Answers on a postage stamp

In my first teacher training course, back in 1987, I watched a video of a man giving a 2 hour class. During the whole session, which involved extensive group activities and learner participation, there was no lecture, and he used just one piece of “content”. A postage stamp.

Of course we didn’t call it “content”, it was resource or material, or part of the contents of a textbook.

I may be mistaken, but there seems to have been a shift in the understanding of the noun “content”, around the mid 90’s, roughly with the rise of the internet and the emerging need for business models for the Internet. From being simply what was inside something else, a container, it became something that could be packaged, and sold. Prior to this, what was sold was the container – the book, for example.

As things went digital, the container remained important for a while, so that though it was clear that the contents of a CD were tiny bits of information it was still felt to be necessary to package this, in a large, useless (hard-backed size) cardboard box. Packaging is important.

As the Net became the container, it became necessary to find other ways of thinking about selling the contents. When the Net is the container, the package is not often clearly visible and identifiable. This was of course disastrous, inimical to effective commoditization of the experience of going online. For example, if you buy an online course, it is hard to say where that course is. To get a “purchase” on the course you need something visible, something concrete.

So the contents of the package became the package. And what was a plural noun, as in “Table of Contents”, became singular. It became a concept. It became “King”.

This shift, from the perspective of education at least, has been pernicious. It has led to mistaken understandings that the material/textbook/video/syllabus/etc used in an educational experience, is the same thing as the educational experience, or as the learning that takes place. How many times have you heard a student say: “I missed the class, but it is OK I have the notes/slides”? It might be an easy mistake to make, given the pervasive presence of transmission perspectives around learning in our folk pedagogies, but it is still pernicious.

In 2002, when MIT launched Open Course Ware, the same conversation about content took place. The decision they made, to put their content online free, was accompanied by clear declarations at the time by Charles Vest, then MIT President, that MIT content was not at all the same as an MIT education. But the identification of content with the course, or worse still, with the learning goes on. Because it is necessary for those who wish to commoditise and control learning.

In this sense, it seems to me vital to question and contest the use of the word “content”. The very word shifts the frame of the conversation around learning. The term drives us to believe that learning requires “content”, neatly packaged, of course, by your vendor of choice. And that without Content, our work is incomplete. Thinking of content as a kind of conversation with the people who created it is a useful way to shift our thinking, it might also be valuable just to stop using the word, and go back to using words like “resources” or “materials” or “texts”, which are words that help to reframe the conversation.

Somewhere south of Wellow

We went riding today, out between the hedgerows, wending our way down leafy corridors. When the path opened out to hillside, we galloped, wind in our manes, until suddenly both horses veered, right, past the scattering lambs, away from the route we had planned…they were excited and fractious, tossing their heads, anxious to be moving forward. We gave them their head, they know these ways more than we do; each startle, each twitch, is a memory. They led us deep the woods, down a bridle path that was new to us, and as we went we tried to work out where this was leading, which track it would connect to, how close we were to the road, to the village. As we talked, relaxed, at the rhythm of horse and hips, we discovered how our mental mapping diverges.

She sees landmarks, fragments of experience; that hay-bale that shone in the sun, spooking the horses, that sign that says “Slow! Free range children” just at the edge of Faulkland. A pointilliste network of loosely located reference points.

I seem to focus more on the hills, and the curve of the valleys, and a sense that our starting point must be more or less “that way”.

As we rode we learned, about the landscape, and about how we learn the landscape, how each of us finds our way. We drew our maps in the air between us, made the learning visible.

All around us the brambles, the grass, the birches, kept up their slow movement through the earth. And the horses found our way home.

 

This is a response to Ellie Lighthouse’s thought-provoking post on mapping learning. Thanks, Ellie!

Cartographic conversations

Ellie Lighthouse in the Rhizomatic Learning theoretical discussion group on Facebook wrote a very interesting post about tracings and maps as ways of looking at learning objectives and subjectives respectively.

She quotes from a Thousand Plateaus (p.12): “The tracing has already translated the map into an image; it has already transformed the rhizome into roots and radicles. It has organized, stabilized, neutralized the multiplicities according to the axes of signifiance and subjectification belonging to it. It has generated, structuralized the rhizome, and when it thinks it is reproducing something else it is in fact only reproducing itself. That is why the tracing is so dangerous. It injects redundancies and propagates them. What the tracing reproduces of the map or rhizome are only the impasses, blockages, incipient taproots, or points of structuration.” She points out that the tracing could be seen as one of the “worst effects of goal setting/ assessment/ goal setting cycles in institutionalised learning“.   I see the tracing as a useful image, though perhaps these days less accessible than another that Simon Ensor pointed to in the comments on that thread. The Satnav, which gives you a single route, or at best a selection of three. Leaving aside the occasions where the route is not appropriate, the problem with satnavs is that that they are drvien by assumptions of efficiency. The scenic route is rarely an option, redundancy is impossible, and serendipity is an accident.

