The Rhizo Classroom: The Flow of Ethics

I made some rather large claims in my last post about ethics being at the heart of the rhizome, woven into the very fabric of reality, which implies that ethics is woven into everything that happens within education. I think my last post was a bit too vague, so I want to elaborate in this post. I lean very heavily here on my understanding of Edgar Morin's argument in his book On Complexity (2008).

I start with Morin's idea about the autonomy of complex, living entities, such as humans. According to Morin, all living entities, certainly humans, are open systems that exchange energy, matter, information, and organization with their eco-systems and within themselves. These exchanges bind us to and make us dependent upon our ecosystems at the same time as they distinguish us from our ecosystems. Humans channel these flows of matter, energy, information, and organization from their environment, through themselves, and back out into their environment, usually after some transformative, internal processes. These exchanges work across all scales that we are aware of: from the unfolding of our DNA to our roles in society, history, and the world. As open systems, we are simultaneously integral parts of the environment and distinguishable entities in our own rights. We are complex entities emerging in a complex environment, overcoming entropy through the constant exchanges with and flows through our ecosystems.

The degree to which we manage these exchanges—the degree to which we open and close ourselves to flows of energy, matter, information, and organization—determines our relative autonomy. We can resist and disengage from exchanges that threaten harm, and we can seek and engage with exchanges that promise benefits. I think all open systems can to some degree manage their exchanges, but certainly humans have this ability, this obligation. We can decide much about what we will take in and what we won't, and the growing complexity of our cultures and technologies have only expanded the range of exchanges that we can and must manage.

For me, this is easily illustrated. For instance, like most animals, we humans have a skin that manages many exchanges between ourselves and our ecosystems. Those exchanges—say between our skins and sunlight—can be of ultimate importance. Too little or too much sunlight, and we suffer, even die. Just enough sunlight, and we flourish as an autonomous entity absolutely dependent upon sunlight. We learn to make choices about our exposure to sunlight, and those choices enrich our lives or destroy it. Our autonomy is measured by our capacity to make choices about how much sunlight we are willing to expose our skin to.

Add the human technologies of clothing and of complex social groups to this skin/sun exchange, and our choices governing the amount of skin we expose to sunlight become much richer and more nuanced, more complex. How much skin we choose to expose or to cover also defines our autonomy, which does not depend on whether we show a lot of skin or show little; rather, autonomy depends on our capacity to decide how much to show. The person who chooses to be naked and the person who choses to be fully clothed are both expressing their autonomy within the context of some social group, some ecosystem. The person who is forced to be naked or fully clothed has lost their autonomy. Our ability to make choices helps define autonomy and, to my mind, entangles us in ethics. Almost always.

As we humans begin life, all our choices are made for us by caretakers. If not, we usually don't survive, which points to the absolute necessity of making choices about which matter, energy, information, and organization flows we engage and which we avoid. Parents insure that appropriate food enters our mouths and inappropriate things do not. Most of us then spend much of the rest of our lives learning what things to ingest and what things to avoid. Of course, some of us never learn completely, which too often leads to unhappiness, disruption, and even death.

The management of the flow of food is obvious, but we also must learn to manage the flows of information and organization that we ingest, process, and feedback into the ecosystem. We must learn a language, and then learn what to say and what not to say and when and where. We must learn up and down, inside and out, near and far, then, now, and tomorrow. We must learn fact, truth, and lie. We have many choices to make, and these choices all carry ethical considerations because they all perturb both our internal and environmental states and processes. Our choices promote or degrade to some degree our own well-being and the well-being of the environments that sustain us. These perturbations are unavoidable; therefore, we should be aware of the effects of our choices and seek to promote the wellbeing of ourselves and our environments.

For me, then, complexity science renders explicit the situation of humans as complex, open systems: we must engage in some flows of energy, matter, information, and organization, and we should learn to manage our engagements to the degree that we can. Making choices about what flows to engage and how to perturb our environments and our internal states always carries an ethical dimension. In their essays in Mason's Complexity Theory and the Philosophy of Education (2008), Kuhn and Morrison seem to want to limit complexity theory to the mechanics of matter, energy, information, and organization flows. I see no reason to limit complexity theory this way, though I understand that most scientists may do so under the delusion that ethics has no place in science. This is one of the main errors in modern thought that Morin addresses, a condition he calls "blind knowledge". Paul Cilliers, who also appears in Mason's book, also seems to have no problem including ethical considerations in his complexity theories, and his thought will appear in my exploration of how complexity science—or more broadly, complexity thought—helps frame a complex ethics.

