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#rhizo14 – week 2: Seeding independent learning: wrestling with writing
Lots of wrestling in FB this week with what could be argued to be an essential ‘issue’ with MOOCs – they are open – free – out there… surely this is thus egalitarian learning at its very best? But no – some are still silenced – some are still feeling the pain of not being good enough – that ‘fish out of water’ feeling that is the experience of so many non-traditional students in the traditional classroom.
We have some strategies that work here to overcome this: say hello – be welcoming – comment – reply – extend a welcoming hand to other students. In doing this we ARE the community, all of us, everyone who does this friendly human thing in this strange and potentially impersonal world.
I blogged about this before – how doing the MOOCs really reinforced the need to bring the human back into the physical classroom. To make time for students to get to know each other – to bond – to feel that it is okay to speak – to listen to and be with their fellow students.
This year we found that role plays and simulations in the trad ‘lecture’ time really helped this to happen. We had a Post-apocalypse scenario running over several weeks:
Who would you keep in your bunker and why?
What education system would you build – immediately on leaving the bunker; five years later; ten years on…
What cultural activities would you save and why – and how would you build a sense of self-efficacy in future students?
The students were puzzled at this strange ‘lecture’ programme at first – but leapt into the discussions and found their voices – and found that they could speak to and with their fellow class mates. I think they formed a ‘cohort identity’ (BLAH) – and the classes definitely FEEL different.
We are also using creative techniques: drawing, collage, poetry… to help us all to think differently – to find our voices in different ways and in different media… And we are asking the students to blog about their learning hoping that this semi-academic space which is open for their colonizing develops their voices in powerful ways.
At the same time, they are going to have to wrestle with the slow, painful and iterative process that is academic writing.
How can we encourage and support our students in this struggle? How do we keep the flow going – and hopefully the joy – when this mountain does have to be climbed?
It’s really hard because writing is hard and the fear of failure is so PRESENT. That fear of making a fool of yourself – of not getting it right – of making your own ignorance visible to the world – of being judged. (Yes folks – let’s check out our FB page – we fear it too – you know!)
Especially when this fear is manifest in a vision and practice of writing that seems to tell students that they must get it right first go. That writing is the pouring out of perfectly formed, pre-digested learning - rather than the stuff and process of learning – and anything else is just pure visible, recorded proof of personal inadequacy and failure.
Below is what I have just sent to a student who has already written her Project – all of it: the proposal part is not due in till W19 (this is W15) and the final report part of it is not due in till W30. She is engaged. She is a motivated student. She has started early. It’s a great first draft – yet I fear that any feedback that suggests that it needs revision will wound.
So this is what I wrote:
I can see that you are going to be a tortured perfectionist! Apart from the pain (!!!) - this will make sure that you do get a wonderful degree. But you are going to have to give yourself permission to write stuff which will not be perfect first go (and nor should it be!) - and then go over it a few times to knock it into shape.
So, yes, there are some bits of the writing that need a little 'smoothing' - some bits are better than others - but there is a project sitting there - waiting to be 'emerged' through a revision process.
This is one reason we *try* to get students to write early (but most of them never do!). When you first write something it is great and so are you! After a little while, because your brain has continued to wrestle with your ideas, you go back over your piece, you see that it is not perfect - and you start to tidy it up.
You change a bit here and there... you realise that those two longish sentences can be cut down into one short sentence that actually makes your point in an even better way...
This is the struggle to write - and it is what we all should do to get our ideas across. It is a brilliant, slow and sometimes painful process - but it is the writing process.
We have to give ourselves permission to write something - and then to change it. So - give yourself a couple of days - then go through your writing again yourself. Try to be shorter (we always need to be shorter!) - make sure you are saying exactly what you mean - change it a bit... Remember to *Save As* the versions: v1, v2, v3 and so on (we often go through 17 or more versions to get to something we are happy with). It is great to keep all the versions - especially as sometimes we delete whole sections of our writing - and then think that it was really important and needs to be in the piece after all...
We need to learn that this IS proper academic writing: this PROCESS is... (and also - it will give you data for future auto-ethnographic studies!). Most people think writing should be 'right first go' - or that if they have to change something - then they are a 'bad person' or a 'poor student' - but no - this is the necessary process of writing.
