Week 11 is addressing the concern of allowing all voices to be acknowledge (a discussion that was very much present during the first six weeks) in an open environment.

As they began so they continued. The vast majority of the people who participated are now only distantly connected to the course if at all. A core of 50 or so people remain in the discussions, however, and are now identify themselves as ‘part of rhizo14′. For now, at least, there is a community of people who I am happy to number myself a member of. When I consider my responsibility as a ‘leader’ in this sort of community, it makes me wonder whether ‘educator’ is even the right word for it.

So Oscar… am I in charge of Rhizo14
Uh… no. I don’t think I ever was. An amazing group of people from around the world decided to spend some of their time learning with me for six weeks. A fair number of those seem to be forming into a community of learners that are planning new work and sharing important parts of their lives with each other. We are creating together. And it can’t be up to me to decide what good means for any of them.
My son, by this point of the conversation, would doubtlessly already be asleep.

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 needs thinking through in all learning contexts.

“I think we do need to notice that a new sort of resilience needs to be nurtured.”

It stuck with me. I’ve kind of taken it as an injunction. I wish I knew who had said it, because I have a pile of thanks to offer that person. We DO need to notice it. I’ve written two posts earlier this year dealing with the idea of resilience as it relates to two different educational contexts – students moving from one educational context to another and my own attempts to learn new things. I will sidestep (for now) the question of whether the resilience required is ‘new’ or not, but I’ve been playing with a model of what that internal narrative of resilience could look like for someone learning on the web. I was going to say ‘open web’ but the near ubiquity of spaces like Facebook, which are distinctly not open, require their inclusion as the vast majority of people who will be learning online will at some point end up in one of these corporate learning spaces.

What I’ve been working with so far
In 2010 George Siemens, Bonnie Stewart, Sandy MacAuley and I did a SSHRC funded research grant on the (at that time) new concepts emerging around MOOCs. One of the central questions we had asked ourselves was about the patterns that we could find that lead to success in a MOOC.

Six years later I’m still broadly comfortable with this as the external process by which someone starts to learn and succeed online. Whether someone goes ahead and makes it all the way to focus/outcomes part of this process is up to them and the process need not really be this linear. Overall, though, I’m still happy with it. We need to Orient ourselves, get a sense of what is going on, what the general rules of engagement are. We need to Declare who we are, need to have a place for our identity to stand. We need to Network with others. We need to find people who we can work with and Cluster with them. Then we can, if we wish, Focus on some sort of outcome, though i feel less strongly about this as a necessity.

What this doesn’t account for
But that’s all external. That’s what it looks like while/after it’s being done. How do we, as Kate so elegantly puts it – “support students to propose their own narrative of purpose”?

@markdrechsler @davecormier @MarciaDevlin We can support students to propose their own narrative of purpose, not just mould them to ours.

— Kate Bowles (@KateMfD) March 30, 2016

As our injunction dictates, we need to account for the resilience required to confront the learning process without the safe structures and comforting space of a ‘learning objective’ or a teacher telling you you’ve done it right. We need to acknowledge that learning in a network/community/wild space means that sometimes there will be uncontrollable interactions. You will be confronted by what a colleague today referred to as ‘aggressive academic hectoring’. There is privilege always. How do we maintain the advantages of rhizomatic space and still give people the tools to be resilient?

A new model
In my last post, I presented a model for how we can talk about resilience for a student in terms of how they might fit in a university. The model is meant to be both an emotional guidepost for students new and old and a reminder to those of us supporting them of what our goals are.

It’s occurred to me that the same thinking process might be useful here. If we translate some of the language closer to what we’ve been exploring with regards to learning in a world of abundance, we might get something like this. The idea of ‘purpose’ matches up for me with ‘learning subjectives‘ which we were exploring last year – Designing for when you don’t know where you’re going. The sense of place feels very comfortable as community. The third one is interesting… every student examplar we’ve found for resilience and much of the research suggests that ‘a person of somekind’ (as opposed to lots of people) is super-important.

I’m still just mulling this over, so I’m not going to go to far with this. The learning subjective is the thought, idea, need… the thing that got you started into this and your constantly reassessed perspective on it. It’s different from an outcome/objective in that you don’t know where it’s going. More importantly, no hierarchically approved agent has decided that it is the the ‘thing you need to know’. The community is the place where thinking resides. There are healthy communities and unhealthy communities. It’s not a perfect situation… it’s the discourse on the thing that you are interested in. The big difference now is that this discourse can be had with living people instead of the thoughts of living/dead people printed on dead paper. The narrowed perspective and finalized thoughts of the text are replaced with the uncertainty of the community space. The key nodes are thoughts/people/things that you start to see as guideposts along the road. They are ideas/people that you can turn to for direction, for help, to find out where help is.

Process of resilience
In accord with the Viv Rolfe quote in the last post, we want to think of resilience as a process rather than some innate quality that people have. This model then, is a suggested process that might help folks who are trying to engage in learning when there are an indefinite number of options/connections/approaches/solutions to the things they are interested in. When that thing they are involved in is simple (like a location on a map) or complicated (like a recipe) this is not such a big issue. If they are engaged in learning something complex this sense of resilience becomes more important.

