Data Security and Boundaries

Data security is a problem for everyone, even for colleges and universities, as a recent post in The Chronicle suggests. Paul Voosen quotes Daniel K. Nelson, director of UNC-Chapel Hill's Office of Human Research Ethics, the team supposedly in charge on protecting sensitive data, "We're really just all waking up as a community to both the power and challenges of dealing with this." It is a serious issue, but I'm wondering if it is being defined correctly. If I take seriously what I've been reading lately about complex boundaries, then I know that I have to change how I think about data security.

It seems to me that data security has largely been framed in the simple or, at most, complicated domains according to Dave Snowden's Cynefin framework. This means that organizations have framed data security as a problem of enclosing well-defined, discrete data within well-defined, discrete boundaries, with well-defined rules for managing the exchange of that data across those boundaries with managed entities outside the boundaries. In this simple domain, the relationship between cause and effect is well known and explicit and people interact with the data according to best practices. This is something, I think, like the data in my checking account. That data is protected within strict boundaries, and the transactions, such as deposits, withdrawals, and inquiries, with that data follow well-defined best practices.

At least, that is how we define or frame the issue of protecting the data in my checking account. We want it to be a simple, airtight procedure, with reliable maintenance and audits of the data and reliable, verifiable exchanges between that data and the bank, my creditors, my employer, and me. The bank especially wants the process to be simple because it has millions of accounts, and it wants a simple procedure that it can reproduce and apply across all those accounts and rely on to protect the data in each account. Another way to say this is that we all want clear, inviolable boundaries around the data in my account, with well-defined and well-managed gateways through the boundaries that control the exchanges between the data on one side and appropriate stakeholders on the other side. This simple arrangement defines a simple system: my employer deposits data which I can use as money into my account regularly, the bank holds and protects that data, and my creditors appropriate some of that data regularly to keep my lifestyle going. The boundaries around the data protect the data and manage the interactions of the various stakeholders in this simple system. And by the way, it hardly matters if I stick to a strictly cash system. I move from virtual boundaries to physical boundaries (a safe or a weapon) to guard my data (money), but the relationships and boundaries retain pretty much the same functions.

Wouldn't it be nice if boundaries were really this simple? Unfortunately, they don't seem to be.

Rather, boundaries are complex. They are not merely complicated, which is just the simple multiplied with more parts and more gateways. Think of the complicated domain as a person (not me) with lots of data in lots of bank accounts with transactions among all those accounts and with all those various outside deposits, transfers, and withdrawals. The data security for this sort of complicated system likely requires much expertise to design and administer—not only  expertise from data security people, but also accountants and lawyers. Fortunately, my bank account is still in the simple domain, but I understand there are people whose numerous accounts are necessarily in the complicated domain "in which the relationship between cause and effect requires analysis or some other form of investigation and/or the application of expert knowledge, the approach is to Sense - Analyze - Respond and we can apply good practice." However, as with the simple domain, the complicated domain still has one or a few really good answers and practices, even if we often require experts to help us figure out what those answers and practices are.

The complex domain is different, for in this domain "the relationship between cause and effect can only be perceived in retrospect, but not in advance, the approach is to Probe - Sense - Respond and we can sense emergent practice." These are the financial systems of gamblers (aka day traders) who have completely uncertain deposits, transfers, and withdrawals with uncertain stakeholders, and all within ecosystems or markets almost completely outside of their control. They can win much and lose much, but they can tell why only in retrospect. They can sense emergent practices, and experience can improve their chances, but they can never guarantee an outcome.

Of course, I think that all financial systems, just like all other systems, are complex. Only a long, stable economy can give us the illusion that our financial systems—such as my little bank account—are simple systems with regular, secure deposits and withdrawals and a set of clear, secure relationships among stakeholders: me, my employer, my bank, and my creditors. As the 2008 recession taught us, all accounts are complex, with uncertain transactions among uncertain stakeholders within an uncertain, dynamic financial ecosystem outside the control of anyone.