So what does this have to do with education? When we frame education rhizomatically, as a complex, open system, we see that formal education is one thread in our process for learning how to manage the flows of matter, energy, information, and organization through our environments and ourselves. Of course, we—especially in higher ed—tend to focus on the flows of information that we present to students for engagement, but a little closer scrutiny reveals that we are always involved with all flows at all scales. When I'm in a classroom with my students, I exchange air and germs with them, smells, sounds, light, temperature, organization in the arrangement of the classroom and the lesson, social structures, poems, stories, plays, beliefs, and infinitely more. And because the class is a rhizome, all nodes across all scales are connected to all other nodes, just as Deleuze and Guattari tell us. Thus, we are confronted with more choices than we can be aware, far more choices than we can make, yet we are called to make them. Our situation as a complex, open system absolutely demands it. Not making choices is still making them. Not being conscious of our choices is still making them. The flows of information, matter, energy, and organization are incessant and demanding. We have no choice but to choose, even if we choose death. As I am beginning to see it, no concept of education is more entangled with ethics than complexity education.

So if there are more choices than we can make, then how do we make them? Another post.

Ethics for MOOCs: Assertive Humility

So in my last post I introduced the idea that engagement of complex spaces such as in cMOOCs requires ethical choices. We must define the open, shifting space to make sense of it, deciding what is valuable and what is not, what is in, what is out, and how it should be arranged. We must frame and arrange the complex space, including ourselves in it, and our ethics are revealed in this framing and arranging. This framing and arranging always unfolds with less knowledge than we desire, less than we usually recognize. In complex spaces, we are always acting on the basis of relative ignorance. This lands us in the first complex ethical issue and characterizes the dialogical nature of ethics within the complex domain.

Think of it as being one locust inside a swarm of locusts, far from the edge, and having to make decisions about your place in the swarm and the proper way to move within the swarm. Frame a space of about 35 locusts including yourself, and call it a collaborative autoethnography to give yourself a manageable focus on the swarm. What is the correct stance here?

The first stance is humility. You will never, ever have enough information within your frame to move with absolute certainty within the swarm. The swarm ever has surprises for you that come from all the swarm outside your frame that, despite your frame, is still interacting with the swarm inside your frame. This is always the case.

Like Woermann and Cilliers and Morin, I believe in general complexity as opposed to restricted complexity, both of which Morin defines in his 2008 article Restricted Complexity, General Complexity. Though many in science have accepted complexity and its concomitant incomplete knowledge, many complexity scientists still hold to the nineteenth century faith that we will discover the rules and structures of complexity given enough time and computing power. This restricted view of complexity still believes in the Theory of Everything (TOE). I do not believe in the big TOE. Like Woermann, Cilliers, Morin, and others, I believe that "Complex phenomena are irreducible, or, to elaborate in the words of the theoretical biologist, Robert Rosen (1985: 424), a system is complex precisely ‘to the extent that it admits non-equivalent encodings; encodings which cannot be reduced to one another’" (450).

Within complex spaces, we must always act from positions of relative ignorance, make our choices partially blind. At best, we are less blind than others—we may see 100 other locusts and not just 35—but compared to the swarm both 100 and 35 are near blindness. This is unlike closed systems such as The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (the APA style guide). Inside a closed, simple system such as APA, we can often act with absolute certainty. We should not presume to act with absolute certainty within a complex system. Our lives are overwhelmingly lived out in complex spaces. Simple spaces are the rare exceptions, won through tremendous social effort. In part, we humans have invented simple spaces to relieve ourselves of the unbearable weight of ethical choices. There may be ethical choices about whether or not to use APA style, but once APA is chosen, the ethical choices are eliminated. One cannot make an unethical choice in APA, one can only make an inaccurate or unskillful choice. Truly ethical choices belong in the complex domain.

And they are awful choices, an unbearable weight. Ask the poets and the prophets, they will tell you. What you don't know far exceeds what you do know, yet you have to make a choice. You don't know enough to make an absolutely certain choice, yet you still have to make a choice. This should make you humble.

Woermann and Cilliers define this humility in terms of a self-critical rationality and intellectual honesty "that makes no claim for objectivity, or for any special status for the grounds from which the claim is made. A self-critical rationality is therefore the outcome of acknowledging the irreducible nature of complexity" (450).

But as Woermann and Cilliers are careful to say, this does not mean that anything goes, that one choice is as good as another. We must still do the hard work of trying to understand:

We must still be competent at performing the necessary calculations and considering the relevant information, but we should also recognise that doing the groundwork won’t resolve the complexity and that we still remain responsible for our modelling choices, since each choice gives rise to ‘a different spectrum of possible consequences, different successes and failures, and different strengths and weaknesses’ (102). Knowledge acquisition is not the objective pursuit of truth, but rather a process of working towards finding suitable strategies for dealing with complex phenomena.

