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This wonderful, highly readable book breaks new ground in revealing commonalities between Gilles Deleuze's nomadic method of inquiry and the pragmatic method of John Dewey. It should be of great interest to both philosophers and educators. Nel Noddings, Stanford University, author of Happiness And Education. . . few have placed the thinking of Dewey into effective dialogue with other forms of philosophy. This is particularly the case regarding contemporary European philosophy. Inna Semetsky's exciting new book bridges this gap for the first time by putting the brilliant poststructuralist work of Gilles Deleuze into critical and creative dialogue with that of Dewey. . The publication of this work announces the appearance of a remarkable line of thinking that scholars around the world will soon come to appreciate.

This thesis explores the process of learning theoretically through a rhizomatic process applied to collaborative learning. A rhizome constantly changes, is flexible and spontaneous. The destination of the path is the process of networking. The Rhizomatic Theory provides a model to develop a learning space that constructs a collaborative knowledge-based community. Therefore the qualities of the Rhizomatic spaces become the root force supporting the collaborative prototypical learning spaces that offer direction towards creating a networked globalized student ecology.

In the pre-in­dus­trial age, no­mads were peo­ple that moved with their liveli­hood (usu­ally an­i­mal herd­ing) in­stead of set­tling at a sin­gle lo­ca­tion. In­dus­tri­al­iza­tion forced the set­tle­ment of many no­madic peo­ples… …but, some­thing new is emerg­ing in the 21st cen­tury: Know­mads. A know­mad is what I term a no­madic knowl­edge worker -that is, a cre­ative, imag­i­na­tive, and in­no­v­a­tive per­son who can work with al­most any­body, any­time, and any­where. In­dus­trial so­ci­ety is giv­ing way to knowl­edge and in­no­va­tion work.

The rhizome metaphor, which represents a critical leap in coping with the loss of a canon against which to compare, judge, and value knowledge, may be particularly apt as a model for disciplines on the bleeding edge where the canon is fluid and knowledge is a moving target.

"I received a crash course in postmodern thought during my first semester at Swarthmore College. In a lesson that was to be repeated throughout my undergraduate education, the professor opened the class by admonishing us to reject binary thinking. As the class was staring at her dumbfounded, she divided the chalkboard in two with a thick vertical line and asked us to name the dualisms that structure our world. After she provided a few examples to get us started - male/female, white/black - we jumped into the game, calling out binaries one after another: rich/poor, smart/stupid, human/animal, cool/lame, skinny/fat … The game went on until the board was full and the air saturated with chalk dust. Pausing a moment, our comparative literature professor asked us if we noticed anything odd about the list we had constructed. "

Although the loss of certainty in the age of postmodernism is questioning knowledge production in general, the emerging discourse of lifelong learning demands a different theory of adult learning in particular. This article aims to offer a conceptual tool for describing learning in adulthood in terms of postmodern and lifelong learning conditions. It approaches the problem from the images of learning and learner that adult education scholarship has produced and identifies that adult learning theory attempts to signify foundational certainty by using binary-trapped adjectives. The author argues that insofar as we continue with the adjective-plus-learning theory, we cannot escape binary thought. The author proposes a new concept, rhizoactivity, to navigate multiplicity of learning in a postmodern world. Anticipated benefits of employing rhizoactivity in understanding learning are discussed in terms of postmodern and lifelong learning conditions.