Moving forward with a model
Is it useful to have a model like this? What questions should be in the circles? How can we introduce people to the process of re-examining their own subjectives, the community of learning (the curriculum) they are approaching and the key people and concepts in it? Resilience in the sense of enduring adversity successfully only works when we know what ‘success’ looks like. In a world of abundance, the learner needs to constantly evaluate what they want, what knowing looks like (the community) and reassess their touch points.

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 still live) – lots of good work done that we’re proud of. This is my second full year responsible for New Student Orientation and through conversations with students, teachers, faculty, counsellors, lots of staff – even PEI’s Minister of Education – we’ve pretty much come to the conclusion that resilience is the approach we want to take to supporting transitions this year. How can we help students continue to feel like they belong when they face adversity? How do we support and model resilience from day 1?

What resilience isn’t
I am not talking about the kind of resilience that is touted by arch-conservatives as the way people used to be ‘in their day’. I am not suggesting that students have gotten soft, that they need to harden, or that somehow we, as an institution, are responsible for being the crucible through which we mint ourselves some toughened students. That’s hazing and it’s gatekeeping.

I am also not talking about the kind of resilience warned of by Viv Rolfe in which she worries that we encourage resilience instead of making our spaces better places to thrive.

What we mean by resilience
Rolfe suggests “A better way of thinking should be to consider resilience as a process and not a personality trait.” It is this process that we are seeking to model and embody in our orientation this year. The current state of our conversation is that resilience for us involves working on goal setting (both micro and macro), creating a sense of place for students to belong, and having point people available to help students find the help they need.

One the one hand, students need to be able to understand their role, work towards understanding their own goals, finding places and people to work with and learn from. We, as an institution, need to be a place where they can work towards their goals, where a sense of place is available to them and where we encourage others – students, staff and faculty – to be the point person for people to learn from and through which they can find help…even when paths to help are complex or not directly visible.

So this is our first draft at what that looks like as an initial model for what we’re hoping new UPEI students – and the rest of us, maybe – will learn at NSO.

Responsibility as a campus
I think of the goal setting part of this, the ‘purpose,’ as tricky business for a campus. My sense of the strength of higher education is in the diversity of ways students encounter goal setting… and the multiplicity of ways in which success can be viewed. I’d like to encourage people to talk about this to students and to work with them, but would certainly not want to be prescriptive.

As someone who’s been thinking about community in education… obviously a sense of place is something that is important to me. We have the infrastructure in place to provide that sense of place, both on and off campus, but we need to come up with ways to offer people ways of belonging from day 1. We’re working on this. Not everybody wants to belong in the same ways, so again, this can’t be prescriptive and needs to remain in Snowden’s complex domain.

For the ‘point person’ idea to work, we need to be transparent about who can help whom and for what. If we see our student volunteers as the primary point person for new students, we need to be very clear with our them about how they can help students get help. The idea is to scaffold new students into the systems and networks of the institution, not just pass them along the channels of the institutional hierarchy. This will require point people – and the point people’s point people all along the line – to act as identities with connections and individual knowledge, not just within the bounds of their roles. Work to do here… but we have some plans in place.

Responsibility of our student volunteers
I can’t really say enough about the volunteers we have in place for orientation. At last count we have 102 volunteers who have committed their time to helping make the transition to UPEI a valuable experience for everyone. The trick here, I think, is for these students to become comfortable with using the model themselves. They need to understand it, understand their own strengths and weaknesses with it, and refer to it during the whole planning process.

We also need to be clear about what we mean by encouraging them to be ‘point people’. A point person is someone who is just ahead of you, someone who can point you in the right direction if you need help or guidance. That person can share their own experience… but are NOT a professional who should be offering advice in critical points of struggle. We’re going to need to work towards that.

The responsibility of the new student
Obviously a pile of responsibility lies with the student as well. They need to struggle towards understanding their goals. They need to work to belong to spaces that are valuable to them. They need to find key point people and use them effectively. BUT… and this is a big but, they can’t be expected to know that before they come. I do not believe that students are under any cultural imperative to understand what they need to do before they come. It’s our job to work with them to help them get there.

We’re hoping that we can grow this model into something that can help us grow towards a campus that supports resilient students. Would love your feedback on our first draft.

A little over a year ago, I was asked to leave the work I was doing with the Recruitment and First Year advisement team (partially rolling out a CRM) and go help with student engagement/retention and getting our university’s first academic plan written. A committee of 22 administrators, faculty, staff and students was assembled to craft the next four years of the academic – and to some degree research – direction of UPEI. We spent a year working on it, starting first with our campus Strategic Plan and then through various feedback approaches. We crafted the 28 page Academic Plan that was endorsed by the Board of Governors after having been approved by our Senate. The content of the plan came out of the vision of our Strat Plan and the needs and ideas of campus, but my role was to direct structure and build consensus. I had to develop an iterative vision and process around core questions: What does a good Academic Plan look like? What should it do? What does ours need to do?

