This is my mother’s spider plant that has lived for years in her sunroom.  Born with a green thumb, my mom gives it care, but it pretty much is self-sustaining, despite the occasional nibbles from Lily the cat.

Before starting my blog on “rhizomatic learning,” I wanted to find the perfect pic to accompany my blog.  I googled “spider plant” to see if it was a rhizome; to my delight it is.

The spider plant reminds me of my experience so far with #etmooc.  When I look at the global map of connections,  I see our instructors as the home plant and all the “spiders” represent the learning generated by all of the participants.

I’ll admit that sitting in on Dave Cormier’s webinar on rhizomatic learning set my wheels to spinning.  While I could grasp the general concept of introducing an idea and letting people run with it,  I had a difficult time seeing the application in K-12 classrooms.  I envisioned the Bing commercial about information overload–haphazard searches that are loosely connected, straying from the original focus.  Part of the webinar discussion included the tension between “going wide versus going deep,”  which made me jump to the idea of crabgrass.  Yes, I know it’s not a rhisome, (I googled it) but if you have ever had the experience of trying to pull up this infernal weed, it seems to go on forever.  Back-breaking work. I could just see students headed off in all directions learning as weeds rather than as rhisomes.

Fortunately, I participated in the Twitter chat.  Dave provided a sample syllabus, which clarified how this type of learning works with adults.  I still wasn’t sold.  How can we balance this form of personalized learning with the demands of curriculum standards such as the Common Core State Standards? I then meet Heidi Siwak in the chat, and she provides me with an example from her 7th graders in her blog post, “X-Box and the War of 1812.”  (I’ll admit that I went off on a crabgrass moment, asking colleagues who won the War of 1812.) When I read about how Siwak directed her students to a LiveBinder with a multitude of resources on the war, I began to see the connection to personalized learning.  Students could choose the way they wanted to learn about the war–through articles, docmentaries, and various websites.  I also came to see how personalized learning contributes to collaborative learning when students came back together to share what they learned and generated an authentic question for discussion and study: “How come the Americans and the British both believe they won the war?” My spider plantlet has sprung thanks to Dave and Heidi.

Rhizomatic learning is just like anything else when we are teaching.  We need to scaffold the opportunities for students to explore like the assignmet Heidi describes and gradually release them to explore in the world that Dave illustrates.