Think of it as having a structured academic conversation with yourself.
This is the hardest thing for us tutors to get students to do. It is also hard to get other academics to realise that THIS is what we need to help students to do. It's not about shouting about spelling, punctuation and grammar - important as they are - but making time and space for this slow and thoughtful process to happen - especially when our students do not want to do this. It all feels too slow and painful.
Anyway - once you have improved it a bit yourself - print all of that off - and bring it to the class on Wednesday. We can give you feedback and hopefully help you to the next step!
But these are just words!
When I was a first year student we had no high stakes assessment that I can remember. All the first year stuff was designed to get us to think – to engage – to learn… It was brilliant – it was a bit like… a MOOC!!
Since I went through HE, ‘they’ broke it a bit more – made it harder – more formal – with more opportunities to fail – and then they let a few more non-traditional students in – and started to blame them for their failure or their fears – or their ‘fragility’ – instead of trying to fix the problem of education…
And now I don’t know how to get these bullied students to embrace this horrible and beautiful struggle with writing….
I am enjoying #rhizo14 so much – and as the community is the curriculum – this is the issue I thought I’d pop out there this week. I do hope for some Comments here folks. I need your thoughts!
Beyond me.
So many words. So many stories.A benign presence behind me. A wall, unlistening, unyielding, uncaring, but solidly present. Over 15 years, I came to realise that the moments when I had nothing to say, when I was still, were the moments of truth.Nothing...
‘The underbelly of education according to Karen’
I learn best when I work with others. I talk my way to learning. I need the discourse to help me refine my ideas and to open up new avenues of thought and connections. My entire learning history is based on fusing my thoughts with the thoughts of other...
Everything We Leave Behind | zchamu dot com
Everything We Leave Behind | zchamu dot com: Social media is real. As in this case, sometimes it's real real.
On the edge.
I have relived this moment so many times, but it comes back in many forms. Here it is again. I am on the edge, exhilarated, terrified, infinitely alive grasping up for an easy hold, and at an instant I am flying through the air downwards...Oh dear not ...
The Opening Speech
Joe Hoyle: Teaching - Getting the Most from Your Students: Opening Speech -- Tell Them What You Want Them to Know:
Becoming Animal: Does cheating really exist? #Rhizo14
Becoming Animal. Does Cheating really exist?
The development of ideas from reading through this week’s material and then returning to Deleuze and Guattari’s thousand plateaus highlights quite how dichotomous the notion of a literature review on rhizomatic concepts might. It is also clear the extent to which opening our exchanges with a focus on cheating is brilliant, revealing as it does the multiplicity of views while also emphasising the preponderance of the tree, the need often to return to the taken-for-granted rules and obligations that form a distinct set of practices. Deleuze and Guattari shock into realisation at each turn, ‘Literature is an assemblage. It has nothing to do with ideology. There is no ideology and ever has been’ (thousand plateaus, p.5). To realise that arguments related to quality, standards, conformity and originality are ideological, or at least the tools by which we are asked to engage with and maintain an ideological ecology, is to reflect on academic practice (amongst all other practices linked to it) as not in any way a given, but a structure created for a dominant purpose.
What began to emerge on a reflection of D + G and Lyotard’s (1984) discussion on the diminishing power of theory, was that it is not only possible but essential to view the subject/ object dichotomy from multiple perspectives. By discussing cheating as a subjective act, a distrustful one, or to reflect objectively of the societal good it can bring, also requires to look too at how the very notion of cheating is itself part of the linguistic structuring created to scaffold the discourse in which we exist. This is a mind-blowing concept if we try to position ourselves in the state it would take to adopt that outsiderliness, hence the schizophrenia labelling elsewhere in D & G I guess? Language as the construct is perhaps clear, its deconstruction also familiar, but its the rhizomatic, the abandoning of the structural as anything other than illusion and dominance that is most difficult to accommodate. The cheat, the act of cheating, become almost the poster boy/girl of the institution by the insistence on maintaining the rules of the game, so firmly adhere are they to its structures that they take even the act of defiance to move upwards, onwards and around its parameters. Rather than creating an ‘other’ or seeking elsewhere, it is the cheats that define the system by highlighting its strength and almost total dominance. Even rebellion is within and rebellion that supports the superstructure.