We are not likely to find truth in a MOOC, but we might find suitable strategies for dealing with complex phenomena.

I suspect that given the topic of ethics, many will not be convinced if I don't provide a rule, an ethical principle. I think a stance is the best I can do: Be confidently humble, or humbly confident. Do you like assertive humility? We are called to make choices based on questionable, contextualized information, but we are called to make choices nonetheless. Quite possibly another context exists within the same swarm in which our choices would be obviously, painfully wrong. Almost certainly another context will arise someday in which our choices are derisively wrong.

We are in an irreconcilable position: on the one hand, we must act; on the other, we do not have complete information. We are suspended between the need to act and our lack of knowledge. This terrifies many of us. Others reduce their situations to the simple domain. Others have too much confidence in their own knowledge. None of these are the ethical stance demanded of us. We must cultivate our knowledge and value, make choices in experimentation with the real, as Deleuze and Guattari say it, all the while knowing that we may well be in error now and will certainly be in error in some other context.

As Morin often points out, irreconcilable positions are the engines of complex spaces, where we are always poised between life and death, order and disorder—where all the fun is. As he says in Restricted Complexity, General Complexity:

We return again to the logical core of complexity which we will see, is dialogical: separability-inseparability, whole-parts, effect-cause, product-producer, life-death, homo sapiens-homo demens, etc. It is here that the principle of the excluded middle reveals its limit. The excluded middle states “A cannot be A and not A”, whereas it can be one and the other. For example, Spinoza is Jewish and non-Jewish, he is neither Jewish, nor non-Jewish. It is here that the dialogic is not the response to these paradoxes, but the means of facing them, by considering the complementarity of antagonisms and the productive play, sometimes vital, of complementary antagonisms.

A complex ethic does not seek to resolve these complementary antagonisms in some dialectic, but to cultivate the inherent, creative energy in these dialogics.

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I think I want to add something more specific. What does this assertive humility say about engaging a cMOOC? It says first that you should not expect to get it all. You can't swallow the whole swarm. You won't know all the people, and you won't read all the content. Neither will anyone else.

Each participant will try to frame the swarm as best they can, many as a traditional classroom, which will cause them much anxiety. Have compassion for them. They are using the frames they know for a space that they don't know.

Very few will frame the swarm as you frame it; thus, almost no one will experience the same MOOC. They will structure, interpret, and value people, content, and events differently than you will. Some will see a white/gold dress, and some a blue/black dress. No one's frame can claim an objective, transcendent, privileged status against which all other frames may be judged or assessed. This is especially the case with the facilitators.

You can join a MOOC such as Rhizo14 expecting to discuss Deleuze and Guattari and even find a few others who share your frame, more or less. Still, the group may frame the content and discussion differently. You should expect antagonistic frames. This is often where the most energy is generated, in the tension between opposing frames. You bring your values and value and present them honestly, knowing that others will bring opposing values and value.

Ethics for MOOCs: Complex vs. Simple Learning

I've just written two things that have left me dissatisfied, and both of them had to do with ethics. The first was a long comment on France Bell's post Cycling between private and public in researching Rhizo14 about the recent article she wrote with Jenny Mackness, Rhizo14: A Rhizomatic Learning cMOOC in Sunlight and in Shade. The second was my last blog post Anarchy as Freedom To. In both, I challenged an ethical position that struck me as inappropriate for education in the complex domain, but I did not provide an alternative. It's too easy to tear down and much harder to build up, so I need to repair myself. I want to start a series of posts that I trust will help me think through an ethical stance for education in the complex domain, which I think is the appropriate domain for connectivist MOOCs such as MOOCMOOC and rhizomatic MOOCs such as Rhizo14.

Much of what I will say in the next couple of posts is based on the work of Minka Woermann and Paul Cilliers, especially in their article The ethics of complexity and the complexity of ethics (2012), and on their extensive use of Edgar Morin's work on complexity. I've just discovered Woermann's work, but I've already written much about Cilliers in this blog and even more about Morin. They provide me a fine way to start thinking about ethics in the complex domain in general and about ethics in rMOOCs in particular.

