conversation between Bruno Latour and Michel Serres in Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time (1995), in which Serres talks about his "'philosophy of prepositions'-
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shared by Vanessa Vaile on 05 Sep 14
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Communications & Society: Prepositions as the Rhizomatic Heart of Writing - 0 views
idst-2215.blogspot.com/...ns-as-rhizomatic-heart-of.html
communications rhizo14 rhizomatic learning blog-post prepositions syntax language use autoethnography
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I had an intuition that prepositions, and prepositional-like elements, might be the linguistic engines that power the rhizome in language.
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Terry Elliot wrote a post GOODBYE, CLASSROOM. HELLO, CONNECTION JUKEBOX. that claims we are all "a magnificent and unique filter for the world
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Then, two people mentioned their attention shifting from nouns to verbs, Frances Bell in a comment on Maha Bali's wonderful post Network vs community – cc #rhizo14 autoethnog and Aaron Davis's post PLN, a Verb or a Noun?
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They could mean multiple things at the same time. They violate Aristotle's principle of the excluded third.
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"I never expected to be writing about prepositions, but it's the approach I've decided to take with the Rhizo14 auto-ethnography, so I want to sketch what I think I'm doing and why and how I'm doing it. This is a preliminary sketch, so expect abrupt turns of the page and new, emergent directions. In rhizomatic terms, expect lots of deterritorializations and reterritorializations. If you've ever heard the ruffle and rush of a covey of quail scattering in the cold, steel-blue dawn, then you're ready. I became interested in the rhizomatic potential of prepositions after reading the conversation between Bruno Latour and Michel Serres in Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time (1995), in which Serres talks about his "'philosophy of prepositions'--an argument for considering prepositions, rather than the conventionally emphasized verbs and substantives, as the linguistic keys to understanding human interactions." "
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Five myths about Moocs | Opinion | Times Higher Education - 0 views
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I'll preface with Stephen Downes's commentary in Feb 14 OLDaily. His question about what kind of undergraduate degree is needed for today and the future and how we might best prepare students has #rhizo14 all over it ;-) This came out about a month ago but according to my logs I haven't mentioned here yet, so here goes. First, let me quote Laurillard's five myths: the idea that 'content is free' in education that students can support each other that Moocs solve the problem of expensive undergraduate education that MOOCs address educational scarcity in emerging economies that Education is a mass customer industry The essence of her criticism is that "a course format that copes with large numbers by relying on peer support and assessment is not an undergraduate education... it requires personalised guidance, which is simply not scalable in the same way." I think we both agree that MOOCs - even cMOOCs - are not an undergraduate education. The question, though, is broader. Is an undergraduate education what we need in order to meet the social and economic challenges of the day? If we started our students off differently, could they succeed in a technology-rich environment wihtout the need for so much personal attention and hand-holding? A lot rides on the answer to this question. And the MOOC - even the xMOOC - is an attempt to look at some possible answers.
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shared by Vanessa Vaile on 30 Aug 14
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The literature on CAE (Collaborative Autoethnography) Reflecting Allowed | Reflecting A... - 0 views
blog.mahabali.me/...-collaborative-autoethnography
collaborative autoethnography ethnography rhizo14 rhizomatic learning blog-post
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Disclaimer: I’m not a methodological purist, I’m an omnivore & a quilt-maker. I don’t even think ethnography believes in methodological purity; the researcher is the instrument even more so if it’s auto
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I’m interested in what didn’t work. But I am also interested in what did work, and for whom.
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this knowledge to help influence future designers of connected courses by highlighting the participant experience
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Geist-Martin et al cite Ellis (2004, p. 30) on autoethnography, and it captures how I feel about this approach
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“The goal is to practice an artful, poetic, and empathic social science in which readers can keep in their minds and feel in their bodies the complexities of concrete moments of lived experience”
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OR a type that focuses on the ethnography part (more analytical, relating one’s own experiences to the wider culture)
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I *think* in #rhizo14 we’re attempting something closer to the latter, but what we have at the moment is closer to the former.
