Tag Archives: #rhizo14

My blogging journey⤴

from

word cloud with words from my thesis title

I started my blog on 17th July 2012, originally as a WordPress.com hosted site. I blogged sporadically about conferences I’d attended, bits of philosophy that interested me (at the time I was a tutor in Philosophy as well as a learning technologist) and other random thoughts. Looking back at it in order to write this post I can see that right from the beginning I was using this as a way to find my voice and sort out my thoughts.

On Feb 16th 2016 I moved my blog over to one of N’s servers with a .co.uk url, with his help, and I’ve had the same ‘self-hosted’* blog since then, still using WordPress – and still using the Twenty Ten theme because I like it.

* I say ‘self’ as it’s not me that does any of it – N sorts out all of the hosting for me.

In 2014 my love of Deleuze and Guattari* and their writings about rhizomes led me to sign up for a ‘course’ that Dave Cormier was hosting called Rhizomatic Learning – The community is the curriculum – or #rhizo14 as we called it (as that was the hashtag that we used for this event).

* The name of my blog, and my name across social media, comes from a concept from D&G.

Rhizo14 gave me a community to bounce ideas off, and with, and helped me to really kick start my blogging into a regular practice. During the event we had various different places across social media where we chatted – a Facebook group, a Twitter hashtag and a G+ group, but no one central place. My blog gave me somewhere that I could curate my conversations and know that I’d be able to find them again later. It was also good for writing long form posts that I could take my time over.

Through the people I met during rhizo14 and rhizo 15 (the second iteration of the event) I was introduced to another community called Connected Learning Massive(ly) Open Online Collaboration CLMOOC,  who at the time were running annual CPD summer courses which I participated in for the first time in June 2015. In 2016 I answered a call for volunteers to help run the 2016 run of the summer course and I became a part of the core facilitation team. These events ran with a combination of Google Drive, a WordPress blog and a newsletter, with a lot of conversation happening over G+ and Twitter. Participants were encouraged to use their personal blogs to curate their activities and share these with others, as I do on mine. Later I also decided to use this community as the basis for my PhD The emergence of participatory learning: authenticity, serendipity and creative playfulness.  My supervisor appreciated my use of blogging for reflective writing and encouraged me to use my blog as a way of talking about my research, and this helped me to make my research more participatory because I could write about my tentative findings and ask the community to validate them. This also made me think a LOT about the ethics of participatory and open research.

During the pandemic I found it pretty hard to keep publishing my own blog posts as well as supporting others at my institution, so I started posting my weekly #SilentSunday photos as a way of maintaining some sort of posting presence – I am currently up to number 126 of these. That meant that when I did have the head space to start writing blog posts again it didn’t feel like resurrecting a dead place.

I don’t usually get huge numbers of people reading my blog, though there are sometimes spikes, so recently I was a little surprised to get a notification telling me that my blog was getting a lot of hits. When I checked I found out that these were related to one recent blog post. I’d taken a  quick photo of some street art as I walked through Glasgow one day, and posted it with the title A Glasgow Banksy. It must have been posted on social media somewhere, because a few days after I had published it I started getting over 1,000 visits a day to that post for a few days. So that might be my five minutes of blogging fame.

Through the rhizos and CLMOOC, and particularly thanks to my friend Ron Leunissen, I was introduced to #DS106 and the Daily Create.  As it says on its web pages, The Daily Create is a “space for regular practice of spontaneous creativity”. Every day at 5am EST a new challenge (Today’s Daily Create – TDC) is posted on a WordPress blog thanks to the technical wizardry of Alan Levine. This might be a visual challenge asking you to share a photo you’ve taken or photo edit one that is shared. Maybe you’ll be asked to write a poem or a story, produce a video or make a gif. Often the prompt just asks you to respond in a creative way without stipulating a medium. And, even if the prompt does indicate a specific medium you don’t have to comply – it’s up to you what you do (or don’t) do. Some people complete the TDC every day, others dip in and out from time to time. There’s no prizes, and  no sanctions. The only rule is to MAKE ART, DAMMIT!