Myth of the Mother tongue
I have come to rhizomatic approaches to learning partly to augment a discussion around the ways in which Popular Education (Myles Horton, Paulo Freire as two significant thinkers/actors) can utilise online space for the greater mobilisation of learning and meaning making. D & G create bot optimism and terror from this perspective. Optimistically, the notion that. ‘There is no language in itself, nor are there any linguistic universals, only a throng of dialects, patois, slangs and specialised languages. There is no ideal speaker/ listener, any more than there is a homogenous linguistic community’ (p.8) highlights the freshness of the future, its possibilities as a ground for creation and recreation of multiplicities. Of course, the downside is already inbuilt in this, that language formed by dominant practice and use is most pervasive and the major rivers of language, the most powerful currents, remain supportive of the existing hierarchies. ‘There is no Mother tongue, only a power takeover by a dominant language within a political multiplicity’ (p.8).
For Popular Educators, for rhixoamtic seekers and nomads the hope of change is persuasive and compelling; I was taken back to the work of David Abrams and ‘Becoming Animal’ (also a D & G concept I read today) in which Abrams highlights how the alphabetic system is, in itself, a transformative technology so ingrained in us that we now have almost no other language left to analyse it except through itself. The very recent (species wise) introduction of alphabetic systems has taken over almost all of our space for interaction, communication and thought. In Abrams evocative discussion, the alphabetic system, ‘functions more like mirrors reflecting the human back upon itself’ (p.177) rather than a pre-alphabet immersion in the natural world in which signs/symbls/ sounds/ smells acted as windows ‘through which one might glimpse the wider landscape’ (p177). Considering concepts of ‘cheating’ as something that can be analysed, made sense of, identified and categorised, leads to the generation of an ever smaller, more closely regulated and impoverished landscape for thought and action. Just as Abrams indicates that by reliance on a simplified worldview that language, alphabetic language at least, can lead to a narrow view that misses the beauty, the brilliance and the depth of our actual environment, so can a call toward the minutia of valid/ legitimate/ originality/ accountable and other measurable terms of authenticity or whatever we want to label it, lead to us missing the point of exploration and learning. This week has left the strong impression that ‘cheating’ is not distinct from, but merely a form of, the restricted and regimented approach to knowledge that much institutional practice hopes to maintain a hold on and insist on controlling. The ease with which it is possible to dismiss the xMOOC’s close relationship to the existing model, with a need for ROI and investment models, should not blind us from the need to establish that cMOOCS, rhizomatic thinkers, are not immune to the strength of the structures in which we exist and it is important to establish what is fundamental (if anything) and what is part of a carefully structured taken-for-granted approach to control. To say that this is not something that shapes practice in college, at work, on the degree programme, seems clear. The institutions, courses and structures are not rhizomatic, they are tree like, but as moss grows on the tree, leaf cutter ants utilise its wealth and generate a rich parallel system outside it, so can new thinking work within and around the forests. It's not so much a case of standing on the shoulders of giants as recognising they never actually existed, not as giants. They were in fact individuals, creating in their own stigmergic way, practices and pathways that future travellers could follow, continue and enrich. It is outward, not upward, inclusive not elitist in form that we shoud seek to build a future upon.
Actually Enjoying the Grading Process?
I am about to say four words that rarely come out of a teacher's mouth:I am enjoying gradingSeriously. I am enjoying it. I'm currently grading my sophomores Asian Literature Portfolios. For this assignment, students took five different styles of writin...
A new year and a new book
Cross posted from the Connected Learning Research Network Leveling Up project blog
It’s the start of a new year and time to take stock. It’s been three years since the launch of the Connected Learning Research Network and the Leveling Up project, and a year and a half since the launch of this blog. Along the way, we’ve delved into stories of knitters, boy band and wrestling fans, fashionistas, eSports enthusiasts, and game makers, as well as how the online world is supporting their learning, sharing, and civic engagement. The cases we’ve developed over these years have both confirmed many of the core values and principles of the connected learning model, as well as challenged them in some unexpected ways.
