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Downes's comments in OLDaily, Feb 7: The medium is the message? Jaap Bosman, Hit the balloon, comment, February 6, 2014 Icon "Language needs a medium," said Jaap Bosman. By contrast, to me, language is a medium. "Learning depends on language, the medium (books, blogs) of the language restricts or benefits the learning," he writes. To me, language is only one of the many media we could use to support learning. Becominbg literate in the 21st century means recognizing that literacy applies far beyond language; it's a way of understanding the world.

Michael Wesch's NetVibes aggregation page: links, feeds, Padlet message wall, resources, etc for digital ethnography/webculture courses, Kansas State University. Wesch's network - aggregation page, personal and course blogs, YouTube channel, etc is (in my opinion) a rhizome ~ with the caveat that my own understanding of the term is continually shifting

46:48 "It's funny: in our courses we say "There is no content." The content is the message that one person says to another. And that's not the important thing. The important thing is the totality of all the messages whether it's the official content or not. The content, we call it the McGuffin. And it's the thing that brings the people together, because they're interested in that subject. You know, they gather around you know like people stare at an accident where the accident is a thing not everybody wants to go to but it attracts. 47:35 The McGuffin is a concept that comes from Alfred Hitchcock. It's the thing in a movie that all the plot evolves around. And it can be anything at all. In the Maltese Falcon, the Mcguffin is the falcon, the statue of the falcon. In The Birds, it's birds. In The Treasure of the Sierra Madre it's the treasure. There's always a map with an X on it and, it's funny, it does not matter what it is because what's interesting about the movie isn't what everybody's chasing after. It's what they do during the chase. It's how they interact with each other, it's what we learn about their characters, about what motivates them. 48:22 So, the content of a course is just a plot device to get people together, to communicate, to interact, to take part in this common exercise. And in this common exercise our connection between each other and our connections inside ourselves will be exercised, will be increased, augmented, developed -- and we learn. "