What is an Academic Plan anyway?
The term means lots of different things to different people. For some, it is a Strat plan for an entire campus. For some, it is the direction that they will take with regards to programming. For UPEI, the Academic Plan is:

1. Our method of enacting the UPEI Strategic Plan on the academic/research end of the house.
2. An attempt to give us some of the tools that we need to be more effective in getting good ideas up and running
3. A way to respond to academic/research related possibilities/challenges on campus

Data Gathering/Research method
We did web based surveys, world cafe style sessions, and had an open door policy for people who wanted to come in and share ideas/concerns. We used a provisional coding strategy with an initial set of codes from the UPEI Strat plan. We then went through individual and program based feedback and adjusted the code as we went along. Those codes eventually morphed into the 35 initiatives that appear in the final draft of the Academic Plan. We very much took an iterative approach, returning to the committee with the results, the adaptation in the code, and the ways in which those codes translated to initiatives. Lots of good discussion.

What is an initiative?
I spent a fair amount of time wringing my hands over this one. We wanted each initiative to have a goal and objectives, to be assigned to people… to be clear. We also wanted to create a scenario where our subject matter experts would have the latitude to innovate in the ways in which they responded to the challenges. If we waited for that innovation to happen before we wrote the document, we’d be finishing the projects before they’d even been approved. We decided on a middle ground that reflected the codes and responses from campus as best we could, but still allowed the groups that would be running those initiatives the chance to do new and interesting things without being committed to our initial thoughts on the matter. Here’s a nice clean example – Initiative 29 – Student Employment on Campus

Goal: Use our employment of students as a training ground for job search skills
Description: Each year, over 500 students work on the UPEI campus supporting the mission of the University. This provides an ideal opportunity to create supports to help shape their future career skills. This project will provide supports to student applicants before, during, and after their work time here at UPEI.
Responsibility: Office of Skills Development and Learning
Success measures: Baseline of student applicants and successful applicants; new communications procedures and follow-up (including mentorship); number of students supported by providing job hunting, résumé building, and interview skills

Project management on an initiative
Having the initiatives detailed in a document is one thing, figuring out how we’re going to go about getting them done is something else. We have a campus full of smart people who are already working on projects. The challenge for us from a project management perspective was to find an approach that would allow 35 initiatives to all get planned out and completed but still allow people to have a window into the process.

initiative charter
The first step for an initiative is to create a charter. A charter basically sets the high level milestones, sets broad timelines for those milestones, assigns the tasks to specific individuals, has a discussion of scope (in and out), and has a common sense section where we can talk about what success looks like. Think of it as an internal contract with ourselves, where we promise what we’re going to do and commit to actually getting it done. The initiative charters are shared google docs that have a rich history of discussion attached to them. These charters will go to Senate for approval and then will get posted on the academic planning website. We have 7 charters going to Senate this month. Fingers crossed.

project plan
This document gets down to the details. I’ve created a streamlined project management approach that has a google sheet for each project stitched together to a central dashboard giving us a sense of the health of all the the initiatives that we are running. Google lacks some of the fancy features of the pro-style project management software, but everyone can use it, assigning view/comment/edit rights is super easy inside our organization and ‘importrange’ is easy for my caveman mind to use to build a dashboard.

The project plan has what you’d expect. A place for general status of the project. A place to talk about what the challenges might be and what possible resolutions could look like. A breakdown of each milestone into tasks, delivered outcomes, due dates etc… Its one spreadsheet that will get used by all project members and where key details get centralized for efficient obstacle removal. I’m trying to make this an email-less project if possible.

What I hope the Academic Plan will mean
There are a number of individual initiatives and specific outcomes in the plan that I care a great deal about. Higher ed is in a very interesting place right now. Our ability to understand things like networked participatory scholarship, the impact of the new focus on ‘career skills’ and the need for good mentorship doesn’t actually need to conflict with maintaining the things that make a university a university (autonomy, academic freedom, research etc…). We can have both of these things, I think. We just need to find effective ways to work on the things that we care about – to get the job done while still being who we are. If we managed to do anything in this project… that’s what I hope we did.

The ‘Marco Rubio Disaster‘ is, in my mind, the most amazing 5 minutes of political debate in my lifetime. It exposes, on the surface, the degree of preparation (training/brainwashing) that goes into preparing a candidate for a debate. It also reminds me personally of that feeling that happens to me occasionally in the middle of a talk where I can’t quite pull my thoughts together. I mean… Rubio just totally brain locked. A monumental momentary breakdown. Potentially, spun right, the end of his viability as a political candidate. But that’s all spin. We obviously shouldn’t judge a person on one flaw in one moment. The real interest for me is how it exposes a political teams desire to present us with certainty… and also where that can go wrong.

What happened
On February 6 2016, Marco Rubio and Chris Christie were debating Rubio’s lack of executive experience. In the middle of critiquing Christie’s record as Governor, Rubio entered into 30 second monologue about how Obama was trying to ‘change’ the country. Christie called Rubio on the prepared speech. And then rubio responded by repeating the speech, again. In almost the exact same words. Christie called him on it. Then Rubio did it AGAIN. His brain totally skipped on him. He tried to attack Christie to regain power in the discussion, but Christie had done too good a job of exposing the repetition. The crowd turned against Rubio.

talking point to truth
For years now, we’ve taken it for granted that our politicians, senior corporate executives and that guy in your home town who bosses people around are going to repeat things over and over again until we believe them. We have taken it for granted that they are in a position to ‘make truth’ by being louder, by being more persistent and being more authoritative than the next guy.

My father often talks about a guy in our home town who was the Oracle of the Possible (my expression, not dad’s). If he said you could fish a certain way, or build your house in a certain place, it was possible. If he disagreed, people figured it wasn’t possible. He was persistent. People laughed at people who disagreed with him.