Likewise, data security is a complex system with complex emergent properties, and we will profit if we view it as a complex problem rather than a simple or even complicated problem. More on that tomorrow.

Flexible Disciplines, Flexible Boundaries, and Making Meaning

I think I have a bit more to say about boundaries, especially in terms of the boundaries that distinguish the academic disciplines. I've been arguing that the boundaries between, say, history and physics are nowhere near as rigid and as static as academic purists might insist, but neither are the boundaries between history and physics imaginary, capricious, and unnecessary as academic anarchists might insist. (I recognize that I am creating extremes with my contrast of purists and anarchists and that most educationists lie somewhere between or even outside these two extremes, but it helps me to see my point.) Boundaries are both necessary for human activity and knowledge and temporary.

I rely here on a few articles by South African complexity scholar Paul Cilliers and by Dave Snowden's Cynefin Framework, and my argument, I think, makes a basic assumption: that education and educational structures are complex systems tending to the chaotic, rather than complicated systems tending to the simple. I believe this is so despite the enormous energy expended in wrenching education into a simple system. Education ain't simple. It probably isn't even complicated. It's complex, at best. To my mind, then, the biggest problem with academic disciplines is that we try to move them into the simple and/or complicated domains of the Cynefin Framework where their boundaries are fixed, explicit, and easily taught, with clear canons of content and methodologies. In the simple or even complicated domains, it's easy to distinguish the historian from the physicist. In the complex domain, disciplinary and canonical boundaries are much more problematic, though no less useful, even necessary. Paul Cilliers helps me understand this.

In several critiques (Knowledge, Complexity, and Understanding (2000), Knowledge, limits and boundaries (2005), and Why We Cannot Know Complex Things Completely (2007), for instance), Cilliers argues that knowledge is best understood as an emergent property "constituted within a complex system of interactions". This view of knowledge avoids both extremes of the purist and the anarchist, or as Cilliers more accurately calls them: the fundamentalist and the relativist. As Cilliers says:

An understanding of knowledge as constituted within a complex system of interactions would, on the one hand, deny that knowledge can be seen as atomised ‘facts’ that have objective meaning. Knowledge comes to be in a dynamic network of interactions, a network that does not have distinctive borders. On the other hand, this perspective would also deny that knowledge is something purely subjective, mainly because one cannot conceive of the subject as something prior to the ‘network of knowledge’, but rather as something constituted within that network. The argument from complexity thus wants to move beyond the objective/subjective dichotomy. (Knowledge, limits and boundaries, p. 608)

Knowledge, then, is not representational, "linked to the sign which represents it", but relational, "the result of a dynamic interaction between all the meaningful components in the system … itself a complex process" (Why We Cannot Know Complex Things Completely, p. 85). This presents an immediate problem, however, given the open nature of complex systems. If complete knowledge must account for an infinite number of interactions across the open boundaries of complex systems, then how do we ever attain actionable knowledge, given that we have a limited amount of time? Because we, as knowledge makers, are ourselves contextualized, and each context limits the number of system components presented for knowledge making. In other words, though a single rose is ultimately connected through its complex interactions to the entire rest of the Universe, the meaning of the rose is constrained when I cut it from my own garden and present it to my wife on Valentine's Day, which provides a bounded context within which meaning can emerge. The boundaries make the emergence of a particular meaning possible.

Of course, the meaning is no more absolute than the boundaries that enable it. In the relatively straightforward example above, the meaning of the rose will be slightly different, perhaps radically different, for me than for my wife as we bring our different contexts to the event, but it will be similar enough that we can at least speak meaningfully with each other—though we should be mindful that the very stuff of most romantic comedies involves the different meanings drawn by men and women from even so well-bounded and commonly shared an event as Valentine's Day. Boundaries in complex systems are not permanent or rigid, though they can persist in recognizable contours for long times.

