Well, didn’t we have a party! I really enjoyed Rhizo14, and I thank everyone who joined in, especially the lurkers, who play a much unheralded role in the community as curriculum. I think they are the ones I most want to talk about.…
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Loading...In her post Questions about rhizomatic learning, Jenny Mackness ponders the arrangement of space in Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome. She quotes D and G: “Nomad space is ‘smooth’, or open-ended. One can rise up at any point and move to any other” and “A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo.”…
(No Ratings Yet)Loading...In her post Questions about rhizomatic learning, Jenny Mackness notes that I “have written that ‘the space holds all the possibilities’, which has made [her] wonder what possibilities the structure holds.” This play with the tensions between open and structured spaces is a conversation I picked up from Michel Serres’ book Genesis, his meditations about how form, or structure, emerges from chaos, …
(No Ratings Yet)Loading...I’ve guests today, so this post will, out of courtesy to them, be too long, not having the time to make it shorter.
Dave Cormier has challenged the Rhizo14 MOOC to think about how to enforce independence in learners, and I have followed the lead of Frances Bell, Jenny Mackness, and others to amend Dave’s terminology to something like encouraging autonomy.…
(No Ratings Yet)Loading...Well, I intended to write a practical view of the rhizome in my last post, but I basically ended up giving my take on the place of the rhizome metaphor in the general development of Western thought over the past few centuries.…
(No Ratings Yet)Loading...Grading has slowed my writing and reading, but I couldn’t help noticing a few posts, the first one from Audrey Watters about The Battle for “Open”. As I had just written about open systems, I was curious to compare her idea of openness with my own.…
(No Ratings Yet)Loading...The fourth property of complexity that both Taborga and Lawrimore discuss within the context of modern organizations is openness or, as Lawrimore terms it, adaptability. This is, I think, a particularly critical property of complexity and most relevant to my current conversations about education, especially the conversation about MOOCs.…
(No Ratings Yet)Loading...Agency is the third principle of complexity that both Taborga and Lawrimore discuss. To my mind, agency is a complementary concept of feedback, or organizational recursion, that I explored in my last post. What is the use of a feedback loop if an agent has no choice in response to the feedback?…
(No Ratings Yet)Loading...A second property of complexity is what Edgar Morin calls organizational recursion. Taborga and Lawrimore both use the more common term feedback, which I think fails to capture the richer implications of the complex interactions inherent in complex systems, but feedback provides an easier starting place with organizational recursion, so I start there.…
(No Ratings Yet)Loading...I’ve reviewed my posts, and I notice that complexity has been dominating my writing for the past several months. I’ve looked at my reading list, and it appears that it will dominate for several more months. I’m plowing through lots of ideas that are new or almost-new to me, but I feel some need to stop pushing outward and pause long enough to see where my boundaries have gotten to.…
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