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.

Why Rhizomatic Learning? Pt. 3 #etmooc

So does the rhizome bring anything to connectivism that it doesn't already have? I don't really know, but I do know that the rhizome helps me think about connectivism in ways that I otherwise find difficult. I also find rhizomatic thinking familiar and evocative for a teacher of writing and literature. To my mind, the rhizome is a metaphor, not a model. A model is created to represent something else, often eliminating much detail and changing the scale to focus on some salient aspects of interest to the model creator and to make handling easier. The rhizome does not model the educational process (or any other process) in this way. Rather, the rhizome is more a metaphor that evokes the way reality works by comparing it, in some points but not all, to the way a rhizome works. The rhizome is evocative rather than descriptive, and it is in no way prescriptive. Evocation works well for me, but the more explicit minded may find the rhizome irrelevant and distracting.

One cannot take the rhizome as metaphor too literally, then. For instance, some have complained that rhizomes are a multiplication of the same plant over and over, and they find little appeal in this kind of mindless repetition, especially when applied to learning. These people are taking the metaphor too literally. The rhizome of Deleuze and Guattari is not a homogeneous botanical system; rather, heterogeneity is one of the six characteristics of their rhizome. As they say, "Any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be" (7). Homogeneity, then, is not one of the points at which Deleuze and Guattari's compare rhizomes to reality. A metaphor invites one to explore all connections between the two things compared, but not all connections will prove useful or enlightening. Love is a rose, but not in all aspects.

If I understand the rhizome correctly, then, it is a metaphor of reality similar to the Enlightenment metaphor of the clock. Just as Galileo, Newton, and Descartes gave us the image of a clock to help us envision how the way too big Universe works, Deleuze and Guattari give us the image of a rhizome to help us make the shift from a mechanistic universe to an organic universe and to the math, science, and technology that make sense of that much expanded, different universe. Both the clock and the rhizome, then, are conceptual metaphors or frames, as Lakoff calls them, that describe reality in terms of either a piece of machinery or a plant; however, reality is neither a clock nor a rhizome. Still, I want to say that Deleuze and Guattari's marvelously twisted rhizomatic prose is about as close as one can get to the quantum, relativistic universe without way more math than I have. The rhizome is a wonderful metaphor in almost natural language for the complex systems that physics has almost completely accepted but still largely describes in mathematical terms—terms that I don't understand.

This may be one of the most important contributions that the rhizome of Deleuze and Guattari makes to connectivism: it emphasizes the shift from a mechanistic, reductionist reality to an organic, relativistic, quantum reality and it captures in natural language something like this new reality. In his definitions of connectivism, George Siemens talks about complexity and chaos theories, but his language does not capture complexity and chaos the way Deleuze and Guattari do. Of course, Siemens has a different audience and different objectives than did Deleuze and Guattari. Still, there are things you can come to understand only by jumping in over your head, and as Mark Twain wisely observed, "If you a hold a cat by the tail you learn things that you cannot learn any other way." Reading Deleuze and Guattari is like holding two cats by the tail. Most people are willing to forgo that joy, but I have found it an endless source of enlightenment.

My friend Dave Cormier makes a most important contribution here by connecting rhizomatic thinking to Dave Snowden's Cynefin framework, which posits five contexts for thinking and decision making, particularly in organizations: simple, complicated, complex, chaotic, and disorder. In his post Seeing rhizomatic learning and MOOCs through the lens of the Cynefin framework, Cormier says that both MOOCs and rhizomatic thinking and teaching match best with the complex domain. As Cormier says:

That description of how to act in a MOOC sounds just about right as a description of rhizomatic learning. The knowledge lives in the community, you engage with it by probing into the community, sensing the response and then adjust. Just like the rhizome. It is a learning approach that is full of uncertainty… not least for the educator. But its one that allows for the development of the literacies that will allow us to sharpen our ability to participate in complex decision making. Dealing with the uncertainty is what the learning is all about.

This, then, is a second important contribution of rhizomatic learning to connectivism: a focus on complexity. Rhizomatic thinking enriches the connectivist conversation, and it has allowed me to say things that I could not say otherwise. Deleuze and Guattari have given me language to speak of complexity.

The rhizome also helps me understand why I share Cormier's discomfort with learning in the simple domain. Cormier says:

I think most of what i criticize or, at least, what concerns me about education is the movement between the complicated and simple domains. Our bureaucracies encourage simple domain learning, things that can be tracked and analyzed. Research goals seem to attempt to take things from complicated domains and shove them down into the simple one. Our world is increasingly one where complex decisions need to be made… and thats the kind of education i’m interested in being involved in.

Most of education seems calculated to force all knowledge into the simple domain, with one source for truth and one answer on the test. Sophisticated instructors and some graduate programs allow for the complicated domain where "the relationship between cause and effect requires analysis or some other form of investigation and/or the application of expert knowledge" (Wikipedia). Traditional education, by and large, eschews the complex domain, where "the relationship between cause and effect can only be perceived in retrospect, but not in advance." Our traditional testing regimes demand clear answers and outcomes, and complexity refuses to play that game. Thus, our curricula try to make reality as simple as possible throughout most of K-16 education, only grudgingly admitting the complicated and almost totally denying the complex. The problem here is that most of reality is complex or chaotic. As near as I can tell, the truly simple is extremely rare in Reality and the merely complicated is almost as rare. Everything else is complex and chaotic (about 99.999% by my calculations). If 99% of education is forced into the simple and complicated domains and 99% of life is complex/chaotic, then it appears that we have a mismatch between what we are teaching and what we need to learn. Rhizomatic learning can help address this mismatch.

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.