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Autoethnography needs to “use personal stories as windows to the world, through which we interpret how their selves are connected to their sociocultural contexts and how the contexts give meanings to their experiences and perspectives” (Chang et al, p. 18-19).
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Geist-Martin et al’s & Chang et al’s critiques of their own process – here are some parts I wanted to highlight:
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They mention how social activities they participated in, in each other’s lives, influenced how they wrote together
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They talk about community-building that occurs because of the collaboration on the autoethnography itself
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They raise ethical issues about how personal narratives actually refer to people outside the narrative itself and the ethics of such story-telling that will get published and scrutinized
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Clearly, doing autoethnography collaboratively is meant to diversify the viewpoints on a topic, making the interpretation richer and more complex than just one person’s autoethnography. It also, of course, makes it more complicated to do. Easier to start than to finish
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the more “critically dialogic” work is, the more it tends towards an analytic/ethnographic rather than evocative/biographical type of research
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it makes sense to do evocative research on emotionally sensitive topics, where over-analyzing it might actually lose the essence of what is being researched
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for tales of abuse, illness, etc., but not for #rhizo14 which is less of an emotionally taxing thing to talk about
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Chang et al call it an “iterative process”), there’s data collection at the beginning (which can keep happening as gaps are found via group negotiation); there’s data analysis and interpretation (where we seem to be at – and I think that might raise areas of gaps to go find data about or to re-write our narratives about – will explain later); and of course writing.
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what matters is that I can basically do whatever I want, call it CAE, and set my own criteria for rigor I’m only half-kidding.
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CAE as an emerging research practice should not be limited to a particular approach or style of representation
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“CAE offers us a scholarly space to hold up mirrors to each other in communal self-interrogation and to explore our subjectivity in the company of one another”
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“This kind of collaborative meaning-making requires that each team members be willing to be vulnerable and open with co-researchers in order to enable the deeper analysis and interrogation that enriches the final product”
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Ethics & confidentiality (this prob deserves a post on its own, but I’ll just give it a section here for now)
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Authors ask if CAE needs to go through IRB? Ours went through IRB. Not sure if they really understood the extent of what we were doing, but they approved it.
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The biggest ethical issue I see is that when only indirectly reference others, we may be broaching on their confidentiality
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We also need to be clear on who gets access to the data after we write our “report”, and how they can use it
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We as individual autoethnographers also need to recognize the need to protect ourselves – how much are we revealing about ourselves and is it OK that all of that becomes open to public scrutiny as we publish it?
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The incident over the use of our data during #et4online by Jen Ross and Amy Collier was a case in point – it is not that simple.
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I’ll just come back to one MAIN point that’s running through my mind (well, points, plural, but they are all related):
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How do we incorporate the views of people who wrote narratives in the autoethnog but who are not part of the team currently analyzing the data?
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CAE implies that only the authors’ stories are told. Now the authors could react to stuff that happened by and with other people, but there are ethical issues in getting to deep with that
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Can we use some of the other data in the narratives DIFFERENTLY? So not as autoethnog, but as narratives
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The inherent “connectdness” of it all makes it almost paralyzing to imagine how we can tell our own stories (6-7 of us) without either implicating others, or needing to reference others
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I usually do ethnography by using any and all data I can; this would mean referencing public blogs, etc.
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I keep circling back to the same thing, right? There power questions, there are questions of who can tell whose story? There are multiple “others” in the “we” of autoethnography, and what do we do by telling our story and leaving out theirs?
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What about the people who didn’t even blog visibly or at all, and so have no easy “trace” to find even if we wanted to incorporate their views?
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Rhizomatic Education : Community as Curriculum | Dave's Educational Blog - 7 views
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Knowledge as negotiation
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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.
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clear definition of the word "knowledge" is difficult
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The definition of knowledge is considered 'key' to the search for shared understanding. The more I read that sentence, the more it becomes the worm Ourboros. If it's a key, then the there is a locked something behind it. In litcrit this has been a fiercely fought battle. Some say it unlocks the power relationships undergirding any society, some say it unlocks the mysteries in the knowers themselves. Some say, fuck it and let's just look at the shiny things inside the vault with no further intent. Yes, it is difficult.