After lurking for a while I completed my first TDC  on March 16th 2016, and have done this every day since November 22nd 2017 – that’s 2702 consecutive days so far. In 2018 (I think?) I answered a call to help behind the scenes, and I’ve been doing that on and off since then (and a lot more on than off recently). It’s not as hard as it sounds – a few of us submit ideas for the daily create and we make sure that there’s always about a week’s worth in the queue – either new ones that have been submitted or reposts of earlier ones (with over 4800 already published there’s a lot of really good ideas to reuse and I really enjoy using the random search facility to find these). I also find that this triggers the creative part of my brain in another way – as I am going about my life on the internet I often get an idea for a TDC which I submit to the drafts folder to queue up later.

As well as my own blog, I also look after two for my Uni  and I run sessions to support colleagues who would like to try out blogging in an academic context. Our SoTL blog now has an editorial team to help us, but at the moment it’s just me looking after our Good Practice one. I try to encourage people to send me posts, and I wish I had more time to spend on it. That’s a project for future me.

As for my own blogging – I miss writing long form blog posts and I need to carve out some reflective time to do that. I do have a couple of posts that are bubbling away at the moment, and having this #blogging4life initiative has been fantastic for reminding me to get back to my own writing out loud. It’s nice to feel part of a community of bloggers.

My blogging journey⤴

from

word cloud with words from my thesis title

I started my blog on 17th July 2012, originally as a WordPress.com hosted site. I blogged sporadically about conferences I’d attended, bits of philosophy that interested me (at the time I was a tutor in Philosophy as well as a learning technologist) and other random thoughts. Looking back at it in order to write this post I can see that right from the beginning I was using this as a way to find my voice and sort out my thoughts.

On Feb 16th 2016 I moved my blog over to one of N’s servers with a .co.uk url, with his help, and I’ve had the same ‘self-hosted’* blog since then, still using WordPress – and still using the Twenty Ten theme because I like it.

* I say ‘self’ as it’s not me that does any of it – N sorts out all of the hosting for me.

In 2014 my love of Deleuze and Guattari* and their writings about rhizomes led me to sign up for a ‘course’ that Dave Cormier was hosting called Rhizomatic Learning – The community is the curriculum – or #rhizo14 as we called it (as that was the hashtag that we used for this event).

* The name of my blog, and my name across social media, comes from a concept from D&G.

Rhizo14 gave me a community to bounce ideas off, and with, and helped me to really kick start my blogging into a regular practice. During the event we had various different places across social media where we chatted – a Facebook group, a Twitter hashtag and a G+ group, but no one central place. My blog gave me somewhere that I could curate my conversations and know that I’d be able to find them again later. It was also good for writing long form posts that I could take my time over.

Through the people I met during rhizo14 and rhizo 15 (the second iteration of the event) I was introduced to another community called Connected Learning Massive(ly) Open Online Collaboration CLMOOC,  who at the time were running annual CPD summer courses which I participated in for the first time in June 2015. In 2016 I answered a call for volunteers to help run the 2016 run of the summer course and I became a part of the core facilitation team. These events ran with a combination of Google Drive, a WordPress blog and a newsletter, with a lot of conversation happening over G+ and Twitter. Participants were encouraged to use their personal blogs to curate their activities and share these with others, as I do on mine. Later I also decided to use this community as the basis for my PhD The emergence of participatory learning: authenticity, serendipity and creative playfulness.  My supervisor appreciated my use of blogging for reflective writing and encouraged me to use my blog as a way of talking about my research, and this helped me to make my research more participatory because I could write about my tentative findings and ask the community to validate them. This also made me think a LOT about the ethics of participatory and open research.

During the pandemic I found it pretty hard to keep publishing my own blog posts as well as supporting others at my institution, so I started posting my weekly #SilentSunday photos as a way of maintaining some sort of posting presence – I am currently up to number 126 of these. That meant that when I did have the head space to start writing blog posts again it didn’t feel like resurrecting a dead place.

I don’t usually get huge numbers of people reading my blog, though there are sometimes spikes, so recently I was a little surprised to get a notification telling me that my blog was getting a lot of hits. When I checked I found out that these were related to one recent blog post. I’d taken a  quick photo of some street art as I walked through Glasgow one day, and posted it with the title A Glasgow Banksy. It must have been posted on social media somewhere, because a few days after I had published it I started getting over 1,000 visits a day to that post for a few days. So that might be my five minutes of blogging fame.

