define what counts as knowledge.
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Teaching in the Age of Uncertainty « Kevin's Meandering Mind - 2 views
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When Meta-MOOC Meets Wiki: Transforming Higher Education - #FutureEd - Blogs - The Chro... - 1 views
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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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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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Rhizomatic learning, knowledge and books | Jenny Connected - 0 views
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don’t throw out your books
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Perhaps it is not the books themselves but the power we grant them just because they are books. There are lots of reasons why we did this: they were the best technology available for carrying information, they are the tools of power for status quo and revolutionary alike, they have are now the traditional, default method. Yet we are at the beginning of an age which has other methods that are even more ubiquitous. The mobile device is becoming preeminent because it not only carries words but also images, moving and static, and sounds, ours and others. It is immediate and easily reproducible.
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Are we going to ignore or throw away our books and so throw away our history? Doesn’t our past inform our present and future?
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Iain MacGilchrist’s book – The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World.
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he traces how the left hemisphere has grabbed more than its fair share of power
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We need books, but we also need to engage with them critically. We need text, but we also need to be able to see its limitations. We need abstraction, but we also need embodied learning. We need to exercise both the left and right hemispheres of our brains.
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I say give books the comeuppance they deserve. Who is the boss of the mind? Mine is reactionary sloganeering here, so let me be less molotov. I, meaning my whole self, am the boss, the master. I am weary of being told and of accepting as writ (holy irony that) that the written word is supreme. I find myself revolting (please no Henny Youngman jokes) against words by my frail attempts to use tools that are decidedly not books--zeega, vine, photography, video, soundcloud, augmented reality--to wrestle control from literacy and return to orality.
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On your side Scott would agree that it is not books who are at fault. Please let us not shoot the messenger. It is our use of books and our abdication to their organization, to their legibility that is our downfall.
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Reader Response theory comes to mind here too. I see where this is both coming from and headed but my own attitude is, like anyone else's, still very much influenced by my personal reading history. I was an only child and, in a time when families moved much less than now, we moved often because of my father's work with a geophysical crew. I didn't spend entire school year in one place or even the same state until the 5th grade -- did not fall behind because my mother taught me to read early and my father made maths fun with cards, dice and dominoes. Add that all that up -- books spoke to me, were my family and friends. FYI Terry, my father was a storyteller and master punster
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The Essence of Peopling - 4 views
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“People”
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“peopling”
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The first part of this essay is an account of innermost peopling – the social, self-conscious nature of human cognition. The second part of this essay moves outward, connecting cognition to the rituals and social information flows that make up the most important parts of our environment.
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In Others in Mind: The Social Origins of Self-Consciousness (one of my favorite books of all time), Philippe Rochat presents a social model of human cognition,
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Rochat, in contrast, models human cognition as fundamentally social in nature. Each person learns to be aware of himself – is constrained toward self-consciousness – by other people being aware of him. He learns to manage his image in the minds of others, and finds himself reflected, as in a mirror, through the interface of language and non-verbal communication.
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infinite recursion
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We see ourselves through the constraining influences of other people, through the 'peopling' of others. Others people us. It is a limited recursion. I think this has significance in #rhizo15. How? We are all seeing ourselves through the eyes of others. How accurate is that subjective view? Sometimes it is off by degrees of magnitude. For example, I see some pretty effusive praise for stuff that by its nature is half-baked. Yes, some is very good for a first draft, but most goes little past the initial draft and into further revision. I expect further recursion, further refinement through reciprocal action, sometimes I get it, mostly I don't. Part of me take no offense while another part is deeply disturbed that the responses I get are so cursory. And the cursory nature of most responses, the desultory considerations of others we have come to respect become the default. And, worse, they become internalized as the default mutual mental modeling. Shallow of necessity, quick by force of circumstance, and a bare reciprocal exigency.
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How much of that is on other people? How much of it is on us? How inviting are we to gather up ideas, particularly those who challenge our thinking? That "infinite" word in there .. that's a lot of recursive thinking going back and forth, toppling on itself ...
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The self is not unitary and separate from others; peopling occurs in the context of mutual-mental-modeling relationships, which continue to affect each person when he is alone.
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Each person’s self is spread out among many people, simulated in all their brains at varying levels of granularity. And each person has a different “self” for each one of the people he knows, and a different self for every social context.