So to directly address my concerns with Marion Brady's dismissal of disciplinary boundaries, I think he slightly overstates his case. We cannot dispense with boundaries in complex systems such as academic disciplines if we want to create meaning, or knowledge. Likewise, we cannot calcify our boundaries without destroying knowledge. As Cilliers says it:

One can, and often should, emphasise the interrelatedness of systems. Often the boundaries of systems are constructions we impose in order to reduce the complexity. This can lead to oversimplifications, to reductive descriptions of the system. However, if boundaries become too vague, we end up with a kind of holism which does not allow much to be said. … We need limits in order to say something. (Why We Cannot Know Complex Things Completely, p. 88)

Perhaps, though, Brady's discontent with disciplinary boundaries comes from the usual interpretation of boundaries as "something that separates one thing from another" (Knowledge, limits and boundaries, p. 611). In this view of boundaries, one cannot be both an historian and a physicist at the same time. History and physics are separate things, and one cannot be in both places at once. Of course, complexity and quantum theories ignore this kind of classical logic. Cilliers makes some suggestions about how we might think differently about boundaries, ways that make sense within complex systems.

First, "we should rather think of a boundary as something that constitutes that which is bounded. This shift will help us to see the boundary as something enabling, rather than as confining" (p. 611). From this view, our skins, those well-known and most familiar boundaries, don't separate us from the rest of the world; rather, they enable our interaction with the world by helping to maintain our own integrity as a persisting complex system and providing somewhat stable and recognizable contours that the rest of the world can engage and through which energy and information may be exchanged. Likewise, disciplinary boundaries need not separate historians from physicists, but they should enable useful, valuable interaction between historians and physicists, shifting and stretching as different issues supply different contexts of meaning, again enabling a mutually valuable exchange of energy and information.

Next, we should rethink our physical images about the place of a boundary. We must replace our visual metaphors which force us to think of complex systems "as something contiguous in space." Complex social systems, Cilliers notes, are not necessarily contiguous; thus, "parts of the system may exist in totally different spatial locations." This is certainly the case with history as an academic discipline, which is not a spatially contiguous physical system. This implies that a historian likely belongs to many different complex systems (families, churches, political parties, etc) and "that different systems interpenetrate each other, that they share internal organs." So where's the boundary? It's always provisional, determined by the context referenced at any given time for any given event. Furthermore, Cilliers notes that any node in a system is "never far away from the boundary. If the components of the system are richly interconnected, there will always be a short route from any component to the 'outside' of the system. … the boundary is folded in, or perhaps, the system consists of boundaries only. Everything is always interacting and interfacing with others and with the environment; the notions of 'inside' and 'outside' are never simple and uncontested" (p. 611).

So maybe that can address Brady's concerns with disciplinary boundaries. At least somewhat.

Socks, Complexity, and the Included Middle in MOOCs

In Chapter 5 of his book Manifesto of Transdisciplinary, Nicolescu says that the logic of the excluded middle applies mostly to simple situations while the logic of the included middle applies to complexity and complex situations. I think that Nicolescu's observation has implications for the Cynefin framework and for MOOCs. I'll explore these implications by defining simplicity, complexity, and the included middle in ways conducive to my argument.

Let's start with simplicity and complexity within the Cynefin framework of Dave Snowden. Wikipedia says that:

The Cynefin framework has five domains. The first four domains are:

1. Simple, in which the relationship between cause and effect is obvious to all, the approach is to Sense - Categorise - Respond and we can apply best practice. 
2. Complicated, in which the relationship between cause and effect requires analysis or some other form of investigation and/or the application of expert knowledge, the approach is to Sense - Analyze - Respond and we can apply good practice. 
3. Complex, in which the relationship between cause and effect can only be perceived in retrospect, but not in advance, the approach is to Probe - Sense - Respond and we can sense emergent practice. 
4. Chaotic, in which there is no relationship between cause and effect at systems level, the approach is to Act - Sense - Respond and we can discover novel practice. 

The fifth domain is Disorder, which is the state of not knowing what type of causality exists, in which state people will revert to their own comfort zone in making a decision.