Through the rhizos and CLMOOC, and particularly thanks to my friend Ron Leunissen, I was introduced to #DS106 and the Daily Create.  As it says on its web pages, The Daily Create is a “space for regular practice of spontaneous creativity”. Every day at 5am EST a new challenge (Today’s Daily Create – TDC) is posted on a WordPress blog thanks to the technical wizardry of Alan Levine. This might be a visual challenge asking you to share a photo you’ve taken or photo edit one that is shared. Maybe you’ll be asked to write a poem or a story, produce a video or make a gif. Often the prompt just asks you to respond in a creative way without stipulating a medium. And, even if the prompt does indicate a specific medium you don’t have to comply – it’s up to you what you do (or don’t) do. Some people complete the TDC every day, others dip in and out from time to time. There’s no prizes, and  no sanctions. The only rule is to MAKE ART, DAMMIT!

After lurking for a while I completed my first TDC  on March 16th 2016, and have done this every day since November 22nd 2017 – that’s 2702 consecutive days so far. In 2018 (I think?) I answered a call to help behind the scenes, and I’ve been doing that on and off since then (and a lot more on than off recently). It’s not as hard as it sounds – a few of us submit ideas for the daily create and we make sure that there’s always about a week’s worth in the queue – either new ones that have been submitted or reposts of earlier ones (with over 4800 already published there’s a lot of really good ideas to reuse and I really enjoy using the random search facility to find these). I also find that this triggers the creative part of my brain in another way – as I am going about my life on the internet I often get an idea for a TDC which I submit to the drafts folder to queue up later.

As well as my own blog, I also look after two for my Uni  and I run sessions to support colleagues who would like to try out blogging in an academic context. Our SoTL blog now has an editorial team to help us, but at the moment it’s just me looking after our Good Practice one. I try to encourage people to send me posts, and I wish I had more time to spend on it. That’s a project for future me.

As for my own blogging – I miss writing long form blog posts and I need to carve out some reflective time to do that. I do have a couple of posts that are bubbling away at the moment, and having this #blogging4life initiative has been fantastic for reminding me to get back to my own writing out loud. It’s nice to feel part of a community of bloggers.

#Rhizo24: the reunion⤴

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Fridge magnet with map of world and connections drawn over it. Text says #rhizo14What were you doing 10 years ago? On January 14th, 2014, #rhizo14 – or Rhizomatic Learning – The community is the curriculum as it was officially called, began. As fellow rhizonauts will remember, this was the brainchild of Dave Cormier, and was originally envisaged as being a six week event to explore rhizomatic learning. It was a whole lot of fun, and I made a lot of very good friends through it. 

Over the years since, some of us have mused about getting the band back together, and a few weeks ago a few of us started jotting down some ideas in a Google Doc with an idea of revisiting #rhizo14 in some shape or form over the summer of 2024.

So, here’s my suggestion: we find out who’s interested in being part of the planning, and we do some brainstorming over the next few months with the aim of running something over the summer of 2024. All are welcome to sign up for any role that they fancy with one exception.

It would be good to have a student body this time to practise with – and I am nominating Dave to be that body. 

So – who’s in? Comment here, reply to my tweet, toot or Facebook post, or indicate in the Google Doc what you think.

And here’s to more rhizomatic adventures.

Image is of fridge magnet sent by Clarissa to rhizo14 participants. It is still on my fridge today.

How to nurture a community of online learners⤴

from

Community.....
“Community…..” flickr photo by Kamaljith shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license

I’ve been involved in open learning for several years now. It started almost by accident, when some guy called Dave ran a crazy learning experience that we called rhizo14, carried on serendipitously into a sister experience called CLMOOC, and gradually became a part of my daily ritual as I started participating in Daily Creates. Much of what happens in these open, online experiences can appear to be random and unstructured, but beneath and behind them is a set of core principles and values and a tried and tested design. Those can be broadly summed up as belonging to an educational framework called connected learning. That’s helped me to learn some tricks to help all of us (staff and students) to teach and learn online. They’re at the end of this post, for those wanting to skip straight to the punchline.

Connected learning is a work in progress. It begins from an (intuitively plausible, I think) set of beliefs in the value of learning that is interest-driven, peer-supported and academically relevant, and harnesses the power of social media in order to make these types of learning better integrated into learners’ lives while attempting to make it accessible to anyone who wants to participate (equity is a core value). As such, it is platform and technology agnostic, although the values of open education are central to what practitioners do.

