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Vanessa Vaile

The literature on CAE (Collaborative Autoethnography) Reflecting Allowed | Reflecting A... - 0 views

  • collaborative autoethnography
  • Mainly this article (Geist-Martin et al) and this book (Chang et al)
  • plans to read this open access book on (non-collaborative) autoethnography
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  • open access article by Ellis et al on autoethnography (only skimmed it)
  • 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
  • So what was MY question?
  • how are people experiencing rhizo14?
  • I am interested in sub-topics of making connections and building community]
  • Why am I interested?
  • I would like to understand how other experienced this MOOC
  • it’s important to note the diverse ways in which the course was perceived by different people
  • I’m interested in what didn’t work. But I am also interested in what did work, and for whom.
  • this knowledge to help influence future designers of connected courses by highlighting the participant experience
  • it will always be partial
  • Geist-Martin et al cite Ellis (2004, p. 30) on autoethnography, and it captures how I feel about this approach
  • “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”
  • collaborative autoethnography rejects the traditional approach of disembodied academic research
  • came out of Chang et al is that there are three broad types of autoethnography
  • the type that emphasizes the auto (closer to autobiography, more narrative)
  • OR a type that focuses on the ethnography part (more analytical, relating one’s own experiences to the wider culture)
  • but any AE contains elements of both
  • I *think* in #rhizo14 we’re attempting something closer to the latter, but what we have at the moment is closer to the former.
  • the practice needs to move beyond mere storytelling in order to be research
  • 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).
  • Geist-Martin et al’s & Chang et al’s critiques of their own process – here are some parts I wanted to highlight:
  • They looked for themes across their stories
  • They helped each other clarify certain aspects of each other’s stories
  • They critiqued and recognized ways in which their stories reproduced cultural stereotypes
  • They struggled with how to “cut” parts of their stories in order to make this paper
  • They mention how social activities they participated in, in each other’s lives, influenced how they wrote together
  • They talk about community-building that occurs because of the collaboration on the autoethnography itself
  • 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
  • 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
  • Chang et al mention 4 key dimensions of CAE:
  • Self-focused
  • Context-conscious
  • Researcher-visible
  • Critically dialogic
  • the more “critically dialogic”  work is, the more it tends towards an analytic/ethnographic rather than evocative/biographical type of research
  • 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
  • for tales of abuse, illness, etc., but not for #rhizo14 which is less of an emotionally taxing thing to talk about
  • Some more stuff about CAE:
  • Alternation between solo and group work
  • This part in Chang et al made me laugh because of its vagueness:
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • CAE as an emerging research practice should not be limited to a particular approach or style of representation
  • The authors suggest the following benefits of CAE  (p. 25):
  • collective exploration of researcher subjectivity
  • power-sharing among researcher-participants
  • efficiency an enrichment in the research process
  • deeper learning about self and other
  • community-building
  • this quote (p. 26):
  • “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”
  • this quote (p. 28):
  • “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”
  • the challenges of CAE:
  • Risk of incomplete trust to lead to premature consensus-building that compromises the data
  • Apparently quite difficult to do at a distance because of degree of closeness needed
  • Interdependency of research efforts
  • Mutlivocality can make each researcher influenced by the voices of others
  • Team effort
  • Ethics & confidentiality (this prob deserves a post on its own, but I’ll just give it a section here for now)
  • Ethics
  • 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.
  • The biggest ethical issue I see is that when only indirectly reference others, we may be broaching on their confidentiality
  • We also need to be clear on who gets  access to the data after we write our “report”, and how they can use it
  • 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?
  • 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.
  • Ch 5 of that book about the data analysis side of things
  • emerging coding approach
  • I’ll just come back to one MAIN point that’s running through my mind (well, points, plural, but they are all related):
  • Can we get multiple autoethnogs out of this
  • 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?
  • 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
  • Can we use some of the other data in the narratives DIFFERENTLY? So not as autoethnog, but as narratives
  • 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
  • I usually do ethnography by using any and all data I can; this would mean referencing public blogs, etc.
  • 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?
  • 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?
Cris Crissman