In a corporation we call them brand statements. They are expressions and feelings that people want us to associate with a particular company. In many corporations employees are trained to mimic these behaviours and expressions in order to deliver on the ‘brand promise’. Some of these things are great… a brand that commits to ‘things not breaking’ and finds a way to deliver on this promise is probably contributing to a positive process. Sadly many of these promises are of the ‘we’re fun’ or ‘we’re edgy’ variety that try to get people to attach their personal aspirations to the clothes they wear. I signal I’m edgy by wearing X brand. I’ll grant you that it is a form of communication… and we certainly need ways to communicate with new people, but it’d be nice if we didn’t have the baggage that goes with it.

I remember about 10 years ago a politician in British Columbia was talking about a law that held political candidates accountable for the promises they made. The discussion was mostly met with confusion. On the one hand there are obvious problems with locking people down to one perspective on an issue when we could learn something and realize we have to change our minds. On the other hand, it would further contribute to people talking and not actually saying anything. We live in a political climate where politicians are criticized for being ‘too intellectual’. Too smart to be president… i mean… what does that even mean?

Rubio’s brain fart is a fascinating combination of the hometown despot, the brand manager and the politician. His message in that little 30 second snapshot (which we heard 3 times…) is that these other guys, they want to change things, and that’s bad by definition. The things I want to change are not ‘change’ they are things that need to be fixed. He needs to manage his brand in this way, because his perceived weakness (as pundit-ed) is a lack of executive experience. The brand response is to control truth making, as it always is. As a political brand statement, he is looking to return to the greatness of the past, the classic simulacra of American the beautiful, of the perfectland before the evil Obama.

In each of the three cases, it was a correct brand response. The problem, of course, is that they were in the same conversation 2 minutes apart. What Rubio did happens all the time – it happens with the guy down the street, it happens with corporate brands and it happens with politicians. The big question is –

Why do we care that a politician is repeating his talking points as non-sequitur when s/he does it in a row and not when s/he does it 100 times over an election period.

The art of repetition and rote
The first answer, I think, is that we’re trained to it. We actively train our society to respond to ‘the truth’ being made as an authoritative claim by people in positions of authority. Our entire school system is a training ground for this. The teacher is correct. They have prepared what you ‘need to know’. You are going to be tested on whether you have ‘remembered’ what you ‘need to know’. The question of whether you need to know it (How am I ever going to use this in real life?) and whether it’s actually true are not part of the system – though certainly there are some teachers that include it on their own.

Politicians have always recognized that they can do this. Look no further than the record of speeches from the Roman Republic to recognize that we didn’t make this up as an extension of corporate branding. The problem, i think, is that our corporations recognized this about a 100 years ago, and the training that was put into our education system to encourage people to listen to politicians and listen to their bosses in the factories are now also part of the consumerism of our culture. We are told, enough times, that a given thing reflects our personal aspirations and so we decide we need it. Repetition for truth.

Stop getting the answer right
I believe that our education system is a society building machine. I believe that the way we build it, the practices we foster, the underlying concepts in it make citizens a certain way. I totally understand that people want our schools to be accountable, but the choices we have made for accountability have created a society where people believe that repetition is true. We believe that there are correct answers to all questions. That’s how tests work isn’t it? Don’t we represent power in our classrooms through teachers who present and test for correct answers?

It is MUCH easier to check and see if a teacher is doing their work if ‘doing their work’ is the same as getting students to deliver the right answer. We’ve always recognized this. We turn to ‘project based learning’ to give people a chance to do explore, to deal with uncertainty, to make their own answers. Super inconvenient though, PBL. I mean, the students have 6 hours to get something done so… it’s much easier to provide some structure so that they can get there in that time. Teachers change, people start to realize that that structure is way easier to measure than the random things that students think… and then we start to measure the structure.

I’ve come to realize that rhizomatic learning (and many other, similar projects – see connectivism, heutagogy etc…) is about creating a different kind of citizen in our little society building machine. I’m hoping to encourage citizens who can, among other things, see what Rubio is doing not just when he so majestically did it in a five minute span, but when he repeats for truth over the course of a campaign. I would love to be part of encouraging citizens who get MORE suspicious as things are repeated rather than less. To destabilize the brand message so that it was less effective. To make it so that we did not look for TRUTH but rather negotiated truths that included more people.

I think certainty in schools is a key battleground. We need to stop getting the answer right.

This is a ‘first-thoughts’ post. I’d love to hear from others on this.

It’s been a very humbling month of learning at Casa Villa here in Charlottetown. I have been teaching myself the difference between a resistor and a capacitor, the value of a good voltmeter and the wonders of enticing little sensors for the arduino platform. Every day the list of things i don’t know gets longer.

I have a number of reasons for having started down the arduino path. I’m both interested and a little worried about the internet of things. I’m fascinated by the possibilities of building fit for purpose items. I think it’s profoundly important that my children understand these things. I think my little girl needs to see a future in math/engineering as just as relevant as her future as a princess. Lots of reasons. The big driver for me, though, is that I’m interested in the confluence of science and self-directed learning in general, and rhizomatic learning in particular.