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simply another part of the way things are"
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I believe that one of the functions of theory is to reveal our cognitive blindspots. This they very much do while at the same time creating new blindspots that arise from the use of the 'tools' of the new theory. Any new system of knowledge exposes the assumptions of the the old system. For example, awareness meditation reveals the blindspot of categorization and differentiation, but the Buddha realized that say focusing on the breath is like pointing at the moon, just another step along the path toward no-mind. Mind and knowing is the problem.
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Horton and Freire
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The expert translation of data into verified knowledge is the central process guiding traditional curriculum development.
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I am quite taken by the word 'translation' here. I think the metaphor of translation is central to rhizomatic learning as we are always connecting and sharing information that then gets translated into knowledge (actionable knowing).
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Experts are not to be trusted anymore, they work for big companies, their translation is skewed.
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no community can live a healthy life if it is nourished only on such old marrowless truths.
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a negotiation (Farrell 2001)
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social contructivist and connectivist
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(Cormier 2008).
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Great question by Alec Couros in the comments: how do we get to a place where we are really and truly decentralized, and will this make the difference?
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I don't think the decentralized rhizome has reached a tipping point society wide, but perhaps we can play at the rhizomatic game for this short few weeks and see what it might mean to live in this world that may or may not be emerging.
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Information is the foundation of knowledge.
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If a given bit of information is recognized as useful to the community or proves itself able to do something, it can be counted as knowledge.
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the prestige of a thousand-year history,
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all over this history the prestige has been attacked. Prestige and knowledge are to be separated, so many experts were proven false and wrong.
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It's a loaded term, for sure, because those who call themselves experts are often the ones in power, and with books and writers to back them up. Is the Internet changing this paradigm? Not yet. Not yet.
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fluid, transitory conception of knowledge
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rhizome.
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The explosion of freely available sources of information has helped drive rapid expansion in the accessibility of the canon and in the range of knowledge available to learners.
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In the rhizomatic model of learning, curriculum is not driven by predefined inputs from experts; it is constructed and negotiated in real time by the contributions of those engaged in the learning process.
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The living curriculum of an active community is a map
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The cartography of learning. I am always intrigued by how this plays out, if done successfully. Most of the curriculum mapping I have done ... I would not call them maps. They are just plot lines going nowhere, it often seems. But the idea of a map continues to intrigue me.
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I know D&G speak of a map as opposed to a tracing. I struggle with understanding this. The best I can come up with is the idea that a map gives possibilities for exploration, as opposed to a photo which declares what exists. This leaves me wondering about sites like Lino and Pinterest. Might they function as a map of one's exploration too, rather than just a collection of discoveries.
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Knowledge seekers in cutting-edge fields are increasingly finding that ongoing appraisal of new developments is most effectively achieved through the participatory and negotiated experience of rhizomatic community engagement. Through involvement in multiple communities where new information is being assimilated and tested, educators can begin to apprehend the moving target that is knowledge in the modern learning environment.
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we see as our goal the co-construction of those secret connections as a collaborative effort
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the conversion of information to knowledge
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members of several communities—acting as core members in some, carrying more weight and engaging more extensively in the discussion, while offering more casual contributions in others
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students had the opportunity to enter the community themselves and impact the shape of its curriculum
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Sharing power - deconstructing the tradtional power structures of the educational system. Did this recursion result in "watering down" the curriculum? From what I recall of Dave's story, the students put in extra effort instead. Like me, they had difficulty in knowing when to quit, the exploration was so rewarding.
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if knowledge is to be negotiated socially
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Stephen Downes (http://www.downes.ca/post/61209 and elsewhere) argues against socially "constructed" knowledge, saying instead that knowledge is recognized. Cormier's "negotiated socially" fits nicely.
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the expert is the power. No resistance is tolerated, because who knows better than the expert? But curriculum is not only made by experts, pressure groups do influence curriculum, hypes and politics do either. Here is the reason for cheating.