Woermann and Cilliers begin their discussion of complexity ethics with the limitation of knowledge within the complex domain. To understand why knowledge of complex systems is necessarily incomplete, I have to refer to other essays by Cilliers, such as Why We Cannot Know Complex Things Completely (2002) in which he argues to my satisfaction that "meaning is constituted in a specific context where some components [of the complex system] are included and others are not" (86). This contextualization, or framing, of a complex system means that we limit the system in order to understand it, but also means that much, often most, is left outside the frame. That information outside the frame is not irrelevant; rather, it is constitutive of the complex system and leaving it out means that we do not know a complex system completely, cannot know it completely. Unfortunately, knowing it at all, means contextualizing and framing a part of the system to bring it into clarity. The only knowledge we can have of a complex system is incomplete, partial knowledge.

cMOOCs and rMOOCs engage the complex in terms of both content and people. People, of course, are always complex, but content is not, so I want to deal with content first. I teach college composition courses to help students master academic writing, the kind of writing they will do in their college courses. My college requires the APA style for all school documents. Teaching APA style is education in the simple domain, simple content. I do not mean that APA is easy—indeed, most of my students find it difficult to master—rather, APA is simple because it is a closed system, with a finite number of components, and if one is so inclined, then one can know all there is to know about APA. It's just a collection of rules, tedious but doable, and in almost all cases, there is only one right way to do any given reference or citation. This is simple content amenable to a mostly simple way of teaching.

Good writing on the other hand—how to craft an effective and appropriate argument or how to develop an illuminating metaphor—is complex content. You cannot know all there is to know about good writing, and to write anything, this post for instance, you must frame it in a way that privileges some ways of writing and certain language and excludes other ways and words. If I teach academic writing, for instance, I leave out all that I could say—often want to say—about poetics. I can cover APA. I will never cover writing, and I've been teaching it 30 years. APA, then, is education in the simple domain, while writing is education in the complex domain. I must mix both in my 10-week courses.

When Dave Cormier proposed Rhizo14, he posed a field of inquiry about the community as the curriculum and left it to the community to develop most of the content. He did not do this as a clever ploy. He did this because the community as the curriculum is a complex field of study, and he really didn't know how far it extended. We still don't know how far the field extends as we are still exploring, and to my knowledge, we haven't reached any definitive boundaries yet. There may be no boundaries. MOOCMOOC15 posed a bit more of a curriculum, but it is still quite open-ended. Both MOOCs are engaging complex content: open-ended and emerging. We can frame issues within the field of each, but we cannot enclose the field. We cannot exhaust the field, no matter how long we study. We can only grow bored and move on to other fields. In other words, our knowledge of the community as the curriculum can expand, but it is always incomplete. This is education in the complex domain.

Unlike content, people are always complex, though we too often try to reduce people to the simple domain through the use of labels: you are a woman, therefore you must not understand technology very well; or you are a white male of European descent, therefore you must feel unreasonably privileged; or you are an advanced student, you are a slow student. We do this all the time, but as Woermann and Cilliers argue, our identities are complex—they are both particle and wave, to use a familiar observation from quantum physics. They say of identity:

Our identities are neither a priori nor static. Rather, identity is constituted in a complex network, and must be contextualised as both a temporal process of becoming, and as a point in a nexus of relationships (Cilliers, 2010).

My identity in a MOOC is both particle, a point in a nexus of relationships, and wave, a temporal process of becoming. As McGilchrist shows so well in his book The Master and His Emissary (2010), the problem with being two things at once is that creatures such as humans with bicameral brains can see either the particle or the wave view, but not both at the same time. The Uncertainty Principle of physics makes this inability to see two things at once a central tenet of complexity science: we can identify either the position of a particle or its velocity, but not both at the same time. In the daily push and pull, we humans favor the left-brain particle view, which means we tend to reduce other people to their current positions, minimizing or ignoring the right-brain wave view, their stories. I am not either my current position or my trajectory—neither particle nor wave. I am both, at the same time, but you and I can see only one at a time. The key insight here is that we always view the other from a limited perspective. Thus, all our views of the other are based on limited knowledge and contain inaccuracies.

Moreover, our identity is never ours alone, but always a product of our interactions with and within an enclosing ecosystem, itself a very complex structure. Woermann and Cilliers say:

We act on one another in ways that give rise to our personal identities as well as the identities of our social practices, and that leads to the transformation of these identities (Woermann, 2010). We are therefore not only vulnerable with regard to the things that we value, but also with regard to our very identities. My state depends on the state of others (Preiser & Cilliers, 2010).

I can't know you unless I know myself, and I can't know myself unless I know all of you. My knowledge of you and me is incomplete, and while it can expand, it will always be incomplete. This is a monstrous ethical problem that cannot be transcended, but must be engaged.