That’s not how we do it in Science
I am often told that students simply have to memorize things in order to start learning. One of the more lucid discussions (read this as: a discussion where dave didn’t end up jumping up and down) that i have taken part in on the subject surrounded the idea that in the humanities, being about humans, all humans have something built in to say on the matter. We bring our humanity to the subject. In the sciences, for many, the subject is almost entirely new. As this is the case, students simply have to cram their brains full of definitions and concepts in order to understand anything. Take the first step. Master the words. Master the concepts. Then you can science things.

I’m sorry. I have a hard time accepting that taking in words out of context is the best way to learn anything. so…

Why this is bad for resilience
I’m always suspicious of any test that checks for exactly the thing that is asked for. The multiple choice tests that check for the ‘word mastery’ are nasty little beasts. They create a system where students are all rewarded for doing exactly the same thing. I see hundreds of students, little cue cards in their hands, desperately trying to memorize the things they were told to memorize. While I will certainly agree that it helps work on their obedience, and, potentially, their willingness to repeatedly do a disconnected task (excellent factory skills) it does not support the ‘adapt to stress’ resiliency that is so critical to our society.

In order to adapt we need to be challenged by the unknown, we need to be confronted by uncertainty. We need to learn how to find an answer (not the answer) to our problem and react accordingly. Try solutions, improve, create…

What this looks like in the workforce
Ok. Lets face it. We can either hide from the workforce discussion as it relates to schools or we can face it head on. I FIRMLY believe that resiliency is one of the, if not THE, most important workforce skill there is. It is not achieved by teaching people to ‘workforce’ or to use a cash register. I have actually heard, several times, employers complain that ‘kids these days’ can’t even use a cash register. The solution to this seems to be to get them train them to actually use a cash register. Um… no. That’s like eating baking soda because you have too much lactic acid in your muscles. The mind, like the body, is a complex system. It’s not a direct pipe.

We need to teach for resilience. To be unflustered by a reluctant cash register. We teach for memory. In a ‘teach for memory’ world people need to be told exactly what to do so that they can perform that task in the future. Does this sound like the world that we are expecting?

Enter the Arduino
So… in an attempt to put my money (and my poor brain) where my mouth is I’ve started a new project. I want to design a rhizomatic learning inspired approach to learning Arduino. I can’t think of anything more ‘step by step’ mastery-like to approach. There’s tons of insider language (today i ran into Pulse Width Modulation) much of it describing critical phenomenons that will either burn up my chip or simply make it so that it wont work. Here are some project links i’ve been collecting… I’m sure i’m supposed to memorize Ohms law before I use it.

I think the Arduino and the projects that can now be done with them are perfect development spaces for resilience if we take this approach. If we make them a struggle… with a possibility for success. If we can make them a place for experimentation and exploration, not memorization and repetition.

First steps
Rhizomatic learning is a complex approach to the learning process. As such, I always try to reduce any other complexity when i’m trying to design something. In the process of accumulating scads of little tiny wired things, I’ve come across what I believe will be the first step in the learning process – failing/succeeding with the ATTINY85. It’s a tiny little chip that takes next to no power, and can only do one or two things at a time. Here’s an excellent article of some of the possibilities.

So. I have a software platform (ArduinoIDE) and I have a chip (attiny85) and I have a couple of leads (it seems that the tiny85 will run a transmitter)… now i need to figure out a way to allow learners to play with those, to use them to discover the depth meaning in electronics in a way that allows them to make their own meaning from it. If I get near to what I’m looking for, they should leave the ‘course’ not only seeing how a chip connects to a capacitor, but seeing the world around as one of limitless connective possibilities…

So far… so fun.

Afterthought: I recognize that the maker movement has been on about this for a long time. 🙂

As some of you are probably aware, I spent the last 10 months working on an academic plan for my university. I tried to be the conduit for 1000’s of pages of feedback, multiple collaborative sessions and piles of surveys. I also tried to listen to hundreds of colleagues and students who had stories they wanted to tell about their time here at the university. It was a fascinating process, and the experience of developing a plan with a committee of 22 people was one I will not soon forget. The digital (meaning the difference between what is possible/likely/imposed in a pre-digital vs. digital society) was hiding around every corner. There was the obvious stuff like the ethical implications of learning analytics and conversations about what ‘quality’ might look like in online learning. There were also more subtle things like integrating student services through a ticket management approach and encouraging networked participatory scholarship. You can ignore it, but you can’t avoid it. We need to re-envision huge chunks of our institutions along new lines taking into account both the affordances and the tyranny of the digital. The systemic impacts of the digital on learning is a panel i’m chairing at the DLRN conference next week. (4 days left to register)

The digital gives us a new window through which to examine our first principles.

An article was posted in Inside Higher Ed yesterday touting the need to shift from the Carnegie Unit to outcomes based education. The author juxtaposes the industrial age approach to learning (thrown them in a room, block out class time) against the information age (let them advance at their own speed towards outcomes). The idea seems to be that we are currently trying to do both industrial, time based education AND outcomes based education at the same time and this leaves us with a commitment to neither. We need to cast off the timed class hour and rebuild our universities to train students for the information economy. Ok. Yup. We need to change because right now we’re trying to do ALL THE THINGS… but lets dig a little deeper.