Ellie also quotes from a Thousand Plateaus (p.13) on maps: “A map has multiple entryways, as opposed to the tracing, which always comes back “to the same.” The map has to do with performance, whereas the tracing always involves an alleged “competence.“” She suggests that a map may correspond to a learning subjective. I am not so sure of this. Though it is more linked to performance and has a multitude of potentials, the map is perhaps one of the outcomes of a process that begins with subjectives. The map is what emerges as the learner explores the territory, and as each rhizome curves and turn and sprouts differently, so each individual map will be different. (And, obviously, the map is not the territory, as Borges so elegantly pointed out.)

The set of subjectives, rather than a map, is perhaps more akin to what a cartographer carries in her bag. These might include tools for viewing, tools for orientation, tools for sampling, tools for representation, probably some kind of prior impression of what the territory may involve (mountain range, tropical jungle, estuary etc) and a set of intentions (or at least a rough direction in which to direct one’s steps at the outset).

The challenge is perhaps the tendency for territories to collapse into maps and from there into tracings (or satnav routes). The tracing is a complete collapse, but the map that emerges from our exploration also exhibits this tendency, and however much we may label it provisional, it always involves a partial closing. It is natural to want to represent and summarise our learning, if only to be able to speak of it, and thus consolidate it, as well as share it.  But to do this is always to discard, and ignore some of the richness of what we have explored.

How can we sustain the potentialities that flower during a rhizomatic exploration of the territory… what conversations are possible between our emerging maps?

Intentions

I am back in rhizospace again.

This week we are to explore the notion of “learning subjectives”, and more specifically focus on this question: How do we design our own or others learning when we don’t know where we are going?

The notion of “the learning subjective” appears to be a way of questioning the idea of learning objectives. Though there are wonderful semantic rabbit-holes to run down here, I shall save them for later. In the term learning objectives, the word objective is largely synonymous with goal, or aim. A learning subjective would therefore in some way be the opposite of a goal. This might be some kind of non-goal, something that has no “goal-ness”, or an absence of goals.

But the focus is on design. The assumption is that something has to be designed.

This assumption could be questioned, we could focus on the value of aimlessness, of not having goals. We could sit under the Bo tree…

But for the moment, the question is how we design…

The notion of design inherently implies intentionality, we design for a purpose.If there is an intention involved then there is a vision of some kind, an end, however nebulous, We can’t do “design” meaningfully without it.

This implies that in some way we “do” know where we are going. The question is perhaps more about whose way it is, whose intention? The word “subjective” implies a self-defined intention. The rhizome sprouts upward through the rich patch of nutrients known as critical pedagogy.

If we do know where we are going, what do we know about it, we know it is unpredictable, perhaps uncharted, it is a place where the usual course structure and linearity is not present, a place where we make the road as we walk it. Designing then is about preparing ourselves for the unknown and the unpredictable. It’s about providing the tools, resources and companions that will help us deal with the unexpected, filter and select what we find, choose paths, orient ourselves. This rhizome emerges into a thicket called metalearning.

But there is another assumption underlying the question, which is that at some point we actually do know where we are going. On the face of it we might, but from some perspectives the linearity of learning through courses looks more like a seductive fiction. Though a curriculum may be set out on paper, and a set of learning objectives defined and later assessed, what is actually enacted in the learning space is usually divergent from that formal curriculum, and the lived experience of the curriculum for each learner is likely to be even more divergent. Our formal assessments focus on compliance with curricular objectives but fail to explore all the other learning that takes place. Every classroom is full of the invisible rhizomes of learner’s thoughts, growing in and outside, beyond and through the syllabus.

This learning is something we can only guess at, in this respect as “designers” we don’t know where we are going. We may draw elegant maps with learning objectives and a set path, but the mind of the learner may well decide to explore the lonely mountains at the corner of the map, or the whale-monstered sea-bottom, or look at the hand holding the map, and the person behind it. We and they need equipment for that journey, and the equipment involved is largely emotional and attitudinal, a mindset. We need to help them, and ourselves, develop the wherewithal to thrive in uncertainty, and the autonomy to stray, and bloom.

May the road rhize with you!

Marram grass

The elusiveness of the term community, or perhaps the jaded quality of the word raises the challenge of mapping “community” in any useful sense. The idea of community as curriculum could be understood as essentially getting rid of the concept of curriculum and working with the “community” at hand. This is a useful approach that I have found works well with demotivated learners, and though I have not participated UMW’s ds106 course seems to work in a similar direction very successfully.

If however curriculum is still a useful notion, and we wish to frame community as curriculum, then we need to further discuss what community involves. In a previous post I mentioned some of the elements that may form part of it, but left out perhaps the most important one, perhaps because it is so obvious, interaction. Communities involve interactions between individuals and groups of individuals and indeed with other communities through networks. When these interactions are rich, conversations emerge, and when these conversations are rich, when they go beyond serial monologue, dialogue can be developed (in the sense used for example by Freire, Böhm or Buber). This kind of interaction, though hard to achieve, could perhaps go some way toward revealing and contesting the power relations that Mariana Funes refers to. It is also perhaps what we should be looking for, at that campfire in the dunes, as a way of focusing and mapping our learning. I believe marram grass is a rhizome J

In this sense, it may be that instead of community as curriculum, we might explore the notion of the conversation as curriculum.

