Coming back to Rhizomatic Learning, I am therefore left mulling over how +dave cormier has successfully ‘managed the MOOC’. I must be honest that the word ‘manage’ may be slightly misleading, inferring incorrectly a sense of power and control, I think that instead what the course has done is instigate learning throughout. In some respect this has now been coordinated by everyone, although Dave has ‘set’ the tasks and facilitated the communications and conversations. However, as was demonstrated by +Mariana Funes‘ post, much was left to the community to continue the learning.

Clear goals for each learning event combined with a perfectly structured class was a clear indication of someone who took the profession of education seriously. This is what it meant to be expert teacher

I am an outsider as many of you are. I came to teaching late after fifteen years of farming and running a couple of businesses (taxes and chimney sweeping). I came to teaching through substitute teaching. WTF.

I have a lot of questions about whether any of the web-based tools we are using actually fit the mold of System A. I don’t often feel those spaces as convivial and natural. Behind the artifice of interface lay the reality of code. Is that structure humane? Is it open, sustainable, and regenerative? Does it feel good? Does the whole idea behind code generate System A or System B? I really don’t know.

System A is all about integrity and health and the folk not as nodes in a machine, but as a growing, adapting, distributed and living whole. It is the difference between a neighborhood and a housing development.

Set project work with explicit networking goals and a phil project as part of it. Mandate that students find off campus resources which they curate and present to class (either online, on a collab blog, or in class), reward students with facetime on their blog – good posts and comments get lecturer feedback,.

Small Blog On Networked Learning

Rhizomatic learning as an open pedagogy

“participation architectures.”

Rhizomatic Learning Is A Metaphor For How We Learn

‘how does it work?

riting rhizomatically; understanding texts as rhizomatic; and analyzing the rhizomatic linkages between texts and the talk of the research participants.

We are in desperate need of new concepts, Deleuzian or otherwise, in this new educational environment that privileges a single positivist research model with its transcendent rationality and objectivity and accompanying concepts such as randomization, replicability, generalizability, bias, and so forth—one that has marginalized subjugated knowledges and done material harm at all levels of education, and one that many educators have resisted with some success for the last fifty years

Todd May (1996) explains that Deleuze’s ontology is ‘built upon the not-so-controversial idea that how we conceive the world is relevant to how we live in it.’

Now you might ask what this discussion of subjectivity in Deleuze has to do with education and science, and I would respond—everything, everything. All of education and science is grounded in certain theories of the subject; and if the subject changes, everything else must as well

Rather than asking what a concept means, you will find yourself Deleuzian Concepts for Education: The subject undone 285 © 2004 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia asking, ‘Does it work? what new thoughts does it make possible to think? what new emotions does it make possible to feel? what new sensations and perceptions does it open in the body?’ (Massumi, 1992, p. 8). You soon give up worrying about what Deleuze might have intended and use him in your own work ‘to free life from where it’s trapped, to trace lines of flight’ (Deleuze, 1990/1995, p. 141) into a different wa y of being in the world

permission to give up the pretense of signifying and ‘making meaning’ in the old way

Now you might ask what this discussion of subjectivity in Deleuze has to do with education and science, and I would respond—everything, everything. All of education and science is grounded in certain theories of the subject; and if the subject changes, everything else must as well.

haecceity

One form of resistance to the scientism produced by the old values of government functionaries involves accomplishing scholarship that critiques those values and introduces concepts that upset the established order. This essay participates in that resistance, illustrating how Deleuzian concepts keep the field of play open, becoming, rhizomatic, with science springing up everywhere, unrecognizable according to the old rules, coming and going in the middle, ‘where things pick up speed’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 25).

We are in desperate need of new concepts, Deleuzian or otherwise, in this new educational environment that privileges a single positivist research model with its transcendent rationality and objectivity and accompanying concepts such as randomization, replicability, generalizability, bias, and so forth—one that has marginalized subjugated knowledges and done material harm at all levels of education, and one that many educators have resisted with some success for the last fifty years.

Deleuze's ontology is ‘built upon the not-so-controversial idea that how we conceive the world is relevant to how we live in it

The “dark” side of Rhizo14 related to many of the gaps in MOOC research that have been noted by other researchers and referenced in the review of literature. Rhizo14 participants for whom the experience was less than positive felt isolated. They felt unable to make meaningful connections despite in some cases being experienced “MOOCers.” One viewed the emphasis on community as an unnecessary pressure, which led to artificial effects, exclusion and limited learning. Another viewed the community as “ disjointed networks of pre-established subgroups. ” Another described the community as having a “ dark edge .” These participants felt that there was a lack of appropriate facilitation, and that there were inappropriate exhibitions of power and politics in the course. Some felt that the course was based on weak philosophical foundations and that the rhizome is an empty signifier. Some questioned the lack of content in the course and felt that it lacked depth and theoretical discussion. For these participants the rhizome is “ A pernicious, pervasive weed, rooted in a lot of dirt and “SH***””; “ . . .a ‘thug’ and can be very badly behaved”; “Part of one big family/ plant—joined at the hip”; “Clones of the “same damn plan t.” One respondent wrote “I knew before that the arborescent paradigm was a problem. The rhizome is a contrasting alternative, but I learned in the course that this alternative has a lot of connotations with ugly and weed-like characteristics which are not necessary for every complex or even chaotic network” (survey respondent)