Woermann and Cilliers say that our incomplete knowledge of any complex system "introduces an unavoidable ethical component into our thinking about complex phenomena", because as soon as "we engage with complexity, we have to make certain modelling choices when describing phenomena. In other words, since we cannot have complete knowledge of complex things, we cannot 'calculate' their behaviour in any deterministic fashion. We have to interpret and evaluate" (448).

Thus, when I engage the people and content in an rMOOC, I introduce an unavoidable ethical component because I have to make certain modelling choices when describing phenomena in the MOOC—when describing the people, the content, the activities and processes and assessing the value of those things. The choices I make in an open field of inquiry reveal my ethics, continue my trajectory, and yet are also influenced by the choices of others.

This is so unlike learning to use APA style, which involves no ethical choices after we commit to using APA. The questions cease to be am I right or wrong and become am I accurate or inaccurate. I do not differ, dare not differ, from others or from the teacher, but I must do APA exactly like everyone else. Conformity is the only reasonable option, the only sanctionable option, in simple learning. Learning becomes, as Deleuze and Guattari say, an issue of tracing accurately, of competence, not an issue of performance, of mapping, which is always an issue of ethics. Most students and teachers like the precision, clarity, and regularity of the simple domain. It's easy to teach here: accurate or inaccurate. That's easy to grade. I suspect that we teachers too often force some topics that are really complex into the simple domain to ease our burdens. It's like writing teachers who base their grades mostly on grammar. They can point to the rules and justify the 74 grade.

I've taken longer than I expected to arrive at my point: learning in the complex domain is an ethical issue. And ethics are constitutive of complex learning, not an add on. As Woermann and Cilliers insist:

[E]thics should be understood as something that constitutes both our knowledge and us, rather than as a normative system that dictates right action. Hence, the ethics of complexity is not an add-on, but inherent to any real engagement with complex phenomena. Otherwise stated, the ethics of complexity is a structural element of complexity thinking. In practice, this means that we should assume a critical attitude when modelling phenomena, where the critical attitude amounts to both the recognition of, and engagement with, the limits of knowledge (Preiser & Cilliers, 2010). (448)

Ethics is not a list of rules or norms or a social contract or a syllabus; rather, it is a critical attitude, complexity thinking, and a way of engaging and mapping an open field of inquiry, such as the community as the curriculum or critical learning. We make ethical choices in education when we are creating new knowledge, mapping new territory, forking a syllabus, not when we are memorizing a list of rules, such as APA. In simple learning, the ethical choices have all been made for us, while in complex learning, we must make the ethical choices through our own engagement with complex others and with complex content.

So what is this ethical stance, this ethical way of engaging and mapping in open terrain? I'll tackle that next.

The Unconscious Reality

The second slippery aspect of the question do we know all of Reality refers to how we conceive knowledge. If knowledge is something conscious and mostly intellectual, then I don't think we can know all of Reality, or even much of Reality. In other words, we have experiences of the Real that we are not conscious of and can hardly represent in any language. We engage and know many things with our minds and bodies long before we become conscious of them, if we ever become conscious. For instance, if you breathe in an unhealthy swarm of influenza virus, your immune system will know it and begin mobilizing a defense long before you are conscious of the infection. Or ask a gifted soccer player how he knows where the ball will be two touches before it arrives, and he likely cannot tell you, but he knows to be at that spot on the pitch anyway. Intimations of things long before we are conscious of them are a common experience in life.

We all know this, but we educators often behave as if we don't. We assume that, and behave as if, knowledge is strictly referential, based solely on our representations, descriptions, images, or mathematical formulations, to use Nicolescu's list. Knowledge is something we can put on the test next Tuesday. It isn't (you'll get a much better discussion of the issues with representational views of knowledge from Stephen Downes' blog Half an Hour). Knowledge extends beyond conscious knowledge.

But is this extended view of knowledge useful to education? I think it is extremely useful for those who envision education as a complex process of traversing networks—not as a walk to be taken (traced), but as a walking (mapping). I'm playing here with ideas that I've gleaned from Morin and Deleuze and Guattari.  Morin's concept of interdisciplinary research suggests that the path to knowledge is not followed, it is forged. He amplifies this idea with a line I've often quoted in this blog: we must learn to define from the inside out, not from the outside in. Deleuze and Guattari suggest that engagement of the rhizome, the Real, is a process of mapping structures and pathways, not tracing given structures and pathways. To my mind, these ideas position the Knower at the center of the zone of engagement as a knowmad who chooses to engage some aspect of the rhizome. Or not.

