Is democratizing uncertainty like trying to formalize the informal?

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.

Perhaps your last paragraph addresses obliquely what I asked above.

As a practicing teacher working under the constraints and affordances that make modern pedagogy such an act of hypocrisy, I find that these generic observations are 'unhandy'. In fact, I get visceral with them. I get pissed off and feel a certain amount of 'how dare you'.

This is what I asked about last week, too. What makes learning different from rhizomatic or deep or knowmadic learning. I think the modifiers (deep, rhizomatic, knowmadic) have a purpose. They allow us to filter learning differently very like having a variety of critical stances. It is, however, like the story of the blind men and the elephant. Which description is correct? All of them--in part.

I tried to address this in my blog post this week: http://impedagogy.com/wp/blog/2014/02/01/hodie-quid-egisti-what-have-ye-done-a-rhizomagic-week-of-blooming-buzzing-confusion/ I don't think I used the word 'uncertainty' once in that post, but the tone is, I think, one of taking that leap.

It is unnatural to leap into the total darkness of the unknown. In fact I think that by definition it is impossible. Instead I think we leap into the partly known. My analogy is the Kentucky pioneer Daniel Boone. Some might say that he worked his way into virgin, unknown territory. I would say yes and no. He did blaze trails into places no Euro-American had ever been, but the territory itelf shared lots of known traits with where he had already been. For example, water flows downhill to larger streams. The sun rises in the east. And the thousand other 'knowns' that come from a lifetime of living close to ground. And, of course, he really did blaze the trails he made by walking. He emblazened trees with marks for others to follow. Now that must've been an ego trip and a half! The other half of the analogy is that we too have general knowledge that we take with us into the knowmadic life and the rhizomatic wilderness of learning. We have theoretical knowledge. I would include the whole baggage of ed school in that. But we have to dump most of that when we move into the partly known territory of deep, rhizomatic knowmadicism. You need to travel light when you are blazing the trail. You need the practical stuff in your backpack. All week and every week I will be bringing back news as I light out into the territories. I expect to get well and truly turned around on occasion, but I don't plan on backtracking much except to send back reports. Boone wasn't much good at this part, but Lewis and Clark were, but I daresay I call more on the Kentuckian than I do the Virginian. All I know is that every one who reads this could be my Sacajewia, a real guide to the undiscovered country. Amen.

I am so glad that you get this. I wrote a post recently that was a short video of a glass of water overflowing in my sink. I put it on YouTube and then shared it via Vialogues so that others could just play with it. Jenny M commented that she didn't get it. There wasn't really anything to get, but it was kind of her to play along. We are homo ludens.

I love the idea of Carnivale.

I think we can view the visualization as part of carnivale and your post as part of it. It doesn't really end if we continue to act with the idea of it in our heart. Carnivale is an irruption of life. Your post is an irruption, conscious and alive and aware. There is a larger Carnivale.

Yet in the end we are all food for the maggots. In the end our word and ideas and memes are the wakes from our ships. So be it. Let the maggots dance!

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.

"Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not so." - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

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.

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.

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.

And its specific corollary: we conflate learning with teaching.

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.

Inspiring me to sponsor some academic play at the beginning of every classroom. So....what does academic play look like?

It looks like any other kind of play with flow and sharing and game boards and game pieces.

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/

Expanding the academic space. Yes. And expanding our idea of what constitutes play in that space. Inviting everyone in to play.

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.

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?

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.

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.

New terrain = common ground of play = ground rules?

And we are walking the path together.

The future is already rhizomatic, it's just not evenly distributed.

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.

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.

I am profoundly happy to see Myles Horton cited and used. I think he has had more influence on my teaching and learning than any other. His autobiography The Long Haul is absolutely must-read for a rhizomatic pov.

Yes, he did and then used it at the Highlander School in Tennessee.

Brave words those--no community.

I wonder if this is similar to rhetoric and comp's idea of writing as a conversation?

These are dead links to the innovateonline site.

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?

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.

Is this what we are doing together here in Diigo, co-constructing secret connections collaboratively? Sounds like an underground conspiracy (forgive the lame joke there.)

Meta note here: I see our collaboration as a secret growing of knowledge among us. It may only even be true for us, on this web page, at this particular juncture because we are growing it out on the tip of the root of this text.

Examples of this conversion in our work here? 1. Each of us runs these words through the filter of our own experience 2. sharing out on social networks 3 asking and answering quesions