Following from the digital youth project, we’ve found that the online world, even as it has expanded into more diverse areas of interests, platforms, and mobile devices, continues to be a rich source of not only social connection, but of peer learning. We’ve also confirmed that while interest-specific learning flourishes online, it takes a unique and uncommon confluence of factors for that learning to connect to academic, career, or civic realms. We continue to puzzle over a core problematic of the connected learning research: what are ways in which we can more actively support these connections for diverse youth and their interests?
The cases have given us glimpses into how to answer that question in ways that deserve further investigation, and are the focus of a new round of research that we will be kicking off this year. In addition to continuing to observe the salience of peer sharing, reputation, and self-directed learning in online communities, some of the fashion and Starcraft work has shown us the kinds of roles that parents can play in supporting connected learning. When educators engage with youth interests, we also see them mediating between fan activity, gaming interest, and school. We were also delighted that we were around to observe interest groups activate around shared purpose and problems that can be mathematical or political in nature when the opportunity presents itself. Some members of the team have dived into an online experiment to support our own connected learning moments through a new web platform.
The diversity of cases that we’ve delved into have given us a new opportunity to interrogate what the barriers and challenges are to getting youth interests connected to adult-facing opportunities. We’ve seen that the winding pathways through which interests are cultivated, abandoned, altered, and revisited create challenges for researchers who are working to document that outcome of interest-driven learning and educators who seek to support it. Further, the specific nature of the interest, and the culture and identity associated with it have a strongly determinist effect on whether that interest can be productively connected to schools, careers, and civic engagement. For example, gamers and boy band fans may be learning a tremendous amount through their interest-driven engagements, but both the youth participants and the parents and teachers in their lives may be resistant to seeing these activities as academically relevant. The cases also demonstrate how the devil is in the details of how particular communities and programs are organized, and creating a high-functioning connected learning environment requires constant tending and adaptation.
These are examples of the kinds of topics and themes that have emerged as salient in our analysis. As we continue to mine our cases and data, we will transition the focus of this blog from reports from the field to analysis that sets the stage for the collectively authored book that we are writing over the next few months. The book will provide an overview of the cases and how they map a divergent field of youth interests, and focus on cross-cutting themes and dynamics that are illuminated by these different examples. We will look at the specific characteristics of interest-centered learning environments that support practices of help and feedback, reputation building, and shared purpose. Stories of individual learners and pathways will describe the varied trajectories we have observed of young people’s developing and changing interests and learning. We will also take a look at outcomes that are academic, career, and civic in nature. We are excited to be able to share the next phase of our work in this fresh new year!
Rhizomatic practice, cosmic interventions and time bending: What constitutes cheating when reframing academic space?
Rhizomatic approaches to learning: A study in how the stretching of time and manipulation of cosmic interventions links to issues of cheating and academic malpractice.
Cosmic Interventions as viable rationale for academic study
The emergence of this course, via Tweet, to my conscience was serendipity and perhaps more than that evidence of an inter-connected organic space in which we exist and which provides the pathways. Having already committed to a literature review that would largely focus on the rhizomatic approaches to engagement as the best way to discuss non-institutional learning, this actually felt like a cosmic intervention. I don’t actually know what a cosmic intervention is, or if it is in any way possible – it certainly seems outside the taught disciplines of the natural and social sciences. And, just like and at the start of the sentence, that seems partly the point. Rhizomatic learning is a non-theoretical theory that allows the discussion of the weaknesses of theories that can’t theorise about the things that exists beyond theory.