Questions about rhizomatic learning | Jenny Connected - 0 views

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    Stephen Downes's comment in OLDaily, Feb. 7 Questions about rhizomatic learning Jenny Mackness, February 6, 2014 At a certain point, perfectly good theories become nonsense. This may be that point. I am sympathetic with the list of questions Jenny Mackness poses to Keith Hamon about rhizomatic learning (a concept I'm increasingly questioning). For example: "I'm not sure that I would know how to distinguish a 'rhizomatic learner' from other learners." And "'A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo.'" Strictly speaking, this is false of rhizomes (unless you're talking of the specific connection between plant and plant, in which case, one wonders how it is different from any other connection (and wonder why it can't have a middle)). I've commented to Dave Cormier (who seems to have a better handle on this) about this in the past: a rhizome network is a mesh, which is good, but there's no openness, no diversity, not really even any autonomy. And you mix that in with (quite frankly) silly statements from Deleuze and Guattari (like: "'State space is 'striated' or griddled") you get something that really begins to lack coherence. I've long complained of continental philosophers that when they don't understand something, they just make stuff up. There's too much of that in educational theory too.
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
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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.
  • 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
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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." "
Cris Crissman

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.
Kevin Hodgson

The Essence of Peopling - 4 views

  • “People”
    • Terry Elliott
       
      To talk about  "people" is to objectify and alienate. Making nouns of anything is a way to separate them from the world.
  • “peopling”
    • Terry Elliott
       
      "Peopling" on the other hand is about human folk connecting to the world--subjectifying and unshackling the word.
    • Kevin Hodgson
       
      to people?
  • 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,
    • Terry Elliott
       
      Social model of human knowings v. Cartesian knowing
  • 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.
    • Terry Elliott
       
      We learn to become self-aware, we are "constrained" toward that goal by other folk.  Other folk are our first mirrors through non-verbal then oral and then written "interfaces".
  • infinite recursion
  • infinite recursion
    • Terry Elliott
       
      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.  
    • Kevin Hodgson
       
      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 ...
  • 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.
  • 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.
    • Terry Elliott
       
      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?
  • 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.
    • Terry Elliott
       
      We are many selves.  No one reflection gets them all not even our own. Especially not our own.
    • Kevin Hodgson
       
      This reminds me of how to think of our students -- of their lives outside of our classroom,our building ... what literacies are authentic for them?
  • 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.
    • Terry Elliott
       
      Powerful assertion here.  And the proof is in asking what happens when we do not maintain that identity.
  • 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
    • Terry Elliott
       
      I wonder how much of our cognitive load is spent maintaining (breaking down and building up) identity, the metabolism of identity?
  • 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.
    • Terry Elliott
       
      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.
  • 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
    • Terry Elliott
       
      I have never seen the problem of identity so succinctly put.  And it explains why there is and can be no permanent solution to the conflict here except perhaps the meditative one of observing the breath and making that identity.
  • 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.
    • Terry Elliott
       
      So how do we play this infinite game of mutually modelling each other's identities to each the other? Language and ritual Language for the easy stuff and ritual for the hard stuff. So what are the #rhizo15 rituals?
  • 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.
    • Terry Elliott
       
      The sparseness of ritual environment in rhizo15 is very painful to me.  The sparseness of feedback from language is just as painful, but the lack of ritual makes it even more so.  Dreadfully more so.  In fact I am on the edge of withdrawing all the time.  I think it is the ritual that will save me.
    • Terry Elliott
       
      So bring on the salve of ritual to rhizo15.
  • 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
    • Terry Elliott
       
      Ritual 1: greeting everyone, every day.
  • (with some caveats).
    • Terry Elliott
       
      Ritual 2:"Serene Social Sloth Sunday, a made-up internet holiday in which we avoid posting "outrage porn" 
    • Terry Elliott
       
      Ritual 3: Breaking Bread Together
    • Terry Elliott
       
      Ritual 4:  Share natural spaces through YouTube, make part of any group meeting e.g. Hangout.  
    • Terry Elliott
       
      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
    • Terry Elliott
       
      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.
  • 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.
    • Kevin Hodgson
       
      Intriguing ...
  • A freeway is useful for getting from place to place, but it’s not a place to merely exist in the moment.
    • Kevin Hodgson
       
      Interesting, since the "internet highway" was an early metaphor for technology and online elements .. and now we are working on ways to slow down, be more reflective, plant flowers along the ugly underpasses of the freeway
  • “we’re here to fart around together.”
    • Kevin Hodgson
       
      Is this a motto of Rhizomatic Learning communities? Ha
  • 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.
  •  
    There are also linguistic differences...for example, the verb vs noun thing does not work the same in Spanish (and perhaps to some extent in other Romance languages as in English, where verbs are the power words. Syntax and the role of particles-prefixes are other factors.
Vanessa Vaile

Between the By-Road and the Main Road: Curated Bibliography of Texts about Rhizomatc Le... - 1 views