Community as curriculum

Like so many terms around online learning, the word “community” has become slippery with overuse. It has been sequestered, reinterpreted, mixed, matched etc. until it is hard to know what is understood when the word is used. It is probably something to do with groups of people in a shared space, or domain, maybe with shared interests, maybe a shared history, maybe even a shared discourse, but tying it down is harder. The edges seem to be loose, and it might be ok to be on the edges. Mostly though it’s just warm fuzz, a kind of happy “social” word, and statistically the use of the word probably has more to do these days with your purchasing habits than any of these other factors. Certainly some way from the literature on communities from the 90’s (Wenger etc). This preamble just to clarify the lack of clarity.

So, when we say the community is the curriculum, what might we be getting at. There are two kinds of communities that might be referred to here. One could be a cousin of the “community of practice”, the people who are active in a specific domain, who walk its walk and talk its talk, they might be described as the experts in the domain. In some senses the “prescribed” or official curriculum has always tended to be presented as based on what is seen as relevant in the domain it purports to refer to. The number of layers in that sentence may make it clear that there are many ways in which curricula fail to actually match the realities they are supposed to relate to, but I will leave that for a possible later post

The other community we might speak of is the “learning community” or perhaps more accurately the “community of learners”. In any given domain this relates to the correspondent community of practice insofar as the objective for a good part of the learners is to become in some way participants in that community of practice. They want be able to “walk the walk and talk the talk”. It can be argued that by virtue of their interest, they are already legitimate peripheral participants in the community, and that the progress of their learning can be viewed as progress into the community.

The problem is that the learner community and the community of practice are very different in terms of what they know, what they know how to do, and how they talk about it, – if these can be separated. They also tend to be active in very different contexts, the locus of learning is often far removed from the locus of practice. In defining curriculum, which of the two notions of community should be given greater emphasis? This leads right back to what appears to be a recurring theme in #rhizo14; the way power relations play out in learning.

A further issue around curriculum is the issue of which curriculum we are focussing on. Is it the official curriculum as handed down from the “powers that be”, ministries agencies etc.? Is it the institutional curriculum, the interpretation by educational institutions of official curricula through their scheduling, staffing, resourcing, assessment and other decisions? Or the enacted curriculum, what actually goes on in the learning “space”? There are other curricula, such as hidden curricula, and learner curricula.

I get the sense, from the tenor of the issues raised so far in #rhizo14, that the statement is perhaps intended to mean that there should be no curriculum that is separate from the needs, interests, and focus of the community. The community (once we have decided what it is) should set the agenda. This is helpful if we are aiming to question the need for a received curriculum devised without reference to the community, or perhaps especially the learner community. However, beyond that it seems to me that the notion of community as curriculum becomes less useful. Any curriculum is in a sense a kind of map. It may be more or less effective as a map, but maps are necessary for orientation. We need to pay attention to who creates the map and how it is understood – power again – but the map cannot be the territory or it becomes redundant. If the aim of learning is to be able to participate actively in a community, then the community itself cannot be the curriculum.

Wodwo

The poem “Wodwo “by Ted Hughes has the flavour of the rhizome.

The Rhizome

The concept of the rhizome interests me as a lens through which to look at learning. But how does this metaphor help us understand learning? In what ways might it be useful? Some times it is useful to explore a metaphor. Here are a few questions.

1. A rhizome explores its enviroment in a search for nutrients and water, in the case of learning this search might be for the knowledge and understanding we need. What happens when we stop exploring? Can we stop, or is it in our nature? What happens to a pot-bound rhizome?
2. The rhizome lives underground. Much learning is also  hidden, largely invisible to surface eyes. What we find is often only explicitly framed as “learning” later, after the fact. What happens when it stays underground? Do we need to force it to surface, if that is possible? Do all the nodules spreading out under the surface feed the flowers that grow up from specific nodes? Or are there dead ends?
   
3. The rhizome does not have a set path and its progress seems accidental. Examining the structure of the network that evolves can only be done when we dig it up, isolating it from the substrate that feeds it, but when we do this we find little explanation for the whys and wherefores of the turns and changes in direction, or why some nodes swell while in other places the roots extend onwards. Sometimes we can point to particularly rich places where the network tarried a while, or decided to sprout, but more often the progress appears to be serendipitous, resistant to easy answers. If we do dig it up and examine it, do we lose access to these rich places because we disturbed the soil?. Some rhizomes can be replanted after examination, but they don’t always grow so well after. How can we explore the rhizome, without interfering with it?
4. The rhizome works to sustain the organism it forms part of. At times it is almost dormant storing the future plant within it, at others it exists to nourish and support the growth above the surface, which is where the plant flowers. Is the rhizome the main organism and the surface expression a brief flourishing? What makes the rhizome flower?
5. There comes a point where metaphors break down. Teachers intervene to facilitate learning. Can we direct the rhizome? Should we? How would that work?

What do the answers to these questions tell us about education and learning?