I wrote Rhizome-plosion about a year ago while attending #etmooc. It was my first opportunity to hear Dave Cormier share his thinking and at that time I was struck by the theme of shifting power – changing the dynamic between instructor and learner.

Still am. Still will be a year from now, no doubt.

But Cormier has carved out another opportunity to focus on this idea during his P2PU course Rhizomatic Learning – The Community is the Curriculum. This then is my introduction. Hola everyone.

The course kicks off with “Cheating as Learning” and the following challenge:

Week 1 Challenge – Use cheating as a weapon. How can you use the idea of cheating as a tool to take apart the structures that you work in? What does it say about learning? About power? About how you see teaching?

Cheating as a weapon. Take apart the structures. Bingo.

The question I came to this course with is this: What is teaching presence – when your instructional goal is to shift power? And I think of teaching presence largely as a construct in the sense of the Community of Inquiry (CoI) model (which also includes social presence and cognitive presence). CoI resonates a lot with the way in which I teach, but it is not how I define myself entirely.

And so: The exploration. What is teaching presence? (Or maybe – what can it be? should it be?).

Off now to think about teacher as chief cheater. More later.

Filed under: Learning, teaching Tagged: #rhizo14, CoI, Dave Cormier, rhizomatic learning