The two parts of this argument we should ignore
Mastery learning – I have come to see the concept of ‘mastery learning’ as code for ‘and we only care about STEM subjects’. It is a rigid system whereby we create a set of standard blocks of ‘knowing’ that people do one after another, only moving to the next step when the previous one is completed. An assembly line of learning, as it were. An industrial model of learning. I am always a little confused by how people use ‘information age’ networked arguments to suggest we should do mastery learning. And, frankly, many STEM grads will go into companies where the daily work life will look like it did 20 years ago. Research labs or construction sites may have incrementally better technologies, but as many of them rigidly protect their intellectual property and have giant marketing budgets to buy TV ads, the ‘information superhighway’ doesn’t intersect with them very often.

Information Age and knowing information – the suggestion here is that we need to have ‘information havers’ who we can prove they ‘have information’ for the information age. This seems a little confusing to me. If we live with an abundance of information, then we need to teach people how to assemble solutions from various levels of knowing. If I’m building a new birdhouse I may be an expert in construction, kinda knowledgeable about birds and suck at the marketing part of selling my birdhouse. The great thing about the world we live in is that (given access – lots of people don’t have it) you can do all those things. That’s part of what’s changed. But it’s not about ‘having all that information’ but knowing how to bring together the information and/or the people to get what you need. We can do that today… we mostly don’t need to be ‘masters’ ahead of time.

But he’s also right – the asynchronous course hour
The asynchronous course hour often drives this conversation. The research that I’ve done on it (this article is representative) suggest that most people have thought about it, understand that it’s an issue, but aren’t really sure what to do about it. Here’s the problem. We have all decided, for convenience sake, that we’ll teach about 36 classroom hours to students and expect them to study about 80 hours outside the classroom for each ‘course’. We’ve adapted our curriculum to fit this convention and, ostensibly, try to balance the amount of knowing/work/information/learning (KWIT) to fit that time frame. Early in online learning, we took the amount of KWIT we did in a face2face classroom and used that as the basis for how much KWIT we would use in an online course. This works ok for as far as it goes… and then you start to ask questions

What if I record my lectures, is that equivalent to a classroom hour… am i teaching?
If I’m giving the same tests, can i let the students self-pace and finish whenever?
Is my responding in a discussion forum equal to me grading or me teaching?
What if i start my course from scratch, how do I imagine 36 hours of classroom teaching?
How can I do online testing without them ‘finding the answers’ on the internet?

We are living with a foot in both worlds, and we are being forced (at least i hope we are) to ask some profound questions about what it means to teach in ‘the information age’. We have weird monsters-hybrids like ‘a video camera that watches your eyes to make sure you are only staring at the screen when you’re doing an online test’ and faculty requesting f2f tests for online courses. That walled classroom has it’s own affordances that get blown up when you work online. The classroom hour structure is only the start of it.

Information control
One of the nice things about keeping people in a boxed off space when you’re trying to teach them is TOTAL POWER over the information space. If you can keep students quiet, you can totally control the information that is being presented. This makes testing super-easy to monitor. It also allows you to forward one perspective (or multiple ones if you so choose) and create the knowledge narrative that you subscribe to. The digital totally blows this up. Five minutes of clicking can get you a counter to almost any narrative. The ‘information hiding’ that is so critical to the way many still test is next to impossible (Big Brother watching you through your computer not-withstanding). The lessons that this teaches “hide your information” and “choose the RIGHT narrative” doesn’t really map up against the information age story that we are being told.

What is our relationship to information in learning in 2015?

Responsibilities
Most faculty agreements are mapped up against the faculty member spending 36 hours in a classroom. That’s super easy to count. Were you there? Yeah? Ok… you were there. That’s pretty easy right? There are certainly many other things in place, student evaluations, faculty professionalism, etc… I’m not suggesting that faculty just put in time in their classrooms. I’m suggesting that the whole model of ‘doing your job’ STARTS at being in class. But what does that look like in an online space? What does ‘being in class’ mean when you and your students have access to a classroom space (if you’re using a VLE) 24 hours a day? What if you tried to answer all of your students questions when there is an unlimited amount of time for them to ask? I remember trying to find guidance when i taught my first hybrid class (18 hours in class, 18 hours online). I tried my best to make it work out… but how do I know that I’m doing my job? How much is the right amount?

What does it mean to ‘teach an hour’ in 2015?

Fix it with outcomes!!!
The solution to this is to use outcomes based education instead of hours based education. The theory here is that as long as we ensure that students ‘get it’ who cares how many hours it takes? But what is ‘IT’? How do we decide what a person needs to know in order to have a Bachelor’s degree in Arts with a major in Philosophy? What outcomes are you going to choose to make a Major in Biology? Can a student finish in 2 years? What about one year? What about 20 years? Is it time based at all? Well… we could model off of what we have now…

Mastery education advocates often cite professional standards bodies as an alternative way to go with this. They use the fields of engineering, or computer science as their example and say we’ll know when they reach those outcomes that they are prepared to go into those fields. The funny thing is that when i talk to engineers and computer scientists I keep hearing about the need for creativity, time management, grit and people skills as much as I hear about the need to know (insert engineering thing that’s easily measured). Those are wonderful things… but they aren’t mastery things. I am not going to get my first block of creativity learned until moving on to block two of grit. And don’t say i can… because… (angry face)

What outcome do we really want from our universities?
This is just another case where the digital has forced us to consider our first principles. What do we want the ‘outcome’ of a university education to be? As we consider how granular, how technical, how mastery-based we want our outcomes to be we are deciding what it means to be a knower in our society. Our schools have been both drivers for creating drones to work in our factories and an attempt to be places of free thought to allow us to change as a society. They are – always – normative. The way we build them and the ways in which we adjudicate success inside them will be reflections of the society we created… whether we’ve thought about it or not.