I use a sock drawer explanation of the Cynefin framework. A simple sock drawer is a closed system of clean, homogenously coupled socks arranged neatly in a highly specific order: dress socks on the left and casual/sport socks on the right. Each of those categories is then sorted by colors (left to right: dress > black, grey, blue, brown, green and casual/sport > white, black, team colors. Everyone can readily see the relationships here and intuitively knows that this is the best arrangement for socks, and if I can maintain this order, then the task of choosing socks is simple, even on a dark morning (if you detect a tinge of sarcasm, then you have a sense of my opinion of the simple domain).

A complicated sock drawer is also a closed system of clean, homogenously coupled socks arranged in matched pairs by color and use, but also by fabric types, without labels. This drawer domain demands analysis and expertise, and often requires my wife's input as I cannot reliably distinguish cotton from rayon from blends. A complicated drawer messes up my wife's morning.

A complex sock drawer is an open system of clean, heterogenously coupled socks, including one or more unidentified men's socks that are not my size or style. Such a sock drawer suggests connections to and interactions with emerging practices beyond the strict confines of the drawer, the closed system. Choosing socks from this drawer requires an aesthetic sensibility and prayer, and it messes up my whole day.

A chaotic sock drawer is an open system of uncoupled socks—some clean, some not—men's and women's underwear, credit card receipts, spare change, and electronic gear, all in no discernable order. Both its contents and its interactions with the ecosystem are totally unpredictable. I have no way to choose a pair of clean socks, and this drawer messes up my whole professional and personal life and challenges my sense of myself and my wife.

It seems to me that much of human activity, both work and play, is an effort to move Life from the chaotic/complex domains into the simple/complicated domains (though I think lawyers work hard to move Life from the simple to the complicated domain, but that's another post). We can see why. A simple sock drawer reduces the aggravation in our lives and renders simple and mindless a task that most of us do not want to spend much energy on. Almost all factory processes depend on rendering complicated or complex tasks into the simple domain so that even an idiot can perform them. Indeed too much intelligence, curiosity, or humor is usually an impediment to good factory processes.

For the rest of this discussion and for the ease of reference, I will conflate the closed simple and complicated domains into the simple and the open complex and chaotic domains into the complex. A person's relationship with the simple domain goes far, for me, toward explaining that person's orientation toward life. A fundamentalist, for instance, will insist that the order of their sock drawer is ordained by the gods or the founding fathers and must be unerringly maintained at the risk of eternal damnation and ruin. A conservative will insist that they've always arranged their sock drawers this way, they see no reason to change it now, and they won't change it unless everyone else changes and proves that the new order is substantially better. A progressive will grow tired of the old arrangement and will try new arrangements to see if they work better, even if they don't. Free spirits will keep no particular order of socks. Perverse people will create an orderly sock drawer and then violate it. Kind people will organize your sock drawer for you. A holy person will organize your sock drawer in the way you want. A mean person will mess up your sock drawer. A tyrant will force everyone to keep their socks in the same order. In the U.S., Democrats will say you can buy only organically grown, fair trade socks, but you may pair them as you like. Republicans will say you can buy any socks you like, but you must pair them in prescribed ways.

You get the idea. It seems to me that, likewise, much of education is an attempt to move knowledge from the open, complex domain to the closed, simple domain, and it's easy to see why this is so. Only knowledge in the simple domain can be easily packaged for easy transfer from teacher/expert to student. (AN UNCOMFORTABLE ASIDE: I'm always amazed by the otherwise liberal faculty who become fundamentalists and fascists about the contents and arrangements of their own disciplines, their own little sock drawer. They will go to war over who belongs in the canon of World Literature or whether or not Pluto is a planet).