Bending Time: altering perception and the provision of unfair advantage
My own academic identity without the pressure release of rhizomatic exploration has been complicit in the maintaining of a series of practices, rules and procedures that seem to have hampered rather than helped in any creation of knowledge, meaning making, or contextual (or abstract) awareness. Continuing the quest for a PhD is perhaps the most symbolic of the ways in which complicity shifts beyond knowledge and growth as features in and of themselves, and become something of an externally agreed pattern of recognition that determines my learning. It is of interest that the discussion on the rhizomatic course has been immediate, engaging, free and allowed me to find time in a calendar that always seem so limited in time most other weeks. This time aspect is something of a surprise and I am not sure how that was generated by Dave Cormier, but sure enough time exists for doing this and it feels natural too. Unfortunately, the time expansion feature is not available for other aspects of study such as the literature review and data records at work – these remain strangely stretched and cause a stressful feeling due to ‘lack of time’. Again, the natural and social sciences may have an explanation for this, it seems like a mysterious magic to me and this offers an additional hidden aspect. Is the bending of time cheating or a declaration of mastery in a particular field? Lyotard, (1984) considers that postmodernism is in fact characterised by a mistrust, a disavowal of meta-narratives and that this leads to,
‘…the crisis of metaphysical philosophy an of the university institution which in the past relied on it’ (Lyotard, J. 1984, The Postmodern Condition).
So, the ecology of learning is now divided by those that need to become weary, diminished and enclosed by a series of discredited theoretical models and for whom time is continually scarce, and those that are able to wander with open mind to develop a series of personalised approaches to meaning that define their existence and that offer some rhizomatic wonder amidst such wanderings. Clearly, cheating as a means of gaining an unfair advantage in a shared endeavour would appear to be at the heart of this dichotomous relationship.
Two options seems immediately available. The first, prove definitively that all meta narratives and theoretical concerns are fundamental truths and insist on adherence to these as they are the only possible ways that the world can, will and should be developed. Second, develop rhizomatic approaches to development and emergence and generate new models of communication, collaboration and creation. The obvious issue here is that the second seems much more enjoyable and has been indicated already, has the benefit of time bent in its favour. That this would be perhaps a benefit and could constitute unfair advantage could be contended again with the evidence that almost all governments and institutions are still so committed to option one that option two is unlikely to ever be significant except for a happy few.
Small plots of land and creating launch pads for abstraction. Cheating through collaboration
Sinfield (2014) expressed the value of a relatively limited yet tangible foothold in reality that can facilitate discovery and exploration in the realms of what is yet abstract in the work of creating a future landscape. In a clever piece of retrospective time bending, Bowie (1995, a small plot of land) took Sinfield’s ideas and identified the challenges that extending intellectual freedom can have on the individual. In Bowie’s interpretation of Sinfield the image is of a,
Poor soul [who we may] Spit upon that Poor soul He never knew what hit him
And it hit him so.
And it hit him so.
Poor dunce He pushed back the pigmen The barbs laughed The fool is dead. Poor dunce
He's less than within us the Brains talk But the will to live is dead And prayer can't Travel so far these days. The talk of your lives Standing so near Two innocent eyes Poor dunce Swings through the tunnels and claws his way Is small life so manic Are these really the days
Poor dunce Poor dunce.
He's less than within us the Brains talk But the will to live is dead And prayer can't Travel so far these days. The talk of your lives Standing so near Two innocent eyes Poor dunce Swings through the tunnels and claws his way Is small life so manic Are these really the days
Poor dunce Poor dunce.
(Bowie, D., 1995)
For Sinfield the influence was perhaps more difficult to offer retrospectively, having to first appropriate the views of French philosophers and then transmit backwards to Bowie after the event had happened. Yet, the analysis is pertinent and poignant and compelling. Additional views highlight that other commentators (dpakoha, 2006; liplex, 2006) found that the alignment of this song in a cinematic interpretation of the artist Basquiat meant the song was most likely a summary of the artists sad demise, or alternatively a general reflection on the tragedy of madness (songmeanings.com http://songmeanings.com/songs/view/3530822107858489083).
If we take Sandra Sinfield’s interpretation as the only one we are going to bother listening to (as I am), we can quite readily read Deleuze and Guattari’s citation as something magical,
"This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have A SMALL PLOT OF LAND at all times.".
The summarising of such a non-geographic space, or geographic depending on the ways the whole vibe feels at the time you think about it, suggests that Cormier’s enticing introduction generated something other than mere cosmic interventiosn and the bending of time. In fact, on a re-reading of the introduction,
What happens when we approach a learning experience and we don’t know what we are going to learn? Where each student can learn something a little bit different – together? If we decide that important learning is more like being a parent, or being a cook, and less like knowing all the counties in England in 1450? What if we decided to trust the idea that people can come together to learn given the availability of an abundance of perspective, of information and of connection? (Cormier, 2014)
The concept of cheating is less an issue of unfair advantage and more a case of a duty to remind those trapped in the earlier first option, of seeking resolution to unresolvable theory; that learning may not be as they perceive it.