This tack positions me with the knowmad and suggests questions about what prompts a knowmad to engage or disengage some aspect of the rhizome. This reverses the usual pedagogical question of how to motivate students, as if motivation is a trigger we can pull, a response we can stimulate. I'm not sure it is. What then prompts a student to engage a teacher, a given curriculum, and a class? Where does this come from? And is there anything a teacher can do to facilitate that engagement?

Let's ask from the knowmad's point of view: why would a twenty-year-old studying to be a physical therapist want to engage a sixty-year-old in a course about writing? Why would they want to avoid such an engagement? In his book The Art of Changing the Brain (2002), James Zull says that most students unconsciously decide within the first 30 seconds of entering a class whether or not they will like it. Or like me. I probably know within the first 30 seconds whether or not I will like a particular class. These largely emotional engagements with the Real set the parameters of the Reality of the class, and they are difficult to change, in large part because we never quite make them conscious, or explicit. We just have a feeling that some classes work and some don't. However, some very heavy, precise neurological sensing and cognitive processing has gone on underneath the conscious surface to cause this particular Reality to emerge in the zone of engagement I and my students call Composition 1. Peering into the collective unconscious of the class to determine why a class is not working is more work than most of us care to take on, but it is extremely important for the success of the class.

There are plenty more questions to ask from the view of the knowmad: does this twenty-year-old have any sense of where I want to take them in the class? And do they want to go there? Do they have any hope of success? Any desire for success? Does this connect in any way with the path they are already on, or is this a side-trek they had just as soon avoid? And mostly: do they really want to connect to this sixty-year-old, short, white guy with his corny jokes told in a slightly southern accent?

The willingness to engage always comes from the knowmad themselves. The knowmad must see some path worth traversing, because mapping the rhizome is hard work. And it is the rare knowmad, especially young knowmads, who know why they want to engage or not. Much of our willingness to engage or not with a particular aspect of the rhizome, the Real, is decided prior to or completely outside of consciousness. As educators, we overlook this unconscious aspect of reality at our peril.

Why Rhizomatic Learning? #etmooc

Okay, so I enjoyed the conversation about rhizomatic education over at Christina Hendricks' blog, You're the Teacher. In the conversation, I'm definitely championing rhizomatic, connectivist education, but why? I've been writing about this for a couple of years now, but can I state my point of view succinctly and reasonably clearly? Well, I can try.

Learning is a network phenomenon.

That's rather succinct, and owes deep apologies to neuroscientist Olaf Sporns, but I can say it with a bit more texture: learning is a function of our complex interactions across multi-scale physical, cognitive, technological, and social networks. For me, this is the DNA of a connectivist and rhizomatic view of learning, and everything else I say about learning will follow from this core idea. At least, I hope so.

But can I defend my claim that learning is a network phenomenon? I think so, but in some ways, starting points always carry with them assumptions that one either accepts or doesn't, and they carry assumptions that the believer is quite often unaware of. I think my use of networks falls into this category. However, I can point to some reasons why I use the concept.

Networks provide me a most useful model of how the Universe/Reality/Everything works, including learning. Of course, as soon as I say that, I am reminded of George E. P. Box's famous dictum that "essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful" (Empirical Model-Building and Response Surfaces, 1987). I am convinced that, despite how right network thinking feels to me, eventually people will come to see the faults with the network metaphor just as we are coming to see the faults with the mechanistic clockwork metaphor that we inherited from Galileo, Newton, and Descartes. As Edgar Morin has pointed out in his book On Complexity (2008), the mechanistic, clockwork model of reality and the science and technology built upon it has been spectacularly successful, but over the past century, cracks have begun to appear as we have come to see more of Reality, especially at the macro and micro levels. As we peer into our scopes, bits of reality emerge that no longer fit the clockwork model. Reality is stubborn, so we change our model. But slowly, sometimes too slowly.

The model that appears to be replacing the mechanistic clockwork model is networking. Of course, not everyone uses that term. Edgar Morin speaks of systems, especially complex systems. In his book Interaction Ritual Chains (2005), Randall Collins defines the core sociological unit not an individual but the situation, a dynamic nexus of intersecting vectors which to my mind requires a network structure. James Lovelock calls it Gaia, the movies call it The Matrix. All of these sources have valid reasons for using the term that they do, but to my mind, networking (and here I'm using the verbal form intentionally to capture the complex dynamics in my concept) is the most convenient and natural-feeling term. I spent many years of my professional life building campus networks and connecting students, faculty, and staff to the Internet, so it just works for me; however, I also frequently use the term rhizomatics or rhizomics to play off Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the rhizome (A Thousand Plateaus, 1988), a more free-form, complex, dynamic, and inclusive form of networking that reveals some properties that I find particularly useful and fun.