The problem with the simple domain for me is that almost all of Life belongs to the complex domain, and it requires much energy to force any aspect of Life into the simple. It requires even more energy to keep a chunk of Life in the simple domain. To add a second metaphor, think of a highway as a process of wrenching a strip of complex terrain into the simple domain for human use. The highway forces the complex texture of the land into a regular, flat, smooth surface. The highway absolutely remembers the pathway to a destination. It has a specific starting point and ending point. It has regular, reliable signs. Cars pass each other safely at 60 miles an hour because they stay on their own sides and follow the simple, explicit rules. This is a pre-eminently useful and beneficial use of the simple domain, and no one would sensibly argue for complex highway systems. Still, though a few highways have endured thousands of years, though seldom in their totality and never without some kind of maintenance, most highways will revert to the complex domain within a few years or decades after they are abandoned by humans. Complexity always wins out over the simple domain. Simple is hard to achieve, and I don't think it is ever completely stable. If it were, then we would all be fascists and fundamentalists. Nothing else would make sense.

Knowledge has an even shorter shelf-life than roads do, especially these days. Yesterday's knowledge is no longer a smooth road to effective and appropriate action in the world. Today, we must constantly map and re-map what we know about the world and how to behave in it. It isn't easy being a fundamentalist these days. You have to ignore so much, become so blind, to maintain the internal consistency of your beliefs and your logic. You have to ignore so much evidence to continue to believe that the Sun rises and circles the Earth each day. Mind you: there is some evidence for just that point of view (go out some morning, and watch the Sun rise), but the evidence for the Earth circling the Sun is overwhelming, if you will shift your point of view and look. Fundamentalists refuse to do that.

And this brings me to Lupasco and Nicolescu's logic of the included middle. Basically, this law is a response to the reality revealed by quantum physics which regularly ignores Aristotle's laws of classical logic:

1. Law of Identity: A is A.
2. Law of Non-Contradiction: A is not non-A.
3. Law of Excluded Middle: There is no middle ground that is both A and non-A.

For millennia, this logic seemed as eternal and as right as the universe until we learned that light, for instance, can be both a particle and a wave at the same time. It was like learning that the Sun does not circle the Earth and having to change all our ways of thinking and knowing. Lupasco's Law of the Included Middle says that there is a middle ground that is both A and non-A, and as Nicolescu insists, Lupasco demonstrated that this logic was rigorous, internally consistent, and empirically verifiable. Nicolescu added to this Law of the Included Middle ideas about the different levels of Reality and Perception, and all of a sudden we gained a reliable way of knowing the world that maps to things we had divined and intuited earlier, but couldn't quite say. As Nicolescu points out in his Manifesto, a simple road follows classical logic: it has two sides (A and non-A, left and right) and there is no middle ground that is both A and non-A. We know which side is ours, and we violate the distinction between left and right at our peril and the peril of others. But this clear distinction between left and right holds only at the flat, untextured level of everyday traffic, and if we shift our point of view outward to the cosmic level or inward to the atomic level, then we readily see that the contradictions disappear. There is a middle ground where left is right and right is left. Or perhaps it's better to say that from a different level of Reality, left and right no longer make sense and cease to be a contradiction.

We've always intuitively known that a shift in point of view to a new level could obviate contradictions at another level—that's what therapy, conversions, and paradigm shifts are all about—but fundamentalists (political and scientific as well as religious) have always tried to flatten Reality into a single, simple domain like road kill on a highway. If you can never transcend the flat surface of the highway, then left is always left, right is always right, and there is no middle ground, no fifty shades of gray. But if you accept that Reality is complex, with different textures, different laws, different logics working across different levels and scales, then you can see the Included Middle. You see that right is right and left is wrong works only at a certain level and in a narrow place and time. The logic and utility of that simple level can be most valuable, but we should not allow that value and utility to trap us at that level. To return to my sock drawer analogy, the order in my drawer is very useful to me, but I should not be trapped by that utility. No drawer is sufficiently large to accommodate and account for all socks, and if it were, it wouldn't be useful to me. To extend this to education, I should not present my sock drawer (or my view of British Romanticism or physics or whatever) as the only way to do socks.