The digital isn’t an evolutionary change, it’s a new toolset that allows us to think about the human experience. The internet is full of humans and the residue of the human experience. Given this moment of reflection that we are forced to confront… what do we want ‘knowing’ to be in 2015?

#DLRN15
DLRN15 is going to happen in nine days. The conference is exploring the impact of the digital on higher education. We’re hoping to have deep conversations on complex issues. We’ve got passionate people coming. How can we make it as useful to people as possible? How do we allow multiple voices to participate to allow that complexity to emerge? How do we encourage that conversation to continue?

Slack experiment
Following the XOXO festival’s lead this year we thought we might take a run at using Slack to support conference conversations. We’ve been using Slack to help organize the conference… and… well… it’s really helpful. If you haven’t used Slack, its like a more organized, slightly more functional twitter. It lets you create channels (really hashtags) to coordinate conversation topics. It allows basic googledoc integration.

It has one feature that I consider essential to battling signal/noise problems – it has a functional notification system. In all my work with open communities, I’ve found that notification is just about the most important part of the process… whether that comes through a newsletter or through facebook updates. Slack has a fairly good notification process, which might really help people zoom in on conversations that they want to pursue.

How we might use Slack
Conference logistics – At the very least, people will know where to go to ask a question. That alone is pretty useful. Will there be too much noise to make it a good place for that? Maybe. Conference announcements? Slack. Too much noise? Don’t know.
Conference socializing – It can be hard to find people to have lunch with, grab a drink with or have dinner with the night before a conference. I always feel just a little weird posting open dinner invitations to the conference twitter hashtag… like my kids are going to worry that I’m lonely. I’m hoping that at the very least people will know where to find other people at the conference. Looking for someone? Find them on Slack. Don’t want to be found? don’t login. easy peasy.
Conference themes – We have five conference themes that we’re hoping to explore. I’m hoping that we can get a bit of a discussion going before the conference starts on each theme. I’d like to have a place where those five conversations can evolve over the conference. I have this idea that people can keep going back to keep pushing the conversation a little further.
Special topic creation – The XOXO conference had 150 channels by the time their conference was over. I think it’d be great if people started their own channels as topics of special interest emerge.

Social contract
As with any new space and any place where new connections are being made there’s a need for addressing the implicit social contract. We are very much trying to create a space where as many people as possible can have a voice… can be part of the conversation. This is DLRNs inclusion statement…

#dlRN15 is dedicated to trying to create an inclusive conversation for all participants, and to welcome voices across lines of gender, gender identity and expression, age, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, race, ethnicity, religion (or lack thereof), technology choices, and academic status.

anti-open?
I don’t expect Slack to replace other methods of sending out content. I can still see people tweeting and sending out images on instagram. I still hope to see blog posts. We’re going to try and do some interesting things with Periscope. I’m hoping that Slack will encourage more discussion amongst the participants that will lead to even more stuff being sent out to the web. We’ll see. Have to try it to find out.

We certainly had some folks during the recent open courses I was facilitating concerned about the exclusion they felt when much of the conversation was being held in Facebook. I’m sensitive to this… but I think it’s still worth trying. We’ll keep track of how it goes and report back after the conference.

Sign up
Want to sign up? Here’s the form. Not coming to the conference and still interested in finding out how it works? Feel free to sign up. Will it be a positive experience? No idea. Please let us know.

I have too many draft blog posts accumulating in this space so I’m committed to publishing whatever drivel comes out of my fingers tonight. I was seconded to lead Academic Planning and Retention/student engagement at UPEI, and with the plan finally out to campus, New Student Orientation ready to go and our analytics project coming together, I can turn my mind to other ideas.

After the open course I ran earlier this year (Rhizo15) we found ourselves tangled in a number of publication and presentation projects. We’ve setup a Slack instance to try and deal with the todos on the different projects. It’s been an interesting process trying to bring enough structure to a ridiculously unstructured concept (rhizomatic learning) to be able to talk to other people about it. We’ve been having a conversation over the last week or so about the viability of running a new rhizo (#rhizo16) next year. The focus of that conversation is about how we can include people in the community so that they feel real membership. The very fact that there’s a ‘we’ talking about this in the first place suggests that we might have a problem on our hands.

WEs creating THEMs
I tend to think that membership and belonging are things that humans seek in most things they do. You may be member of a very small, very pigheaded group, but you still have a place to belong… even if that belonging is only in opposition to the dominant group. In the learning stuff that I play with, I always try to be very sensitive to the idea that it can be difficult for new people to play. By this i don’t mean “do people know enough to join”, but rather “do people feel like they are members of the community”. Rhizo14 (the first Rhizomatic learning open course) spawned a set of tightly knit communities that, in some cases, continued working together after the course was over. In some of those cases I think the community may have formed in opposition to the course… but it still formed. We had created some very strong WE during the course of our work during and after the course. We had created a language. We had reifications that were part of shared experience.

