Tag Archives: #rhizo15

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⤴

from

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.

Rhizo Reminiscences⤴

from

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

Reclaiming Lurking⤴

from

Stalker

Lurking is a potential problem for theories of social constructivism and principles of active learning. It’s also a problem for data analytics – if the student is not VISIBLE, how do we KNOW that they are learning? The invisible are easy to ignore, easy to problemetise, easy to marginalise, easy to other, easy to shame. It is tempting to chivvy them into participation, but participation without intrinsic engagement and motivation is futile, is facile, is inauthentic. A pedagogic approach that emphasises the visible over all else ignores autonomy, dismisses reasons, denies that another story might exist. This type of approach can force us all to join in the jolly learning games FOR OUR OWN GOOD.

All of this makes me shudder with memories of the forced jollity of childhood – the insistence upon JOINING IN – no sitting in the corner READING quietly while the rest of the (good) children are PLAYING NICELY together. (If you know Joyce Grenfell you will hear her voice here.) I felt odd. I am not shy, yet for most of my life I had no way of describing my need to sometimes pause and reflect before speaking. Now I know that I am not alone – that others (sometimes) feel as I do. But I digress.

When we other the silent participants we risk confusing what is countable, what is trackable, what is noticeable,  for what is important – we risk confusing meaningful learning with what is easy to assess. But learning is not a counting noun – Dave Cormier taught us that. And, if we are not careful, we send students the message that spending time in quiet reflection is somehow wrong, that spending time learning conventions is wrong, that watching is cheating, that this behaviour is FREELOADING and that is JUST NOT CRICKET.

Yet learning often takes time. Thoughts need to percolate. Fine wine is not made overnight. this blog post, for example, began with a discussion on Twitter, and has been knocking around in my head ever since.

So I am stating, here and now, that I am reclaiming lurking. I am reclaiming the behaviour, and I am reclaiming the word. Lurking is allowed. Lurking. Is. Allowed. There, I said it aloud (lol).

I’ve written about this with others before. I’ve used Lave and Wenger’s idea of legitimate peripheral participation to suggest that lurking can be a legitimate strategy for those new to a community and its norms. I’ve talked about how our Facebook groups can help shyer students, and those without English as a native language, to take their time to respond in their own way. I’ve run a Twitter chat to talk in more detail about this. I’m not saying anything new. But the current emphasis on student engagement and active learning makes me want to emphasise this more. Lurking is a legitimate behaviour. It is something we all do from time to time. I lurk, you lurk, we all lurk. (Note, by the way, that I am talking about a behaviour here, and not a type of person – lurking is relational, is situational, is context dependent.)

We learn a lot by doing, I know. We should encourage our students to participate. We should ensure that the digitally shy can be helped to find their voice, that students build their digital capabilities as well as their academic ones. All of these will help them both within academia and beyond it. But any insistence on one size fitting all, of active learning being the only ‘proper’ way of learning, needs to stop.

So the question becomes, I think: how do we, as compassionate educators, allow students opportunities to learn what, when and how they want to learn?

Image of Cagney, lurking in our garden

It depends how you look at it⤴

from

Blind men and elephant3

There’s a story that’s often told about a bunch of blind men and an elephant. Each man only encounters a part of the elephant and, based on their partial understanding, disagree with the others about the *real* nature of the animal. I wrote about this years ago on another site, now lost, and I can’t remember exactly what I said, butI said something related during rhizo15.

I’m not a fan of pretending that educational researchers can be objective. However, I don’t think that an implication of this is that all educational research is a matter of subjective opinion – there’s an alternative candidate that’s worth consideration.

Perspectivism is the view that every point of view is a matter of perspective.* Everybody has their own perspective, and it’s important to recognise that this might not be the whole story. This doesn’t mean that truth is subjective, or relative – perspectives can be better or worse than others, and some perspectives can be aggregated to make a bigger story, as the blind men can do in order to get a fuller picture of the elephant – if they take the time to listen to each other.

Rhizomes are like this. Each of us finds our own way of navigating then, each of us have our own perspective. We can often understand others’, and we can agree or disagree with them. Rhizomes are heterogeneous multiplicities, to use some of D&G’s words.

Perspectivism grounds my methodology and my ethical approach for my PhD. I am looking at CLMOOC and putting my interpretation on what I see there, then making my interpretation open to others to agree, or disagree. I’m not pretending to have all of the answers, but I am suggesting a point of view that I think is plausible. I think that’s how educational research should be viewed.

* There’s a lot more to this, of course. I’m not suggesting that there is no such thing as objective truth, it’s more complicated than that. But this will suffice for here.