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Recommended by Telli01 in Vialogues conversation https://vialogues.com/vialogues/play/13001 as good intro to Dave's work on rhizomatic ed
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Hacking Four Corners « Kevin's Meandering Mind - 0 views
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our morning meeting
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Responsive Classroom
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some of the activities start getting a little old, so I encourage my students to mess around with the rules once we’ve learned them and hack the activities as they see fit
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This fits in beautifully with the discussion of cheating this week in #rhizo14. Fake/make/hack/unmake--seems like the normal pattern of mastery. Once you have mastered the rules it seems as if one of the unwritten rules is to break them in order to see if they are still worth following. Cheating is stress testing the system. Seems almost biological.
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Always try to touch and watch what happens, all children do it, could be biology indeed. Trying to see what would happen if we do this?
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new terrain
Freire, MOOCs and Pedagogy of the Oppressed | Jenny Connected - 1 views
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The Alphabet Vs The Goddess | by Leonard Shlain - 1 views
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Literacy rewired our brains; will digital literacy free us again? Shlain describes the shift from orality to print as one that upset the balance between men and women resulting in lower political status/power for women and ultimately, patriarchy and misogyny. Fascinating book!
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Gutenberg pause as power grab? In retrospect, you could filter it that way. Hard to imagine (for me anyway) a cabal of men sitting together and saying to themselves, "Now we need to shift to print as way to keep the women down." I can see it as an emergent effect from some other more potent and probably simpler need. Although power is a pretty simple need. Literacy as guild of men only? A boy's treehouse with no girls allowed? Hmmm.
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Neil Postman - Bullshit and the Art of Crap-Detection | Critical Thinking Snippets - 5 views
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by people who use fancy titles, words, phrases, and sentences to obscure their own insufficiencies.
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But with the development of the mass media, inanity has suddenly emerged as a major form of language in public matters.
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"Postman's Third Law: "At any given time, the chief source of bullshit with which you have to contend is yourself." Postman's Fourth Law: "Almost nothing is about what you think it is about-including you."
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Premise: books is making us stupid #Rhizo14 Jim's reply: not if we employ good crap detectors and keep other conversations going
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Qualify: books without talking about them, having conversations. Then there are certain categories of academic writing...
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I am somebody who like to go back to sources. Here is the original speech in case some of you may find it useful" http://aquadoc.typepad.com/files/bs_speech_postman-1.pdf
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much thanks for the full article -- I like Postman and to go back to sources too
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rhizomatic learning | Viplav Baxi's Meanderings - 1 views
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Uncertainty exists in all forms of education and learning. It is not mostly celebrated. In fact, it is suppressed.
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It is even systematically constrained in other (non-traditional) environments, even informal ones at most times.
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Not all certainties may be “good” or “appropriate”.
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democratizing uncertainty
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We shall also need to “prove” in many ways, that more “good” uncertainty in the system will impact social outcomes positively.
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Seems like predictability is worming its way into your discussion of uncertainty. Uncertainty is largely complex and unmanageable. Should we be focusing more on the processes and products that emerge from uncertainty? I don't think we can do a whole lot more than that, but I am certainly open to being informed more on this.
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~ Stephen's Web - 0 views
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For #rhizo14 "This future wasn't created by the Bill Gates of the world. It was created by the Pete Seegers" via @oldaily
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I understand Downes' rhetorical purpose here, but I think that all of us are midwives to the emerging future otherwise we get trapped in paradigms like "the great man" theory of history. And I mean that literally--the paternal bias and the bias toward what are conceived of as "large" acts.
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Ethics and soft boundaries between Facebook groups and other web services | ... - 0 views
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I want to frame my comments in the distinction between reductionist thought and complexity thought, a habit of mind I attribute to Edgar Morin’s book On Complexity
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I find the fourth view, the one from Foucault, to be the most engaging, as it approaches a complex view of power
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first three views of power assume a Classical, simple (not simplistic, but not complex, either) epistemology
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“‘Power’ in its most generic sense simply means the capacity to bring about significant effects: to effect changes or prevent them.”