At that point of WE the THEMs are created. Lots of us are interested in making these great communities of knowing, but in doing so we are, defacto, excluding all the folks who didn’t make it in, for whatever reason. Some people expect to be part of the WE – just because they showed up. Some people take great offence to starting out as a THEM. Some are very sensitive to these kinds of belonging and others, of course, could care less. As facilitators we have a double responsibility to both the WEs and the THEMs.

In planning for #rhizo15 my main concern was to create a space where new people could join and participate on a level playing field with folks from #rhizo14. Not possible, I know, I guess maybe it was a direction I was heading in. I took a number of approaches:

1. I committed to running the course by myself, thereby not overtly creating an ‘in crowd’ (though, to be fair, lots of #rhizo14ers helped lots and lots in the background
2. I changed the name (to 15), the focus and the location of the course… killing off a very successful facebook group in the process
3. I attempted (and failed) to create a forkable course
4. I vowed to do way more social intervention work to include people equally
5. I equally attempted to avoided ‘right answers’ as these favour the initiated
6. I was terribly mysterious about the content (and, frankly, the goal) of each week… putting everyone in the same position

For all the efforts I made, it was breathtaking how quickly the WE groups formed themselves. We’re still looking at the data from twitter, suffice it to say that people form up pretty quickly. That shared experience starts to create new language, it melds with the old language, and new WEs are created. And that’s good. People start to trust and like each other, and they start to learn together. They care about each other. Community forms. New thinking emerges. WEs happen. But anyone who did not participate in that experience, who did not, for whatever reason, feel included if they did participate… they are now a them. It’s not something I saw people do overtly… it just seems to happen. I’ve been working in online communities (mostly for learning) for a dozen years or so, as a community emerges, it tends to get more and more difficult to join fully. I’ve come to see this as normal, and to see my job as trying to create ways to allow people to belong over time.

Opening the door
This blog post is here because my excellent colleague asked the question “wonder why we speak of opening the door at all, instead of an open hallway?”. I think we create those doors by liking each other. There are certainly people who are more than willing to just ignore the doors and jump in anyway, but I think that the longer a group of people are together, the fewer people there are who are willing to do that. Unless, of course, people make an overt effort to create strategies that allow people to become members of a community, and, in our case, a community of knowing.

And we all know this really – from the rest of our lives. It takes effort to belong to any tight knit group of people, and I’m certainly not suggesting that all the effort should be on the part of the WE to allow for the THEM. Becoming part of the WE is an overt act of becoming on the part of the THEM. They have to want it. They have to be willing to try and understand the WE even as they come to belong and start to shape what the WE means. But the WE has to continually find new ways to open the door, to allow people to join on equal footing (whatever that means).

What this means for learning – Making people WEs
I’ve always seen Instructivism as a process by which you explain to people that there are things they are supposed to know, and they should just go on about believing those things. There are instances in which i agree with this. Road rules. The names of things (though this is tricky). The fire exits. Timestables. I think its very dangerous, however, when we start applying it to everything. While its probably a more effective way to get someone to pass a test, it’s not as effective a mechanism at encouraging creativity, independence and people’s ability to confront adversity/uncertainty.

That’s where, I believe, Constructivism comes in. From those terms, you are building your own understanding of the world around you. Not a great way to learn to use a stop sign, but a more effective mechanism for emancipation. My particular feelings about learning are, I think, a form of constructivism, where we remove the ‘right answer’ entirely, and try to move people from the THEM category of learning to the WE category. Where we are trying to bring them into the community of knowing rather than enforcing a belief upon them. Teaching is, i think, a constant effort of shoving that damn door open to try and let people in. Making WEs of the THEMs.

If you poke around long enough in large change projects in higher education right now, you’ll find a technology that someone is trying to deal with. Whether it’s the needs of a CRM (customer relations management) system, the feedback from a learning analytics project, a social media mental health campaign… whatever. While technology is often complicated to develop/configure and it often does not solve the problem it was acquired for, that’s only the start of it. These technologies are really proxies for human activity, wether they are connective tech or simply a way of story things people said or did, they are still ‘activities’ that we are doing with our students. They are ethical situations, they need to impact policy etc…

In the last few years, as I’ve started to work in student preparation, recruitment, engagement and retention, I’ve been seeing new challenges. How do we incorporate health and wellness into an online program? What are the ethical implications of opening up student’s work to the world? How much learning analytics is too much analytics? How do we encourage systemic change? How much change can we even encourage inside higher ed and still call it higher ed? How does it relate to the way that people work?

And so I got a call from George Siemens talking about the DLRN conference. And it seems that I’m not alone in wanting to ask and talk about these questions. I’m currently on a planning committee with some very interesting folks

Kate Bowles, University of Wollongong
Dave Cormier, University of Prince Edward Island
Matt Crosslin, University of Texas at Arlington
Justin T. Dellinger, University of Texas at Arlington
Kristen Eshleman, Davidson College
George Siemens, University of Texas at Arlington
Bonnie Stewart, University of Prince Edward Island
Candace Thille, Stanford University

Our conference is hoping to explore the most pressing uncertainties and most promising applications of digital networks for learning and the academy through five lenses for submissions: The Ethics of collaboration, Individualized learning, Systemic impacts, Innovation and work and Sociocultural Implications.

If you’re wondering about these things too… here’s the call for proposals