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Jaap Bosman

Independence as Essential for Lifelong Learning | Reflecting Allowed - 1 views

  • This might be the “role” of the teacher here – to make learners realize they are better off becoming more independent.
    • Terry Elliott
       
      I am thinking that this is the difference between inviting participation and permitting participation?
  • I don’t know how to foster this, or if it is possible.
    • Terry Elliott
       
      I bet you do know how to foster this. In social capital theory they describe two ways of connecting that we all use--bridging (across groups) and bonding (within groups). All of this is part of a larger tool-reciprocation.
    • Terry Elliott
       
      In fact annotating and sharing this is a way to reinforce both your independent stance and your interdependent connections. It is like Mrs. Malaprop discovered: she has been speaking dialogue here entire life. I think we all are doing this dance of independence and interdependence all the time.
  • my attempts to let them
    • Terry Elliott
       
      Invitation or permission?
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • (with my help at first,
    • Terry Elliott
       
      the idea of 'minimal necessary scaffolding' is so important here. Have you read Myles Horton's The Long Haul. He addresses this question over and over.
  • because nothing essentially assessable or measurable needs to result from their learning
  • Even worse control because it becomes internalized,
    • Terry Elliott
       
      None of the issues of pre-requisites and order of learning and institutional imperatives matters if we put the power in the heart of the learner. After that 'engine' is started all of the world becomes fuel whether it is credentialing, certification, accrediting--it doesn't matter. It is all grist for each unique learning soul to turn into her or his own bread.
  • “A” for “answering”
  • “A” for “answering”
  • these questions an “A” for “answering”
    • Terry Elliott
  • You could argue he system is flawed, its structures non-conducive to learning,
    • Jaap Bosman
       
      Education is expensive, online courses are cheaper. Online courses engage people from all ages, they foster life-long-learning. Online courses are a means to make schools change. If schools do not change they will suffer and go down.
  •  
    The system of education will change, teachers should be change agents.
Cris Crissman

Is books making us stupid? behind the curtain of #rhizo14 | Dave's Educational Blog - 0 views

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    Stephen Downes' comments in OLDaily, Feb. 7 Is books making us stupid? behind the curtain of #rhizo14 Dave Cormier, Dave's Educational Blog, February 6, 2014 This post actually provides a good overview of the first few weeks of the Rhizomatic Learning course, exploring as it does a set of "challenges" posed by Dave Cormier: Cheating as learning Enforcing independence Embracing uncertainty Is books making us stupid I can certainly be frustrated by some of this sort of discussion - when people express concerns, for example, about "enforcing independence" my reaction is that they just don't know what those words mean. And in another post I've raised some questions about some of the more nebulous aspects of this approach to learning. But I see value in these discussions. And questioning the authority of the book is certainly something I support.
Terry Elliott

lastrefuge: #rhizo14 - week 2: Seeding independent learning: wrestling with writing - 0 views

  • wrestling
    • Terry Elliott
       
      When I taught high school and middle school I was reminded of how I felt after wrestling practice when I was in high school myself. Totally drained in the body.
  • hat ‘fish out of water’ feeling that is the experience of so many non-traditional students in the traditional classroom.
    • Terry Elliott
       
      Also felt by teachers in those classrooms.
  • doing the MOOCs really reinforced the need to bring the human back into the physical classroom.
    • Terry Elliott
       
      I find that I drop out of MOOC s that do not have this humanity and do not have opportunities to bond.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • role plays and simulations in the trad ‘lecture’ time really helped this to happen.
    • Terry Elliott
       
      Inspiring me to sponsor some academic play at the beginning of every classroom. So....what does academic play look like?
    • Terry Elliott
       
      It looks like any other kind of play with flow and sharing and game boards and game pieces.
  • the classes definitely FEEL different
    • Terry Elliott
       