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The One-dimensional View posits two agents disjoined from one another, and power occurs when one agent prevails in some way over the other agent
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The Two-dimensional view adds agenda control by the more powerful agent, and finally, the Three-dimensional view adds social influence
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it also encompasses being able to secure their dependence, deference, allegiance or compliance, even without needing to act and in the absence of conflict.
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the successive views move in the direction of complexity, but they are always limited by a Classical epistemology that posits disjoined, discrete agents interacting in deterministic ways across or through clear boundaries, either in accordance with or in violation of some social contract or rules.
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an agent is formed and informed by the flows of energy, information, and organizational structures of the systems within which the agent lives and functions
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power is the flow of energy, matter, information, and organization throughout a complex, multi-scale system
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Power is the weave of the fabric we are all woven into, and it is difficult, often impossible, to isolate any single thread of power and to trace it back to a single cause.
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the more open the use and sharing of information, the more important it is to clarify how we expect that information to be used
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This is a fine example of a clear, classical social contract. Independent agents agree on boundaries and behaviors between themselves
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A complex view of power and reality—my view—says, however, that Frances is already part of the Rhizo14 group and the document
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Power as flows of energy, information, and organization have already woven us together in ways that I do not know how to disentangle.
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most views of plagiarism are based on the simple view of relationships among agents and social contracts
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ole authorship is a reductionist’s fiction, a useful fiction perhaps, but perhaps becoming less useful as online, open spaces emerge
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How to behave in an open community, then, where flows of power are unavoidable and many are uncontrollable, even unknowable
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if we don’t confront this problem, then we will continue to apply the old social contracts. I don’t think those social contracts alone can address the issue
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interested in learning how this group will write this document. Like all good ethnographers, I think I can learn most by living and functioning within the group, by helping to write it. I want to define the process from the inside
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Wanna do a cMOOC? | doublemirror - 5 views
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Matthias Melcher – he made it so easy to follow everyone’s blogs
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power is not due to the technology or its design, but to the actual people involved
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So, when I did DS106 as a course for the first time in 2013, life was already set up in such a way that I could give it my full attention.
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So, what was Rhizo14 setting out to create? A one of what? Stephen uses his own courses as an example
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I have a great deal of respect for Stephen, and enjoyed his talk at Vlaencia (referenced in this blog) immensely. It seemed to me though, that he was explaining a landscape rather than prescribing a recipe for a MOOC. Might it be better to examine Rhizo14 in light of what Dave Cormier says about it, rather than force it to be scrutinized through the lens of questions raised by Steven Downes' lecture? Dave Cormier at MIT "MOOCs as a selfish enterprise" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Smt8lsPU_Mo If any "making one" objective(s) existed in Rhizo14, it(they) would be very subjective. Dave says he threw a party to see if anyone would come. I certainly participated as part of my process of "becoming", but without conciously adding "...one of X". I just know by experience that by "hanging out" with groups like this, I am able to do interesting things in teaching that I had not deliberately set out to learn (and I borrow that articulation from Dave Cormier), so from time to time I keep engaging with communities and courses that interest me. Some others have expressed or evidenced more clearly defined objectives - academic research, webtool development, and building a PLN are some examples.
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I agree with you that Dave is defferent from S.D. and rhizo should be described with Dave's terms
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If my need for inclusion had been high, then I think I would have felt excluded from what some called Rhizo14FB.
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They did what humans do so well in new situations: gather in their tribes and by definition exclude those not in their tribe, or try to ‘convince’ those outside ‘it’ to join it;
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The design of Rhizo14, I have to assume, is the current state of what Dave as an educational technologist believes works for massive open online courses.
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diversity was managed out through a group dynamic that excluded what the majority did not approve
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I did not see much by way of supporting the importance of diversity in action rather than theory.
