Quick Disclaimer:

I seem to be struggling with is putting the nib to the page or at least selecting the submit/publish button.  It must be because I find it different to join the conversation or worried about being wrong.  I hoping these blog posts will get better.

Anyway, now for the blog post:

I’ve been reading and watching and thinking about this new term rhizomatic education.  This doesn’t seem to be a concept easy to get your head around.  For one, it is such a different model of traditional forms of education you can’t help but chew on the idea until it makes more sense.  I seriously must have read the section below of Rhizomatic Education: Community as Curriclum a half dozen times.

“This is the new reality. Knowledge seekers in cutting-edge fields are increasingly finding that ongoing appraisal of new developments is most effectively achieved through the participatory and negotiated experience of rhizomatic community engagement. Through involvement in multiple communities where new information is being assimilated and tested, educators can begin to apprehend the moving target that is knowledge in the modern learning environment.”

It was amazing to me to think about knowledge as a path and a path of our own choosing.  And, if everyone is choosing his or her own path then how could there be any sort of continuity to knowledge.  Is there supposed to be standards and wholeness to what we know as a group of learners.  I couldn’t help but think this mode of learning must be a complete mess and completely out of control.  Then I remember a scientific concept from my freshmen year of college… chaos theory.  The chaos theory I remember was defined by patterns emerging from what seemed to be unpredictable events and in many cases absolutely beautiful when visualized.  Those visualizations are called fractals.  Now, I don’t know if this is what Dave Cormier was trying to explain in the article, but when I saw this video again it started to make more sense.  In this less than two-minute clip we follow the path of one person’s knowledge.  In the theory of rhizomatic education if another person were to enter this fractal we’d see a completely different path, however the patterns of knowledge would be the same.