      I think that without this feel there probably has been no learning. I often ask my students what learning feels like. When this embodied cognition, this snick of the tumblers in a lock feeling, is absent I daresay the reading and writing and academic research have not been integrated, intertwined with not only your own rhizomes but with other rhizomes. I have a post about this struggle here: http://impedagogy.com/wp/blog/2014/01/25/i-know-not-wtf-some-shallow-arboreal-learnage/
  • using creative techniques: drawing, collage, poetry… to help us all to think differently
    • Terry Elliott
       
      Expanding the academic space. Yes. And expanding our idea of what constitutes play in that space. Inviting everyone in to play.
    • Terry Elliott
       
      blog, voice, transmedia, iteration, flow, joy, the feeling of climbing and the crossing the divide, failing and banishing fear from the space, playing the fool, online spaces--these are ways to play in an academic space.
  • It all feels too slow and painful. Anyway - once you have improved it a bit yourself - print all of that off - and bring it to the class on Wednesday. We can give you feedback and hopefully help you to the next step!
    • Terry Elliott
       
      My struggle here is an institutional and structural one. How can we play when no matter what it is still my enforced independence, my assignment , my classroom?
Cris Crissman

Painting Myself Out of the Picture | Virtually Foolproof - 2 views

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    Week Two's question of enforcing independence leads me to revisit an old post about semester-long collaborative projects for grad students.
Helen Crump

Rhizomatic learning: chaos, provocation and conflation #rhizo14 | Learningcreep - 2 views

  • being a lifelong learner is something you just have to take on personally;
    • Terry Elliott
       
      Part of me disagrees vwehemently with this and part not so much. The disagree part says that lifelong learner is baked into the DNA. You don't have to take in 'on' because it is already 'in'. Another part of me says that we can devise algorithms for pursuing our own curiosity, we can take that task on personally.
  • Chaos abounds
    • Helen Crump
       
      messified - now that's a good word.
    • Terry Elliott
       
      Messy is the space between order and chaos. It is the interval where stuff gets done, usually where friction and energy and all things physical happen.
  • independence isn’t the only stance to learning that they need – what about dependence and interdependence?
    • Terry Elliott
       
      enforced dependence, interdependence, and independence really puts the wind in my sails, but I am pretty sure I am not a good enough sailor to pull out all the sails. Add sail! That really shivers me timbers.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • “taking responsibility” doesn’t come naturally
    • Terry Elliott
       
      Perhaps it is repressed in traditional formal learning situations or it just doesn't make good, strategic sense to most learners where they are situated.
  • To permit “responsibility” and enable learners to assert their independence, it seems to me (and to a few others) that schools, or any formal learning context, would do well to not only encourage learners to pursue their passion, but to honour their unique experiences and to give them voice.
    • Terry Elliott
       
      I might also add that we invite as well. Permission may be necessary as a pump primer but invitation is the force that drives the water up and out. If you think of it in terms of artesian wells then you have to admit that for most of us you have to drill down for the water. The springs are fewer and may often only be a little weep of water that has to be dammed up a bit in order to drink from it.
  • “we conflate learning and schooling”
    • Terry Elliott
       
      And its specific corollary: we conflate learning with teaching.
  • it’s not about seeing learning more clearly
    • Terry Elliott
       
      I tried to talk about this when I referenced James Scott's binary of legible/illegible. Like the quants on Wall Street and in the Department of Education, clarification entails filtering out the fines of complexity. Sometimes this is good--penicillin, for example. But it can lead to unintended consequences--a wider resistance to all antibiotics. Seeing more clearly often has to come from sitting in the vortex and waiting. The water might clear of its own accord.
  •  
    "being a lifelong learner is something you just have to take on personally"
  •  
    "being a lifelong learner is something you just have to take on personally"
Cris Crissman

Experimental-Sites-Concept-Paper-FINAL.pdf - 1 views

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    Competency-Based Education appeals to me because it seems easier for the teacher to be the facilitator/guide if not also responsible for the assessing/grading. Can it lead to independent learning?
  •  
    It appeals to me too...I wonder why same person facilitating as assessing is rarely thought of as a conflict of interest. It's not impossible but can challenge impartiality
Terry Elliott

Independent Thinking in an Age of Conformity « Kevin's Meandering Mind - 0 views

  • . We’ve drummed out their curiosity for fear of failure, and we are all to blame.
    • Terry Elliott
       