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    "A few weeks ago a friend, Renee, from NH emailed me to ask if I would mentor her for her individualized learning portion of her dissertation. She attends Antioch University and is in the process of earning her PhD in Leadership and Change. I was of course thrilled to be a part of this venture especially as she is thinking about rhizomatic leadership which I am keen to think about and theorize alongside Renee. We will work together for the next 4 to 6 months. Below is the start to some readings we may well do (we'll see what surfaces). Thought I would share this curated list."
Jaap Bosman

Rhizomatic learning, definitions and cheating | Jenny Connected - 0 views

  • He believes that cheating is a structure in which the teacher has decided what is true or not true and that this disempowers learners. It is not about stealing people’s stuff – but is about finding your own path – creating your own map. For him this is rhizomatic learning.
  • I don’t think we can just cut ‘ethics’ out of our thinking about rhizomatic learning, by saying – Yes OK, there is this thing about ethics and dishonesty associated with cheating, but we are not going to consider it in relation to our discussions about rhizomatic learning.
  •  
    This is a very short description of D.M.s intentions with 'cheating' Ethics and cheating are connected, you should not keep them apart.
Jaap Bosman

Academic Integrity and Cheating - 1 views

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    Ethics Cheating and the Academy; where might we find Ambiguity Innovation and Creativity?
  •  
    Introductionabout cheating, but the sources of images are not in the page, is that cheating? Rules and rules, all about assessment, not about learning?
Vanessa Vaile

Rhizo14 MOOC Research Storm - Ma Bali, Google Drive - 1 views

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    Thoughts about the #Rhizo14 MOOC Research Project? INTRO BY MAHA: We can EACH have our own research agenda and work together to support each other in making it work for this course. This might mean four or five or ten different research questions led by different people, and supported by as many of us as are interested in the other's question. I see already we are on the path to a rhizomatic research approach that is not unidirectional and slightly chaotic but has such rich potential. This would hopefully result in different research projects and publications that each give a different perspective on rhizo14. A metaphor i like is "crystallization" - like a crystal, u can look at it and illuminate it from different angles and see totally different things. Would be beautiful to have this about #rhizo14.
Vanessa Vaile

Ma Bali FB thread: Rhizo14 Research - 0 views

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    "Anyone interested in doing research about the different forms of community interaction and its effects on learning in ‪#‎rhizo14‬? How would we go about that? (I assume it has been done for other cMOOCs but this could take a rhizomatic angle)."
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.
Vanessa Vaile

About | Simply Elfje - 2 views

  • An ‘Elfje’ counts as five sentences. Line 1. One word. This word symbolizes a colour or feature. The word symbolizes the atmosphere. Line 2. Two words. These are something or someone with this colour or feature. Line 3. Three words. Giving more information about the person or the object. You describe where the person or the object is, who the person or what the object is, or what the person or object is doing. This sentence usually starts with the word ‘he’, ‘she’ or ‘it.’ Line 4. Four words. Here you are writing something about yourself in relation to the person or the object. This sentence is your conclusion. Line 5. One word. This word is called the ‘Bomb.’ It is the essence of the poem.
Vanessa Vaile

