Rhizomatic learning, week 1: What happens when we approach a learning experience looking for support that makes it impossible to simply continue along previous lines?

#rhizo14 A collation of my postings to the google+ community  and the P2PU MOOC on Rhizomatic learning.

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On rhizomatic learning: Since 2009 I have been running interdisciplinary graduate courses that revolve entirely around 3-4 week cases, designed so that students can explore their own interests and learn from each other. The students’ work usually creates rhizomes from one case to the next. A glimpse into the process can be gained from http://wp.me/p1gwfa-xp and from student comments at http://grst.wikispaces.umb.edu/Evaluations and bottom of the page http://ppol749.wikispaces.umb.edu .

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Check out a new P2PU course —https://p2pu.org/en/courses/1208/science-in-a-changing-world/ that connects with the spring series of “Collaborative Explorations” around Science in a Changing World —http://sicw.wikispaces.com/CE (which parallel, but are separate from a graduate course at UMass Boston on Scientific and Political Change) — http://ppol749.wikispaces.umb.edu.
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The image I’d been working with was of microrrhizal fungi, not plant rhizomes:

sdhydroponics.com/resources/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/mycorrhizal-fungi.jpg

(p.s. see also: http://www.bumblenut.com/drawing/art/plateaus/index.shtml)

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Is anyone else wondering why the posts are mostly about cheating in the literal sense, whereas Dave’s video for week 1 and the “about this community” emphasize breaking away from (implicit as well as explicit) rules so that “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?”? What do people think about breaking away from — as against breaking — rules?

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From a 1995 reflection on my teaching, quoted in section 3 of a 1999 article, which seems relevant to the student’s experience of breaking away from rules and expectations:

Critical thinking… should not depend on students rejecting conventional accounts, but they do have to move through uncertainty. Their knowledge is, at least for a time, destabilized; what has been established cannot be taken for granted. Students can no longer expect that if they just wait long enough the teacher will provide complete and tidy conclusions; instead they have to take a great deal of responsibility for their own learning. Anxieties inevitably arise for students when they have to respond to new situations knowing that the teacher will not act as the final arbiter of their success. A high level of critical thinking is possible when students explore such anxieties and gain the confidence to face uncertainty and ambiguity.

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On dave cormier “people [coming] together to learn given the availability of an abundance of perspective, of information and of connection (=a major theme for the course):

Envisage the google+ community as a container, a space that you enter and leave mindfully. That is, set limits and give yourself a structure so involvement in the community does not lead you to feel swamped or fragmented or unsure that you can synthesize or keep in mind all the interesting items you are coming across. To this end, you might allow yourself a delimited amount of time per day, say 30 minutes, to explore online offerings or sharings but you would also preserve an equal amount of time (preferably when you are fresh at the start of the day) to gather your thoughts based on whatever is currently in view or in mind, which may be quite different from what you have to do for your work or project or studies. Such “refractive practice,” in which you give yourself space to “connect, probe, and reflect,” makes it less likely that you feel left behind when you don’t follow or respond to every thread that is offered, however worthwhile they seem at first sight (adapted from http://bit.ly/1dQJh8p).

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I have been chewing on principles or themes (other than “cheating”=Dave Cormier’s term) that help people–ourselves included–to learn rhizomatically. Terry Elliott ‘s reply to my post (https://plus.google.com/+petertaylorip/posts/e6Himo5G7qd) nudged me to share something.
My favorite model at the moment is the kindergarten class described by Vivian Paley in her book, The Girl with the Brown Crayon (GWBC). The post linked below provides the notes I made when re-reading the book last October. The sense I give at the outset of creativity as a process-in-context, which GWBC exemplifies, applies equally well to “finding one’s own way to succeed in something” (Dave Cormier)– I think.

http://wp.me/p1gwfa-yJ = a 2-part blog post that built on the GWBC and expands on dave cormier: “with the freedom to choose your own path (make your own map) comes the responsibility to both do your own assessing of what you need and where you are going and to remediate sufficiently that you are able to get there.”

p.s. The picture I present of individuals engaging in a process-in-context (at the start of the notes on GWBC and the 2-part blog post) tweaks dave cormier ‘s question: “What happens when we approach a learning experience and we don’t know what we are going to learn?” That sounds a little like rhizomatic learners start as blank slates without direction. Instead, we could ask: “What happens when we approach a learning experience looking for support that makes it impossible to simply continue along previous lines?”