      I think they are still curious, just not in the school context. I compare it to code switching only what happens is that our 'good' students get very strategic and realize that every minute of class is an extrinsic good. Why waste precious intrinsic, will power on the likes of that? Now, out of school, we get so many examples of the intrinsic game, that infinite play and flow we are seeking.
Jaap Bosman

Be More Saga | teachnorthern - 0 views

  • Diversity has become a buzz word, an oversimplified ideal.  We should instead embrace heterogeneity—the fact that people in the population at large, and within our own movements and communities, will invariably differ with regards to every possible trait. Heterogeneity is messy and complicated, but we must come to expect it.”
  • As educators, our job as I see it is to facilitate the self-responsible expression of those opinions and provide a safe space to allow them to change.
  •  
    about independence and self-responsibility.
Terry Elliott

Ego and The Swarm | teachnorthern - 1 views

  • I’m finding it impossible to escape the thread of ‘ego’ running through the last ten days.  
    • Terry Elliott
       
      I am having trouble, too. In fact I find myself moving from ego to eco, from tree to root, from node to network in a kind of leap of faith.
  • Independent learning is tough.  Independent thinking even tougher.
    • Terry Elliott
       
      I agree and I want to add that the task of interdependent learning and thinking is even harder. It is so hard for me that I am not sure I am even doing it. I trust that this share annotation is one simple way of doing interdependence. The hard part is figuring out what is happening in the mix that rises above the mix. What is the reintegration that happens as we bake our variety into the cake? What is the final baked product?
  • I’ve thought about Tragic Life Stories (actually the name of a department in WH Smith) and the way in which they dominate not only TV and popular news media, but stories about adult learning too.
    • Terry Elliott
       
      I file this under 'everybody's a critic'. Each of us has a set of personal and professional filters for the buzzing profusion of life that pushed into us every day. The tabloid filter is quite simple; it bleeds, it leads. There are lots of schema (some might call them assumptions or presumptions). Diversity is good--a presumption. Dependency is bad--a presumption. The problem with all of these presumptions is that they are habitualized into near-instinct quick filters. Hence, the birth and perpetuation of the blindspot. Dammit.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  •  I want a dialogue that begins, “I can’t do this thing you asked me to do, in this timeframe,” and continues with, “What are you assuming, that is stopping you meeting the deadline?” – designed to search only for a strategy to get past whatever barrier has set itself in the way.
    • Terry Elliott
       
      This is heavy pull here. The filter/value of keeping deadlines is self-referential. You make the filter because that cog is needed to fit into the larger machinery of the institution. You must have deadlines in order to have order within the term or semester. We wouldn't want to treat others unfairly, unequally (even more filters). Thus the system creates the circular logic that justifies the values of the system. The heavy pull is to dump the trash can that holds the whole mess together and say, "Well...it's a mess. Let's try something else." What you are asking for is the right to be messy. The system struggles against such illegibility. Mightily. So mightily that subversion (one of the tools of messification) is inevitable and iconoclasm becomes a way of life in that system. Or we become 'silent runners'. Does this analysis seem true to what you are saying? I ask in the spirit of interdependence.
  • Bernard Williams ‘fetish of assertion’
    • Terry Elliott
       
      "Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not so." - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
  • So, released from time to time from the imperative to obey my ego, I walk happily into the swarm.
    • Terry Elliott
       
      Fro ego to eco--how else can it be with 7 billion people on the planet. This is not just a stance, it is an imperative.
Vanessa Vaile

Ethics and soft boundaries between Facebook groups  and other web services | ... - 0 views

