And I don't have a problem with safe spaces, digital and otherwise, for students, but I think there's still not enough being done to populate the open web with safe citizens who will care for each other, and who know enough around their digital capabilities to build safe spaces for themselves on the open web. Institutions are still entirely too one-extreme-or-the-other about this: either they tell students the web is DANGEROUS or they are utterly laissez-faire about the risks of simply being in the world for many students. The internet is just a subset of these hazards, but avoiding it altogether is not ever going to be a solution. Students should have enough knowledge and preparation to make their own decisions about presence or absence in various places.

It can and also does put us in contact with people who support and care for us--tremendously important for those who are not f2f close to supportive people. The internet is part of the wider world, and there are safe and unsafe spaces within it.

esp important to distinguish "knowledge" from "facts" while keeping in mind there are things that anthropologists (and others) call "social facts" to further muddy the waters.

So I guess the question shot through a lot of this is--what is the balance each pedagogy is trying to achieve?

OK but: structures can be complex. These are not necessarily in opposition

me, too, I want this too.

but what if rhizo is deliberately unbalanced, what if it's a provocation and the unbalanced nature of the approach is deliberate and a way to provide alternatives to more contained, neat, less messy ways of teaching and learning (which predominate)

These are challenges for the instructor in the sense that these could also be barriers to participation for the students. They don't have to be, but framing and some kind of (not necessarily content-based) scaffolding seem necessary

I agree

There may not have been a community of practice emerging from the rhizo students, but I'd argue that practitioners in teaching and learning who want to engage with rhizo pedagogy are potentially members of a CoP

SO, does this mean that while rhizo as Dave Cormier experimented with it was connectivist in practice, that it can be not-so in theory?

this is the core framing for me, and also my way in. I'm not as familiar with this pedagogy of abundance discussion as I should be, and also I'm guilty of eliding "networked" and "Rhizomatic" together when talking about it all in contrast to "buckets of content" pedagogies.

this would be my hope. That these pedagogies are actually in a constantly formative state.

I'm not sure that rhizo is "contrary" to strong ties, just doesn't necessarily start there

But if the new thing is the processes, then students are better equipped than before to move towards actually producing/engaging with new ideas

it's worth thinking under what circumstances this would be necessary or preferred. I understand the absence of such an introduction, as a desire to see what people come up with on their own. But there is a role for teaching in the setting up of context, in the provision of a starting point, of scaffolding structure to allow people to more easily find their way in and out.

if this is a typo I don't actually want it to me. I love the idea of a "hearth" of a matter, it involves gathering around, getting comfort, sometimes in the context of hard conditions outside of the core of the home-space. Having a "hearth" of a matter implies more than one person coming together to worth through and understand processes and problems.

yes! Entering and staying in complex domain is about capacity, not content. This is key to me. We need people in this world who dwell comfortably with complexity. How do we build those capacities in the current educational systems we have? Not well. Because they are content-focused. And then we have lots of conversations about "How do we get critical thinking in the worldplace/citizenry/etc"

I am wondering about this. The potential speed of information availability isn't the only thing that makes expert verification fall behind. Expert verification is slow to come sometimes because it requires changing positions on which people have spent their entire careers. I'm thinking about the difficulties in accepting the implications of new fossils in paleontology. The resistance among "experts" to verficiation wasn't about fast or slow but about legitimacy and notions of authority based on Being Right, instead of about Being Scientific (and using the scientific method to rethink what we think we know based on new evidence).

From an anthropological perspective, knowledge has always been a negotiation

I wonder how increasingly rare this opportunity is for teachers, to be allowed to insist that education is not about passing tests.

This is me going through commencement at UC Berkeley for my PhD, in June of 2000.

This conversation happened at ALTC, and was a wide-ranging exploration of digital, teaching and learning, the nature of education, and the nature of ALT itself. Plus arguing.

Catherine's post here is still one of the best summaries of the point of Visitors and Residents workshops--this one was conducted by me and Dave White, at Catherine's invitation. This post is a great "outside eye" description of what we do, when we talk to rooms of people about V&R

A nice capturing of my professional journey as of 2013. thanks to my colleague Amy Santee.

My colleague James Clay has a series of posts on his blog talking around, and about some of the work we've done together, or of mine that he's commented on in some way.

I find it really useful when people (such as Ned Potter here) post their reactions to talks I give--it gives me ideas about what else i should be thinking about or saying, and helps me figure out if I was effective in my original goals for a particular talk.

This is a nice example of the kinds of audiences I can find for my research--EBSCO has a UX team, and it was useful for me not just to talk with them but to hear from a roomful of EBSCO folks about what they think of the kinds of themes I'm pulling out of my research.

Interesting evidence of impact here--they took us tweeting out about work we've done at UNC Charlotte and wrote up an encouraging post to get people do do this in their own libraries. Also note I'm misidentified as a librarian. Which, I don't mind, but I'm not one. :)

I originally wrote this to be just for fun. I am increasingly thinking that I wasn't entirely bullshitting here.

This talk I gave at UKSG contains themes that are present in other blogposts and articles, I'm trying to get at the tension between institutional mechanisms to control people and content, and what happens in people's practices (ie, mess).

Even though the content of my book isn't specifically relevant anymore to the work I do in Academia, it's still an important part of who I am as a scholar and a person, so I highlight it on my website.

This is our working document for the TriangleSCI symposium. You can see the messy way we've been thinking about things.

for what they are worth, the Google Scholar stats on frequency of citation of certain pieces of my work.

I'm still interested in this genre, "provocation" that I'm increasingly asked to engage in. Why isn't more writing on digital and teaching and learning "provocative?"

This VConnecting conversation, attached to the July 2016 DigPed conference, involved me as a digital participant, but was focused on the F2F conversation with Cindy Jennings and Lawrie Phipps (moderated by Alan Levine, whose blog this is). It was a great example of participation across the world, via digital places, in a f2f event.

I don't usually interact with blogs in the comments but realize that people still do it! I'm used to getting comments on Twitter because that's where I tend to be most interactive online, and where I expect commentary on whatever I blog to appear.

I started studying Anthropology in 1988 when I began my undergraduate degree at UC Santa Barbara. I went straight to graduate school after completing my BA, and studied with my advisor Alan Dundes (among others) at UC Berkeley from 1992 until 1999.