To conclude and to reflect on the introduction to this course it is perhaps most useful to include a quote a mere four days after the introduction on the impact that the intervention has had on a disparate grouping. A grouping that Bosman (2014) considered, ‘…not a good sample group of the total world student population. Sinfield’s (2014) question serving to highlight the benefits of a freeing up of the concepts of learning and making accessible a nomadic sensibility,
‘Who knew that such a simple question - with no hook into recommended reading or essential videos to watch - or anything else at all really - could generate so many ideas - such excellent discussion... Such BIG FAT THOUGHTS?’
(Sinfield, S, 2014).
#rhizo14: the Community is the Curriculum
This week I sort of started two MOOCS – NovoEd’s Storytelling for Change and Dave Cormier’s Rhizomatic Learning: #rhizo14: The Community is the Curriculum.
I had a go at both of them – and they do both look good. BUT – I’m only going to proceed with #rhizo14 – it is more flexible and self-directed – it is setting us free to work together - and I already know and like quite a lot of the other participants.
Here’s some info on Storytelling for change in case it appeals – then I will paste in some cool stuff about #rhizo14 – including links to some of the best blogs that I’ve already stumbled across.
#storytelling-change
Home:
Key Learning Outcomes
By the end of this course, participants will:
Be confident in using stories, especially personal stories, as part of their communication toolkit.
Know how to tell stories and use a specific set of storytelling skills so that they connect with the hearts and minds of their audiences (an audience of one or many).
Have developed, rehearsed, and received feedback on one personal story as a replicable model so that they can build a personal “library” or “back pocket” of stories that can be used in different situations.
Be able to use a 5-step process to integrate story into presentations for change, work, or many other situations.
Forums:
#rhizo14: And so it begins:
The tour:
The FB group:
Dave’s opening blog posts thoughts:
“Rhizomatic Learning posits, among other things, that the community is the curriculum. That being able to participate with and among those people who are resident in a particular field is a primary goal of learning. In each of my classes the curriculum is, of course, filled with the ideas and connections that pre-exist in the field but the paths that are taken by the students are as individual as they are, and the path taken by the class is made up of the collected paths chosen by all the students, shaped by my influence as an instructor and the impact of those external nodes they manage to contact.”
Week 1 Things to do:
Introduce yourself, follow one of the threads of discussion somewhere. Comment on someone's work. Get acclimated.
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?
Bonus - Do lots of rhizomatic teaching? Tell us about it.
Some cool blogs:
Alan L: http://cogdogblog.com/
Emily P: un content ed – Blog http://t.co/E00BGoyCsi Challenge everything!
This fits:
Failing Superman: http://t.co/6aDQHGGhts- curriculum as endurance.
As does this:
Everything is a re-mix: http://t.co/LjNmTlLvRa - especially the richly textured beginning.
I just love this:
Irrational art series: http://danariely.com/2012/06/15/creative-dishonesty/Not dishonesty as much as a really cool research method.
And @dkernohan’s daily create challenges: http://t.co/OQ6j7uUMpp
A big takeaway for the weekend:
And if you’re holding back cos the tech scares you… this PPT essay on technology made me smile: http://t.co/Q3IzZMjufF
But the best note on cheating to learn comes from Ary’s wonderful blog: A small plot of land (http://fearlesstech4teachers.wordpress.com/):
“I am a former high school teacher with rhizomatic tendencies so I have been at war with public education for the last 20 years, defending my students’ right to think, question, create and express themselves, so hell yeah I’ve cheated! …for one I never taught from a textbook or assigned a workbook. I always got to know my students to discover what they wanted to read and write about. I asked them what they wanted to learn, and I listened. …It took months to set up this type of infrastructure and culture in my classroom, and honestly there were always those students and (their parents) who preferred to passively learn, answer questions at the end of the chapter, or complete a worksheet than to rewrite, remix and modernize an act of Romeo and Juliet, podcast it, or perform it live for their classmates. Some people prefer traditions. It‘s safe. My students took risks. They weren’t students; they were actors, producers, writers, directors, poets, pod-casters, radio show hosts, bloggers, analysts, reporters, detectives, mentors, lawyers, teachers, game show hosts, artists, mimes…they did it all! They created “stuff” all the time…”
Frankly in awe of Ary here for being able to do this in the public education system, and for younger students. I like to think that I managed a fraction of this in my evening A’level classes, mainly attended by adults wanting to wrestle with Shakespeare and Chaucer. I definitely try to mix it up in my University classes … but against the sheer monolithic power of state education ???!!!!! That is an achievement!