And this brings me at long last to MOOCs and their connection to Cynefin and the Included Middle. The traditional class built around a single teacher/expert almost of necessity encourages a single, simple view of Reality (British Romanticism or physics, for instance). Even if the enlightened teacher works against this tendency, students will tend to venerate the teaching and preaching and flatten other expert opinions into simple contradictions to be ignored or discounted. This is so especially if the teacher is a great person. In the early 1980s, I had the great fortune to study under Nobel prize winning author Isaac Bashevis Singer, and though he was himself an incredibly rich and complex artist with a complex view of Reality, his voice was so strong and convincing that we students took his sayings as gospel. For a while, all literature for me was Singerian, and I inhabited a delightful, but simple domain. I don't regret the experience at all, but even a mind as rich, intricate, and complex as Singer's is not sufficient to account for all of reality, not even the literary reality. We have all had other, lesser teachers who were tyrants in one way or another, both benevolent and not, intent upon forcing a simple view of biology or business on their students.

A connectivist MOOC, on the other hand, provides an ideal platform for a complex exploration of the Included Middle. Even if a given MOOC starts with a specific content, agenda, and exposition by facilitators, its open nature mandates that participants rip, mix, and burn, or in the more accurate words of Dave Cormier:

1. orient,
2. declare,
3. network,
4. cluster, and
5. focus.

MOOCs are one of the best platforms that I know of for moving education from the simple domain to the complex domain, a place that I find much more engaging and rewarding. This is not to say that all MOOCs embrace the complex, as many xMOOCs have demonstrated. Still, I am convinced that connectivist MOOCs will persist and will show all of us how, in the long run, complex education takes us farther than simple education. More and more of simple education (the multiplication tables, for instance) is being moved to our machines, and I do not see this trend changing, regardless of our personal views about it. Machines are teaching the simple and they are even removing the need for learning the simple (I really don't know that we will still be teaching children their multiplication tables 30 years from now). I think the complex domain is the future of education, especially higher education, and MOOCs are one of the most concrete steps toward that future.

Simple vs. Complex Definitions

Dave Cormier's post A review of rhizomatic learning in Mendeley led me to an engaging conversation about definitions, especially a definition of rhizomatic learning. This is a topic that keeps returning to me, and I have not sufficiently worked through it, but I keep trying because I think it is important to the discussions about connectivism and rhizomatic learning.

Definitions are important to any discussion, for without a working definition, conversation is almost impossible. In many ways, definitions are the bedrock of traditional education, especially to what Cormier calls "the basics." Much class time from kindergarten all the way through baccalaureate higher education is spent on defining colors, times tables, history dates, science terms, parts of speech, and literary genres. The problem, it seems to me, stems from our standard method of defining, which I believe is reductionist and essentialist in nature. What do I mean by that?

First, traditional definitions reduce a concept—let's pick the four major learning theories—to a few usually salient and so-called essential features. A recent infographic from Edudemic entitled A Simple Guide To 4 Complex Learning Theories lists and defines the theories this way:

1. Behaviorism: Learning is a process of reacting to external stimuli.
2. Constructionism: Learning is a process of acquiring and storing information.
3. Cognitivism: Learning is a process of constructing subjective reality based ???
4. Connectivism: Learning is a process of connecting specialized nodes or information sources.

For the moment, let's ignore whether or not we think these definitions reliably capture the essential features of each theory. Let's note instead that they are standard definitions. They reduce complex theories to a couple of essential characteristics. A traditional education course might say: if you want to understand connectivism, at least well enough and long enough to pass the test, then learn an eleven-word formula that effectively reduces the life's work of Siemens, Downes, Cormier, and countless other scholars to a process of connecting specialized nodes or information sources. Well, if that's all it is, then why didn't George just say that to begin with and save us all this work and talk? Of course, this is not connectivism, and if you are like me, you find this kind of reductionism repugnant and inadequate. It takes us almost nowhere. It takes those poor students almost nowhere, at least, nowhere beyond a grade on a test.