  • This is rhetoric, perhaps even rhizorhetoric, at it’s best
  • 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
  • tension between a reductionist understanding of power and a complexity understanding
  • ...33 more annotations...
  • Steven Luke’s short article about power
  • I find the fourth view, the one from Foucault, to be the most engaging, as it approaches a complex view of power
  • first three views of power assume a Classical, simple (not simplistic, but not complex, either) epistemology
  • “‘Power’ in its most generic sense simply means the capacity to bring about significant effects: to effect changes or prevent them.”
  • 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
  • too simple, too explicit and over
  • The Two-dimensional view adds agenda control by the more powerful agent, and finally, the Three-dimensional view adds social influence
  • it also encompasses being able to secure their dependence, deference, allegiance or compliance, even without needing to act and in the absence of conflict.
  • 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.
  • its affordances are outweighed by its limitations
  • This is where Foucault’s view of power comes into play, and note that it’s the only unnamed view
  • complexity is often nameless, even unnameable
  • power is the flow of energy, matter, information, and organization throughout a complex, multi-scale system
  • 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
  • we are not discrete entities, independent of an enclosing ecosystem
  • those flows all implicate power
  • 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.
  • what does this mean for how we should decide who is in Rhizo14 and how we should behave there?
  • the more open the use and sharing of information, the more important it is to clarify how we expect that information to be used
  • Clarity has great affordances, but it also has its blindness
  • This is a fine example of a clear, classical social contract. Independent agents agree on boundaries and behaviors between themselves
  • This assumes discrete agents with clear boundaries, a simple view of power and reality
  • A complex view of power and reality—my view—says, however, that Frances is already part of the Rhizo14 group and the document
  • Likewise, I suspect that Frances has herself been in/formed by the Rhizo14 discussion
  • circular causality, a core mechanism of complex systems with their complex flows of power
  • Power as flows of energy, information, and organization have already woven us together in ways that I do not know how to disentangle.
  • really only a very small part
  • request not to be part of the group leaves me with some sticky issues
  • most views of plagiarism are based on the simple view of relationships among agents and social contracts
  • ole authorship is a reductionist’s fiction, a useful fiction perhaps, but perhaps becoming less useful as online, open spaces emerge
  • How to behave in an open community, then, where flows of power are unavoidable and many are uncontrollable, even unknowable
  • 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
  • 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
Jaap Bosman

Self-assessment and self-remediation | Dave's Educational Blog - 0 views

  • Overcoming isolation
  • Active learning
  • Controlling learning behaviours
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Diagnosis and remediation
  • Student responsibility for learning
  • Teaching students how to make good questions for themselves, to ask them in ways that are going to lead to effective searching and learning,
  •  
    So i'm basically trying to give people something they can work with… a strategy rather than content… that can get them 'in the know' so that they can participate in the community effectively.
wayupnorth

we don't need no thought control: the deep grammar of schooling | the theoryblog - 0 views

  • a constant filtering that exhausts us
    • wayupnorth
       
      Exhausting to be sure My filtering dilemma: To get a broad perspective I have to read more than I can budget timewise, but if I filter by Rheingold, Cormier, Downes etc, I get only that perspective.
  • desire for trusted channels
    • wayupnorth
       
      It's not that difficult picking some channels (people?) and starting there. Those will connect to other channels one begins to trust. The rhizome grows and pretty soon one is back to overload.
  • those channels tend to be corporate or institutional hierarchies
    • wayupnorth
       
      Lucky me who discovered MOOCs before our institution caught on to providing channels
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • what would (or do) YOU do in a classroom full of people with devices
    • wayupnorth
       
      I teach a small adult literacy class and provide connected devices for each of them. I encourage them to use social media, help them to create Google and Facebook accounts if they don't have one. At least they are reading and writing authentically if not gramatically. Yes, it is a distraction, especially when I think we need some whole-class activity. I have not found THE ANSWER to balancing power and independence. But we have some wonderfully illuninating moments. See my blogpost about my own serendipitous encounter with Pink Floyd http://www.wayupnorth.ca/blog/2013/01/14/something-weird/
  • without new ways to conceptualize the work of learning, we end up replicating top-down power and knowledge structures
  • filtering and prioritizing
  • We are skilled
  • but our culture is not giving us the meta-literacies to recognize and value and utilize those skills
  •  
    Bonnie Stewart on new ways of thinking about education
Scott Johnson