Right now we (my partner Tom Burns and I – with Quaco Cloutterbuck) are running ‘Becomingan Educationalist’ (http://becomingeducational.wordpress.com/). Deleuzian in form and content, we’ve started to de-territorialise – we are nomads – we are taking our lines of flight – and our lines of escape…
ETMOOC Anniversary and Noam Chomsky
Well, Tuesday January 14th was like old home week as the ETMOOCers gathered around our twitter feed (#etmchat/#etmooc) and chatted about what we had accomplished since starting ETMOOC. Quite a buzz! Some people described it as a high school reunion! As...
Author’s Declaration (Updated)
Author’s Declaration
I am wearing dark glasses in this picture to emphasise that some of the views in this literature review are not appropriate to a literature review. It must also be pointed out that the dark glasses (and hat) are in no way an attempt to disguise the fact that is also not me. This is an avatar, and may (or may not) represent who I am, and cannot be considered in any way to validate the views expressed here, which may (or may not) be my own. I promise that at no point will I actually believe that I know what I am talking about, and reserve the right to deny that if questioned by a member of any institution. I abide by the social media rules of multiple, transferable, transient identities and uphold the values of immediacy, engagement and interest. At no point has this work been submitted previously, except in cases where it has been, and in the situations where previous submission has been made this may (or may not) have been me, even when it looks like me. I reserve the right to alter any views that people disagree with and make me look stupid for thinking in the first place, without acknowledging the fact that I ever said that anyway, you must have read it wrong (it must also be pointed out that wayback machine type searches are not helping anyone in cases like this and read what I said last, not any earlier versions – except when earlier versions actually turn out to be more accurate, in which case the earlier version will replace the later versions). I promise to uphold the values as they appear to me at any given moment and, where work from others is submitted as my own, I will do so with the feeling that it is better than I would have written and as such is more valuable as something to share with people who might not have read it otherwise. I understand that using various platforms and having contradictory views on each in no ways diminishes my accountability or validity and in fact just shows how open minded I am, and willing to change (this may or may not include instances where I am contradictory based on forgetting what I have said at other times, in other places). Quotes attributed to others will remain in place unless evidence can be provided that they really did never say that and there is no way they could have altered their own blogs, postings and/or made any other moderation to statements that might be interpreted in the way I preferred. I acknowledge that everything I say has been said, if not word for word then certainly in meaning, many times before and by people who lived before I was born. From a position of atom-like, miniscule, titchy-tiny importance in the universal scheme of things I recognise that names and attributions are meaningless and all that really matters is the general patterns of existence that make a significant trace in the development of ways of being and that I will never be in any way cognitively able or distant enough to be able to appreciate the nuances of what I do now to any significant level of understanding and that a stigmergic state of being insists on my perpetual ignorance that can only be reconciled by knowing that things are as they should be and by following the natural, organic paths that seem right to me I am serving the purpose that I almost certainly was meant to be doing. I appreciate that standing on the shoulders of giant is a. dangerous b. impossible c. subjective and that giants are in fact millions of little things piled high and being on the top at any given moment is temporary and should not go to my head.
I will not steal the plastic wallet from the previous person’s submission because it makes my work look nicer if I forget to bring my own.
Signed: Peter Shukie
Steal this post
Dave Cormier’s open course – Rhizomatic Learning – The community is the curriculum - starts today, Tues 14th January. As I began to get oriented I saw a link to this post by Jenny Mackness. My first intent was to steal her post and paste it here. I discovered in the OLDSMOOC course last year […]
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