So why do we do this? I think we are seeking clarity, stability, and control. The flux of life is troubling and troublesome to most of us, and we want to define it away. We want clarity, or clear boundaries between this and that. So we say that behaviorism is reacting to external stimuli, and connectivism is connecting nodes—as if behaviorists can't connect things and connectivists can't react to external stimuli. This is little more than arranging your sock drawer—not a bad thing to do, but hardly sufficient to build a life or an education around. And we want stability. Once we define light socks on this side and dark socks on that side, then we don't want anybody messing with those categories. We can be outraged at those who will re-arrange our drawers (I'm thinking of a certain spouse here) putting cotton socks here and synthetics there, or dress socks for dark shoes, dress socks for brown shoes, casual socks, and athletic socks all in different piles. Don't these other people understand the inviolable order of the Universe? And finally, we seek control. When I reach for a certain pair of socks, I want to know exactly where they are and just which pants they go with.

So am I ridiculing this drive toward clarity, stability, and control? Absolutely not. Life is much easier with clarity, stability, and control, and much of our time and energy is spent blocking out well-ordered social, economic, political, religious, and familial spaces for ourselves. In terms of Dave Snowden's Cynefin framework, which Dave Cormier uses in his post Seeing rhizomatic learning and MOOCs through the lens of the Cynefin framework, we are constantly trying to move as much of life as possible from the chaotic, complex, and complicated zones into the simple zone. If my socks are arranged as I want them in my sock drawer, then I don't have to think much about them anymore. The sock realm of my life is now simple, which reduces my expenditure of cognitive and physical energy for an issue that I don't really want to engage much anyway. As with our socks, we want to move connectivism into the simple zone. Once I've made connectivism simple by reducing it to couple of essential characteristics and creating distinct, stable boundaries between it and other theories, then I don't have to think about it much anymore. I've nailed it. This gives me a sense of clarity, stability, and control.

So what's wrong with clarity, stability, and control? Nothing, except the Universe doesn't seem to be arranged that way. Reality has a way of becoming un-nailed and slipping out of our comfortable categories, of fleeing down lines of deterritorialization in what Deleuze and Guattari call asignifying ruptures. Modern physics seems to suggest that very little of the Universe is simple and that all of that most interesting and salient part of the Universe that we call Life exists in the complex zone between the merely complicated and the radically chaotic. Certainly, connectivism and rhizomatic education exist in the complex zone. By the time they have moved securely into the simple zone, most of us will have lost interest in them. And look at what has happened to MOOCs. We early participants in cMOOCs thought we had them fairly well defined, and then Coursera and edX came along to re-arrange the sock drawer. Life does that, and we shouldn't have tried to reduce MOOCs to a single thing anyway.

So the big problem for me is that definitions based on reductionism and essentialism try to move complex things into the simple zone, obscuring a thing rather than clarifying it. How so? First, a reductionist definition treats the definition as an end point rather than a beginning point. It stops conversation rather than starts it. Most teachers know that the quickest way to end a classroom discussion is for the teacher to give the answer. After you have the right answer, what else needs to be said? That issue is closed. Unlike simple, reductionist definitions, complex definitions take a definition as a starting point, as DNA which is constantly unfolding into a new entity, like a snowflake: recognizable as a snowflake, and yet totally unique. If snowflakes are that complex an entity, then how much more complex are humans and societies? We need definitions of snowflakes and people and theories that start with a few elements and processes (DNA) and work outward to an infinity of forms, not definitions that work inward toward one form with a few distinguishing features. Of course, this approach to defining really messes with the whole regime of multiple-choice tests.

Then, simple definitions remove the person from the definition. One of the great lessons of modern physics is that no observation or calculation or definition can be made aside from an observer, calculator, or defining agent. We can't leave people out. Any definition of connectivism must account for the point of view of the person defining it. I value the Oxford English Dictionary for its inclusion of writers who have used a given word in a given way. That's a step in the right direction. Complex definitions recognize the issue of point of view and build it into the definition.

I'll write more tomorrow about definitions.