At the heart of connected learning is the thought that we live, nowadays, in a participatory culture. Sometimes people describe this as “Web 2.0”, but participatory culture is actually a richer concept than that. Henry Jenkins contrasts the concept of “interactivity”, which he describes as a relationship between a customer and a software company and a property of some social media platforms, and “participation” which is a relationship between people (which can be facilitated by use of social media). This means that we can’t take student engagement for granted, we have to explicitly design it into our courses. For those familiar with the terminology, I might use this distinction to explain the differences between xMOOCs and cMOOCs. I say this to note a difference, and not to imply that cMOOCs are always superior – knowledge acquisition and participation in learning are not, imo, contradictory concepts – each has its place. Anna Sfard makes this point better than I could.

To an outsider, learning in the open can look unstructured and random, and those new to this type of learning and teaching can feel overwhelmed, out of their depth, unsure of their own abilities, frustrated, scared or even angry. This goes for both learners (often called participants) and educators (often called facilitators). This is why it is so important to design these experiences carefully, and to think carefully about the types of support that can be provided. I think, in the interesting times that lie ahead of us, we are all going to need all the support we can get – both to keep ourselves going, and to help our learners. Teaching and learning online can be an isolated experience, as those of us who do it know only too well.

So how can all of this help us now? First of all I should stress that I’m not suggesting that everybody immediately abandons whatever they are doing and redesign their courses so that they are connected learning experiences – I’m not trying to make more work for anyone. What I am going to tell you about is some tried and tested strategies that have helped the community that I am a part of to emerge and continue. I’m not pretending to have invented any of these strategies either – just to have used or experienced them for myself.

  • Remember that your learners will be in many different time zones, some of which will have better connectivity than others. People who can’t participate are likely to feel very left out and uncared for. Think about asynchronous activities as well as synchronous ones.
  • Some learners will have state of the art technology, others … won’t. Think about designing activities/resources that can load on different devices.
  • Realise that there is no such thing as a digital native: some (staff and students) will find it easy to adapt to this new way of teaching and learning others … won’t. We can’t predict who will and won’t adapt. Think about how to support staff and students who just can’t work out how to log in/submit/engage.
  • Don’t rely on one platform or one mode of delivery. Systems could be overloaded, or not available for a particular device, or not available in a geographical area (YouTube content, for example, can be restricted by geographical area). Yes, this could mean duplicating important content/messages in order to ensure that everyone who needs can access them.
  • Don’t force anyone to use a particular platform (other than official, institutionally supported ones). Your students might well have ethical objections to using a particular one. Respect those. Never require anyone to sign up to a (non-institutionally supported/“official”) platform in order to participate. Data rights are human rights.
  • Tap into the altruism of others. Nurture a community that helps each other (both staff and students). Model this yourself, watch for others doing it and publicly thank them. Think about the types of roles that might be needed to build a learning community: as well as you (the teacher), you might look for particularly active and/or knowledgeable students to become mentors.
  • Structure informal activities that people can engage in if they want. These don’t have to take a lot of time to design – you might ask students to share something unique about where they are living, to tell others about their hobbies, pets, or family. You could ask them to do this by sharing a small image, a link to a website, or a forum post. These help participants to feel that they belong and can build a sense of community over time.

And, finally, reach out to others around you. Use your networks and don’t be afraid of saying that you are finding something hard. My initial experiences of all of this was a baptism of fire. Those who watch me nowadays often think that I always find it easy to participate, and have always found it easy, but that’s not true. In fact, I nearly dropped out of an early connected learning experience (CLMOOC 2015) because I was feeling lost, confused and overwhelmed. What happened next was, I realise, due to the carefully designed support structure that was in place. I shouted out into the void and someone answered. The rest, as they say, is history.

Rhizo Reminiscences⤴

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rhizo network made with gephi

Were were you six years ago? When I asked myself that question earlier this week I realised that I was participating in the first week of rhizo14

So much has happened since then – so much that I don’t know where to start. I tried to remember who I met for the first time then and put tagged some people in a tweet:

Kevin suggested that we all write something to mark the occasion:

So here’s an open invitation – to anyone who wants – let’s have a rhizo reunion. Let us know what you’ve done since rhizo14, or 15, or whenever it was that you first encountered this networked learning that we do. Tag it #rhizo, if you like, and share it with us.

Image is a Gephi graph of #rhizo14