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gossiping about other participants
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but Rhizo14 as an experiment on the future of higher education as a whole is not what the originators intend
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This critique of Rhizo14 accuses it of not producing what it was not intended to produce. Seems a bit like criticizing an alligator because, while it has great hide, it makes an unsatisfactory mount since it was never intended to be a horse. I understand the author's dissatisfaction with the course. Rhizo14 neither met expectations nor satisfied any personal objectives. A dissenting opinion eloquently expressed is very valuable. The underlying tone of the post, however, carries a distinctly subjective disapproval or dismissal of anyone who has received satisfaction in their own experience in Rhizo14. The author speaks repeatedly of observing attempts to silence or marginalize those who did not buy into the opinions of the majority. Yet the author engages in a similar tactic against possible critics.
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I hope that after my comment on my blog this feeling has eased in you. I absolutely did not intend to disapprove or dismiss any individual. I disagree with some of the choices made in design and educator intervention precisely because I feel they closed down the possibility of having a space where multiple perspective could be held openly without the need for filtering through an agree/disagree frame. This led to people who we could all have learnt from leaving and I was sad about this. Also - just for clarity I was not at all dissatisfied with the course. It was set up as an experiment and I love experiments. I was dissatisfied with our human inability create more silence and space for listening and the compulsive drive to talk. Nick put it beautifully in his blog: "that kind of dialogue. It is a way of being that one has to learn, but seems to me to be integral to what we might call "deep" learnign. The word retreat is interesting, one of the first pre-requisites of that dialogue is to shut up and listen. Online you are largely characterised by the noise you make, the text you generate. Silence online transmutes to a lack of presence, and described as "lurking". Lurk has too many negative associations to be reframed. But we do have the right to remain silent! Another issue, as you observe, is that dialogue is not transactional, but online interaction does very often seem to devolve to that kind of behaviour…" http://avisodemiranda.wordpress.com/2014/02/14/marram-grass/ I chose to create the space I needed for learning and this may be meant I chose 'no intervention' when intervention may have benefitted us all. I need to take time to reflect on this. I will leave it here for now, let's see if this is a space for us to engage before I spend any more time here :)
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Mariana speaks so well but why it is so challenging to hear, I am wondering after reading these notes
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I recognise this clearly from my
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You were definitely the right kind of ‘one’ if you believed in emergence, non-linearity, poetry and art rather than theory and explanation.
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to connect with ‘old MOOC friends’ no mention of rhizomes of the metaphorical or garden variety.
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It's amazing what happens over coffee: or deterritoralising the curriculum (a #rhizo15 ... - 7 views
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coffee
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my first full academic year in the job
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I am curious if this newness is freeing or is it constricting? Can you try new things or are you expected to toe the line? I suppose it depends on the "boss man" in charge.
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Well, a mixture really. It is 'my' course but that doesn't mean it is always viewed that way by those upstairs - this is a very small unit and can be claustrophobic at times. Dealing with a bit of a culture of talking the talk but not necessarily walking the walk. If you get what I mean. It depends how assertive I wish to be.
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My recent engagement with digital scholarship and #connectedlearning has propelled me to consider other options, and to think about how I might hack my own course, hybridise it.
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sets of resources organised around difficult ideas
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I like this phrasing and the idea here ... of shifting the learning, as long as you don't focus on the tool/technology but on the learnings elements. Sometimes, the tech drives the learning, not the other way around. We want our students to have agency of exploration in their learning.
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This year we used the closed box of the institutional VLE to do some of this work but I want to push this further by using more open platforms and ask participants to find their own materials. The assessment will have to be tweaked to facilitate this.
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have shorter workshops that model many of the ideas we promote
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This might up the engagement factor. I think a few folks from Connected Courses are tinkering with collective design of curriculum, right? Of allowing students to have a say in the learning. This is what Dave is doing with us. I think.
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The 'time' allocated to 'teaching' sessions is driven by the Bologna process (Tuning in N.America) and 'European Credit and Accumulation Transfer System' which usually gets reduced to 'time on task' rather than learning. We can play with this though
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Emergent objectives could become points for reflecting on what the course should be dealing with, what the difficult ideas and issues are, and therefore the content required.
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I am after all a final arbiter, the one who, institutionally, is responsible for assessment
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Also, could we introduce aspects of peer review?
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@davecormier