So the networking model in all its various iterations and apellations appears to be the emerging model of how things work. I like Olaf Sporns' comments about this in his book Networks of the Brain (2011), so I'll end this post with a long quote that has a decidedly scientific bias that I think will inform our thinking in the humanities:

Over the last decade, the study of complex networks has dramatically expanded across diverse scientific fields, ranging from the social sciences to physics and biology. This expansion reflects modern trends and currents that have changed the way scientific questions are formulated and research is carried out. Increasingly, science is concerned with the structure, behavior, and evolution of complex systems such as cells, brains, ecosystems, societies, or the global economy. To understand these systems, we require not only knowledge of elementary system components but also knowledge of the ways in which these components interact and the emergent properties of their interactions. (1)

Boundaries and the System

A fourth concept that Morin discusses in The Reform of Thought is the system, or organization. If I understand Morin correctly, then he means by system any self-organizing entity that pulls itself together  in such a manner that allows it to function as an entity and that provides the organized substrate for the emergence of properties and capabilities not necessarily inherent in the individual parts. The whole entity, then, is greater than the sum of the parts. For instance, consciousness is not a property of individual neurons, but it emerges when enough neurons self-organize into a functioning human brain within a functioning eco-system. As near as I can tell, systems appear to be all-inclusive—the ultimate vacation resorts. I cannot think of anything that is not both itself a system and a part of another system. Even strings on the micro-scale and the Universe on the macro-scale may be systems within systems. If string theorists are correct, then our Universe is just one system within a system of Universes. Maybe strings themselves are systems. After all, we once thought atoms were the smallest things possible, and we've moved way beyond that idea. We will likely move again.

This concept of system quite likely includes the other concepts that I've considered in my exploration of boundaries: the included middle, the dialogic, circular causality, and the holographic principle. Or perhaps I'm being drawn to the realization that all of these concepts suggest and implicate the others. Each of them, in true transdisciplinary fashion, is difficult to think about alone. Rather, they make more sense when seen as a whole. They represent the nature of boundaries as

• the included middles that join rather than separate but without merging, 
• the dialogics that juxtapose and hold in a creative, dynamic dance distinct entities, becoming the fertile zone where new things emerge and enrich both entities,
• the circular causalities that enable the flow of energy, matter, and information between the distinct entities, again enriching and sustaining both,
• the holographic principles that encode the whole within the part, like stem cells able to self-reproduce the entity, and finally,
• the systems that nestle systems within systems within systems.

Really. Can we understand any of this if we don't see that the part is within the system is within the part and that this is irreducibly loopy? Can we understand Mending Wall if we don't see that the narrator and the neighbor are a self-forming, self-organizing system, joined and at the same time distinguished at an included middle that expresses their dynamic dance and creates the zone in which they both assert their independence and their dependence, their individuality and their kinship, defining their independence in terms of their dependence and vice versa, and that echoes the patterns of molecules, societies, and stars.

Well, at any rate, I think that's what Mending Wall means to me. I have no idea what the poem meant to Robert Frost, and the question is somewhat irrelevant to my discussion which hasn't been about Frost but about boundaries. Still, I feel just strong enough to believe that, if he were here, I might persuade him.

Boundaries and the Holographic Principle

I've been thinking of boundaries as included middles, or zones of engagement, which transcend the separation of entities into discrete units required by the classical logic of the excluded middle—A is A, A is not non-A, and there is no entity T which is both A and non-A. The logic of the included middle demonstrates that T exists, and quantum physics and complexity theory say that T not only exists but is a fundamental feature of Reality. If you want to know how things work, then you must wrap your head around T, the included middle.

In my previous posts, I suggested that to my mind, Edgar Morin has provided us with several characteristics of boundaries as zones of engagement, or included middles, rather than lines of separation. The first two are the dialogic principle and circular causality. The third characteristic that I explore in terms of Frost's Mending Wall is the holographic principle, which Morin defines in The Reform of Thought (in Nicolescu's Transdisciplinarity: Theory and Practice, 2008):

In a system, in a complex world, not only is a part found in the whole (for example, we human beings are in the cosmos), but the whole is found in the part. Not only is the individual in the society but the society is within us since birth; it inculcated us with language, culture, its prohibitions, its norms. (26, 27)

I was fortunate to recently read a new book by Neal Shubin called The Universe Within: Discovering the Common History of Rocks, Planets, and People (2013), in which Mr. Shubin, a University of Chicago paleontologist and evolutionary biologist, demonstrates repeatedly how the patterns of the Universe—its energy, matter, and information—from the Big Bang to now are echoed within each of us, as well as within rocks, plants, and planets. The patterns for the human ear, for instance, were worked out some 350 million years ago in a fish called Panderichthys. The energy, material, and informational patterns of the Universe are echoed within each entity. As the fractal images of Mandelbrot have so beautifully shown us, self-similar patterns repeat and echo at each level of Reailty.