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

  • exchange of information between open and closed spaces
  • Facebook groups can be open, closed or secret, the meanings of these being laid out in the Facebook help
  • the ‘closed’ space of Facebook, only visible to one of the 1.3 billion members of Facebook
  • ...36 more annotations...
  • Facebook is not completely open from the outside but doesn’t seem very closed
  • anyone who has the link to an open Facebook group post or comment, can share it inside or outside Facebook, and it can be opened by any Facebook (not just group) member.
  • participants who are not Facebook members are excluded from sight of posts in the Facebook group, whilst a very large number of Facebook members who have never heard of rhizo14 could check it out if you sent them the link
  • Ethical dilemmas
  • How do we behave around here?
  • The rhizo14 MOOC offers no explicit written norms, behavioural or otherwise, and the strapline for the FB group is “An attempt to create a feed for Rhizomatic Learning posts from around the web.”
  • a number of people (significantly less than the full 240 ish membership) regard the group as a semi-private backchannel
  • The implicit norms on lurking in the FB group are to some extent discernible, but the norms on other behaviours sometimes seem to be taken as read by some active members of the group.
  • Teachers and moderators can model ethical behaviour, and communities usually engage with norm-building online where misunderstanding is not uncommon. Overt moderation and norm-building activities have been generally absent from rhizo14 in general and the FB group in particular
  • What does sharing mean within and beyond the rhizo14 community?
  • A lot of sharing goes on at rhizo14, and there is a sense that openness is a value of rhizo14. The remix culture has been very evident in rhizo14, and creativity and remix
  • Communities of Practice literature and others have identified the importance of the boundary in the propagation of knowledge.  The facility for stuff and people to cross boundaries presents great opportunities, but with these come tricky questions of how we share and what we do with what is shared
  • A great set of ‘rules’ that has helped sharing is Creative Commons Licenses, not always enforceable but signifying intent in a sharing and use context
  • A dilemma presented by research data sharing is current at rhizo14 FB group, and raises, for me at any rate, some very interesting issues about how we do Open Research
  • the issue of ethics of use of open/closed data for research purposes in rhizo14 at the time it became clear that a group doing auto-ethnography, and a group of which I am a part were both doing research around rhizo14
  • The data arrangements
  • my wish not to be quoted was incompatible with the publicy of the document
  • Discussion of Agency
  • sharing our ethical stance with others can help our moral agency within a network of human and technical agents.  I am not thinking of a set of rules but rather our expectations and ethical stance that we could share with other moral agents
  • ome participants seem to assume there is a ‘common decency’ approach to the use of ‘open’ information
  • unwarranted assumption of community
  • technology as ‘moral agent’ where permissions and constraints on agency can be coded into a system
  • hard rules, hard boundaries can be explained in help pages and observed in action
  • rules can be overcome by human agency.
  • Some Tentative Conclusions
  • An important element of the digital moral agent’s backpack to complement their ethical literacy is the digital literacy of having an active understanding of the ethical and other implications of using a digital space/service for communication
  • benefits in clarifying use of information, utterances, multimedia in practice
  • the more open the use and sharing of information, the more important it is to clarify how we expect that information to be used
  • unclear use in the above extract from Help of the words
  • I would have benefited from a clearer statement of expectations and behaviours in rhizo14
  • discussion on how we behave around rhizo14
  • digital literacies are a moving target
  • communication in open spaces is tricky, we need flexible repair strategies
  • state our expectations and promote discussion of expectations within a group  as starting point, then we may be able to minimise but not eliminate problems
  • the issue of who can use the information in the auto-ethnography
  • “when you engage online in equally public settings such as on someone’s Facebook Wall, the conversation is public by default, private through effort.” (boyd, danah. 2010. “Making Sense of Privacy and Publicity.” SXSW. Austin, Texas, March 13).
  •  
    "As part of a MOOC on rhizomatic learning that performs itself in many different spaces (Facebook, P2PU, G+, Twitter and others), I am a member of an 'open' Facebook group.  It is endlessly fascinating, and has given me a lot of scope for reflection about back channels and the exchange of information between open and closed spaces. Of course, I say that as if a space could be categorised as open or closed:  it's often a lot more complicated than that, acted out by technical aspects of the space and by the agency of the people who interact there. Facebook groups can be open, closed or secret, the meanings of these being laid out in the Facebook help."
  •  
    "As part of a MOOC on rhizomatic learning that performs itself in many different spaces (Facebook, P2PU, G+, Twitter and others), I am a member of an 'open' Facebook group.  It is endlessly fascinating, and has given me a lot of scope for reflection about back channels and the exchange of information between open and closed spaces. Of course, I say that as if a space could be categorised as open or closed:  it's often a lot more complicated than that, acted out by technical aspects of the space and by the agency of the people who interact there. Facebook groups can be open, closed or secret, the meanings of these being laid out in the Facebook help."
Vanessa Vaile

When a Course becomes a Community | Felicia M. Sullivan - 2 views

  •  
    "Dave Cormier, the mind behind Rhizomatic Learning 2014 (#rhizo14), just posted thoughts on his blog about creating a wonderful learning experience that went from a 6-week course to a self-propelled learning community.  The challenge as Cormier articulates it is how to bring in new learners into this community. His original plan - create a new course, but what about the energy of the existing learning community?  Connect the new course to the first course or simply bring the new learners into the existing community?"
Heli Nurmi

Wanna do a cMOOC? | doublemirror - 5 views

  • Matthias Melcher – he made it so easy to follow everyone’s blogs
    • wayupnorth
       
      That was a huge contribution Matthias made to help tie Rhizo14 together. Although later in the course, when it became impossible for me to keep up with all the blog posts, I opted for the narrower conversation on Facebook as my link - even that subset exceeded my capacity
  • power is not due to the technology or its design, but to the actual people involved
    • wayupnorth
       
      strongly agree - although the ds106 assignment bank is an outstanding design element
  • 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.
    • wayupnorth
       
      This helps understand the author's perspective. Not everyone in an open online course shares that life-setup. Many are trying to squeeze learning into the varying cracks between other overlapping committments.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • So, what was Rhizo14 setting out to create? A one of what? Stephen uses his own courses as an example
    • wayupnorth
       