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Therefore, we have different subjective reflections from among different folk. Each reflection is a unique self simulated by another's mind. The same is true for social context. We have a Rhizo15 self created by our Rhizo15 folk. My question here is whether it is in any way an objective measure and does that matter? Should any of us care about the simulations of others? Should we rebel and subvert these simulacra because they are not 'us'? It is hard to argue for this position simply because this acceptance of the peopling of others seems quite natural. It is natural for us to consider this subjective and recursive view from others as the real deal. Or is it just the default view? Can we generate another way toward identity that is a balance between outer and inner subjectivity?
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The self at work is different from the self at home with close friends, or in bed with a spouse. And none of these are the “true self” – rather, the self exists in all these, and in the transitions between them. There can never be one single, public self; to collapse all these multiple selves together would be akin to social death.
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Mentally maintaining one’s identity in relation to others, including one’s accurate social status and relationships in each case, is the core task of being human.
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a huge portion of our internal cognitive machinery, of which we are not normally aware, is concerned with the ordinary function of maintaining one’s own identity and that of others
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Baumeister and Masicampo posit that interfacing between identities – both within a single mind, and between minds – is the purpose of conscious thought (Conscious Thought Is for Facilitating Social and Cultural Interactions: How Mental Simulations Serve the Animal–Culture Interface). And just as Rochat proposes that we are “constrained toward consciousness” by others, Kevin Simler says that we “infect” each other with personhood.
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Three views of this social model of cognition: 1. Baumeister and Masicampo: conscious thought is the transport mechanism for moving between inner identity and outer identity. 2.Rochat: we become conscious because of others, 'constrained by folk' in order to be. 3. Simler: we infect each other with consciousness through the interaction of identity.
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There is a profound irreconcilability or dissonance between first-and third-person perspectives on the self once objectified and valued. This dissonance shapes behaviors in crucial ways, as individuals try to reconcile their own and others’ putative representations about them. These two representational systems are always at some odds or in conflict, always in need of readjustment. It is so because these systems are open, and they do not share the same informational resources: direct, permanent, and embodied for the first-person perspective on the self; indirect, more fleeting, and disembodied for the third-person perspective on the self. A main property of this dissonance is that it tends to feed into itself and can reach overwhelming proportions in the life of individuals. More often than not, this dissonance is a major struggle, expressed in the nuisance of self-conscious behaviors that hinder creativity and the smooth “flow” of interpersonal exchanges. Others in Mind, p. 41
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People are able to accomplish this feat of mutual simulation by use of two tools: language and ritual. Ritual allows for the communication of information that language can’t convey – hard-to-fake costly signals of commitment, dependability, harmoniousness, and cooperative intent.
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If humans are somehow calibrated to expect a constant flow of social information, then the sparseness of ritual and social participation in modern environments might trigger a cascade of rumination.
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A very simple example is greetings. “Greeting everyone you see” is a candidate for a ritual universal, a part of the ritual atmosphere that displays good fit with peopling
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(with some caveats).
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Ritual 2:"Serene Social Sloth Sunday, a made-up internet holiday in which we avoid posting "outrage porn"
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Ritual 4: Share natural spaces through YouTube, make part of any group meeting e.g. Hangout.
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Ritual 5: "With joy and zest, publicly celebrate milestones and recurring events. Affirming shared history, we nourish community, crystallize a sense of accomplishment, and build group identity by unifying our stories and common goals. Can be planned and ritualized, or as spontaneous as a group cheer." Celebrate | Group Works. (n.d.). Retrieved April 19, 2015, from http://groupworksdeck.org/patterns/Celebrate
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Ritual 6: Feedforward with the imagination. In other words project your self into the future and 'recall' all that 'happened' from the beginning of #rhizo15. In a way I think this defines what rhizomatic learning is. Each of us creates identity for the group by being who we are with the voices we have. Why not imagine that forth along with others instead of relying solely upon the weekly proddings of one person identified as 'teacher/leader'. Feedforwardings would allow us to compare rhizomatic identities. and from there decide where we might go as a group as well as individually.
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Information about the self from the first-person perspective tends to be inflated and self-aggrandizing; information about the self from the third-person perspective, projected into the minds of others, tends to be deflated and self-deprecatory.
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A freeway is useful for getting from place to place, but it’s not a place to merely exist in the moment.
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“we’re here to fart around together.”
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In conclusion, drink tea, together with your friends; pay attention to the tea, and to your friends, and pay attention to your friends paying attention to the tea. Therein lies the meaning of life.
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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.