A Guide to the Building Blocks of Online Learning for Faculty - 0 views

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    Deals with the reality of distributing quality education to most of the people in the world. "DRIVERS OF CHANGE IN THE WAY WE TEACH AND LEARN The increasing recognition the world over of the central role that post- secondary education plays in social and economic success has resulted in many drivers for change, including the following which have been identified by Bates: 1) An increasing demand for college and university places 2) Changing demographics (more older and part-time students) and more learner diversity (broader intellectual, language and cultural ranges) 3) Growing numbers of students at ease with new technologies and social media who are demanding the same sort of flexibility and access from post-secondary education that they already enjoy in their daily business and social interactions. 4) Pressures on institutions to be more open and accountable 5) Recognition of society's needs for skilled knowledge-based workers and the associated focus on learning outcomes indicating the extent to which graduates have such requisite skills as critical thinking, problem-solving, communication, independent learning, and the ability to work in a variety of contexts, to work in teams and to navigate cultural differences. 6) Research evidence of the effectiveness of more interactive approaches to learning that engage students more intensively 7) The continuing evolution of Web-based technologies which make knowledge much more accessible and bring learners together without the constraint of time or place..."
Terry Elliott

What's next for Webmaker tools | Webmaker - 0 views

  • This means giving each learner the ability to flourish independently
    • Terry Elliott
       
      Getting rid of popcornmaker does the opposite of this Orwellian proclamation.
Scott Johnson

Blurring the Boundaries? New social media, new social research: Developing a network to... - 1 views

  •  
    Woodfield, Kandy and Morrell, Gareth and Metzler, Katie and Blank, Grant and Salmons, Janet and Finnegan, Jerome and Lucraft, Mithu (2013) Blurring the Boundaries? New social media, new social research: Developing a network to explore the issues faced by researchers negotiating the new research landscape of online social media platforms. NCRM Working Paper. "On a practical level, some of our network members were struggling with the constant stream of social media data, finding it difficult to keep pace with their participants as they moved on in their conversations and discussions. Digital overwhelm might become counter-productive to reflective social science if researchers are not skilled at managing data flows. Similarly, gathering massive datasets requires a computing power outside of the grasp of many independent researchers or students. The increasing emphasis on 'big data' runs the risk of access to datasets being increasingly concentrated in the hands of a tiny minority of researchers and organisations. An alternative perspective sees this as an opportunity for researchers to come together in creative, cross-disciplinary collaborations, Either way, social researchers will need to find ways of convincing those who own social media sites about the merits of extending, or at least continuing, some freely accessible datasets. The politics of social media research will become an increasingly important agenda for social scientists to engage with. Despite the strengths that social media offer in terms of providing an accessible platform for some marginalised groups, other hard-to-reach populations like the elderly, the poor and those with limited literacy remain more difficult to reach online." Page 12
Vanessa Vaile

Communications & Society: Prepositions as the Rhizomatic Heart of Writing - 0 views

  • conversation between Bruno Latour and Michel Serres in Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time (1995), in which Serres talks about his "'philosophy of prepositions'-
  • linguistic keys to understanding human interactions."
  • independently code the entries in the auto-ethnography, and then compare our codings
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • I had an intuition that prepositions, and prepositional-like elements, might be the linguistic engines that power the rhizome in language.
  • rhizomes are first about connections
  • At its deepest level, the rhizome itself is all possible and potential connections
  • Language is one of the core tools we use to map our worlds and to create patterns
  • prepositions as stage directors
  • Simon Ensor sent me an article about ecological psychology on Wikipedia.
  • Terry Elliot wrote a post GOODBYE, CLASSROOM. HELLO, CONNECTION JUKEBOX. that claims we are all "a magnificent and unique filter for the world
  • 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?
  • Simon Ensor writes in his post Spacetimecontinuum
  • In more prosaic terms: how do prepositions drive the emergence of a sentence into meaning?
  • cognitive linguistics
  • George Lakoff
  • polysemy (many possible meanings for a given word)
  • They could mean multiple things at the same time. They violate Aristotle's principle of the excluded third.
  • This is very much like elementary particles
  •  
    "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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