      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.
    • Heli Nurmi
       
      I agree with you that Dave is defferent from S.D. and rhizo should be described with Dave's terms
  • If my need for inclusion had been high, then I think I would have felt excluded from what some called Rhizo14FB.
    • wayupnorth
       
      This again gives us insight into the writer's perspective. It is a valid attitude, but important to recognize. Consciously looking through the same lens will keep a reader who experienced Rhizo14 differently from too easily dismissing parts of the critique that do not resonate with herm.
  • 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;
  • batting the ideas back and forth in order to win the game.
  • 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.
    • wayupnorth
       
      After listening to Dave Cormier, I have to challenge this assumption. What I hear from him suggests that Dave is very much aware that he is still trying to find out what "works".
    • Heli Nurmi
       
      I thought that rhizo14 was Dave's first try to facilitate a MOOC his first own experiment
  • diversity was managed out through a group dynamic that excluded what the majority did not approve
    • Heli Nurmi
       
      I agree = saw this happen, all norms are not written, they can be strong without it
  • I did not see much by way of supporting the importance of diversity in action rather than theory.
    • Heli Nurmi
       
      very true in my eyes too
  • people left and may have been silenced by a vocal minority
  • gossiping about other participants
    • Heli Nurmi
       
      and this still praised as a good strategy - a year after the end of the studies
  • but Rhizo14 as an experiment on the future of higher education as a whole is not what the originators intend
    • wayupnorth
       
      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.
    • anonymous
       
      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 :)
    • Heli Nurmi
       
      Mariana speaks so well but why it is so challenging to hear, I am wondering after reading these notes
  • what he created with CCK08
  • own work in self-managed learning
  • I recognise this clearly from my
    • Heli Nurmi
       
      I recognise this too and this reminds the storming phase of group process. You must be strong as a facilitator to receive all the complaints. It is a normal phase as long as education is in movement
  • You were definitely the right kind of ‘one’ if you believed in emergence, non-linearity, poetry and art rather than theory and explanation.
    • Heli Nurmi
       
      you said that better than I could, thanks
  • to connect with ‘old MOOC friends’ no mention of rhizomes of the metaphorical or garden variety.
    • Heli Nurmi
       
      I belong to this group
Jaap Bosman

PDF.js viewe - 1 views

  •  
    Rhizomatic research cultures The current research climate in Australian universities is one in which projects are increasingly conceived as multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, extradisciplinary, even 'wicked' (Brown, Harris & Russell 2010). A recent lead article in Campus Review (Bennett 2012) takes this as a critical shift in the academy that urgently requires attention. One effect of this increasingly interdisciplinary focus is that the traditional boundaries between disciplines seem to be blurring. Within this, the people working on these projects are also increasingly diverse, coming together from non‐traditional pathways, from different disciplinary backgrounds, and from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds, so that distinctions between local and global also seem to be blurring. One way to understand these conditions might be through the rhizomatic knowledge structures described by Deleuze & Guattari (Deleuze & Guattari 1988): perhaps it would be useful to think about this research climate as a kind of rhizomatic academic network that is characterised by connection, heterogeneity and multiplicity.
  •  
    about research culture
Jaap Bosman

X-Change Lab: Learning through Disruptive Technologies - 0 views

  •  
    If the question concerning where technologies come from must be understood within a political context, how are we then to understand the agency of technology? Should it be approached from a deterministic point of view or are we, since it's a question about political processes, still in control?
  •  
    it is about rhizomatic education,
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
Jaap Bosman

No! You should not do DS106 | doublemirror - 0 views

  • What have you changed you mind about recently and why?
  • the greater the tension, the greater is the potential. Great energy springs from a correspondingly great tension of opposites
  • DS106 subscribes to what Cormier calls ‘community as curriculum’
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • depending on one’s pedagogical position, one can argue about feasibility and validity of knowledge created within a community
  • Yes, it takes a particular kind of learner to engage with the mythology of DS106 and understand that the learning is in the engagement.
  • The psychology of creativity involves a great deal and as the new self appointed DS106 Headless Shrink I hope to bring some of that capability into the collective.
  • Some see this interactional pattern and have accused DS106 of being cult. I
  • [but] the vast majority of the rest of them will just keep blindly following one superprofessor messiah after another, thinking that they’re learning something important about life when in fact what they’re really doing is helping the enemies of higher education keep more people from ever becoming enlightened at all. ‘
  •  
    the real headless mooc
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"
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