The most cursory exploration of the term holographic principle demonstrates that it has a rather specific meaning in quantum physics, which I do not have the skill or knowledge to discuss, but again, I think that Frost's poem Mending Wall can give the non-scientific among us a way to approach the idea and work with it usefully.

First, the poem paints for us the relationship between two men, the narrator and his neighbor, based in large part on the dialogic tension between their two points of view about walls: "something there is that doesn't love a wall", on the one hand, and "good fences make good neighbors", on the other. This dialogic tension, or pattern, echoes the patterns between electrons and nuclei or planets and stars. The dialogic relationship at each level is, of course, not identical, but I think it is self-similar. This pattern of an interactive tension between antagonistic entities is the stuff of life, certainly of human relationships (This tension does not necessarily suggest violence. Love has its own tensions, but that's another post.). It is this tension between Life and Death, Order and Chaos that allows for the development of the Reality. Like his predecessor William Blake, Frost is able to "see a world in a grain of sand" (Auguries of Innocence), or in a wall.

This echoing of patterns within and without and across different levels of reality suggests to me another way to think about Deleuze and Guattari's concept of decalcomania, which tries to capture the propagation of patterns throughout a system, or a rhizome. Something there is within each of us that recognizes patterns in the other and that echoes those patterns, that responds to the patterns of the Universe. If you yawn, I will yawn—it can be that ordinary. Note that the narrator responds to and echoes the patterns of his neighbor, for despite his dislike of walls, he is the one who calls to his neighbor to arrange their mending game. He responds to the pattern of the game and plays his part as well as the neighbor does.

Moreover, the narrator echoes the New England stubbornness of his neighbor. In the poem, we see the relationship between the two men only from the narrator's point of view. He views his neighbor as a primitive "old-stone savage armed" who "will not go behind his father's saying, / And he likes having thought of it so well / He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors." Clearly the narrator believes his neighbor to be stubbornly unenlightened, but can't we easily imagine the neighbor viewing the narrator in about the same light—or darkness: a fellow who keeps repeating the same old saw, "something there is that doesn't love a wall." The neighbor might be wondering—as the narrator does—why his neighbor can't see beyond his own narrow prejudices. The two men echo each other, and therein lies their game. Each holds within himself the pattern of the other. Together, they contain the patterns of the Universe, turning the wall between them into a zone of engagement, an included middle. I think.

Boundaries and the Loop of Circular Causality

A second characteristic to emerge from thinking of boundaries as included middles is circular causality, or the feedback loop. In The Reform of Thought (2008), Morin begins his explanation of circular causality by quoting Pascal: "I hold knowing the whole to be impossible if I do not know the parts nor can I know the parts if I do not know the whole." If I understand correctly, then Pascal is suggesting a loop of energy and information between the part and the whole, the entity and its ecosystem, this side and that. Neither the part nor the whole can exist without this loop, and this loop is greatly responsible for defining both the part and the whole. Think in terms of strings <—> atoms <—> molecules <—> cells <—> organs <—> bodies <—> families <—> societies  <—> planet <—> solar system <—> well, you get the idea.

Boundaries are the zones of engagement that enable the loop of energy and information into the individual and then out again into whatever systems the individual is a part. This loop of energy and information is not benign; rather, it changes both the individual and the system so that the individual develops by feeding and informing itself from its systems, and those systems in turn develop by feeding and informing themselves both from the individuals that make them systems and from the larger systems of which they are parts. Boundaries, then, are not cellophane wrappers, but semi-permeable membranes that help manage the ebb and flow of information and energy from the system to the individual and back again.

This loop is a fundamental characteristic of boundaries as included middles. This circular causality is fundamental to physical, chemical, biological, social, intellectual, and spiritual processes as well. It is the very life-blood of economics and of rhetoric and poetic. It is the eucharistic ground of Reality. We eat that we might engage that we might eat again. As Morin explains so clearly using ourselves as the examples:

An obvious example of this kind of loop is ourselves, because we are products of a cycle of biological reproduction in which we are, at the same time, producers, in order that the cycle continues. We are the product-producers. Thus, society is the product of interactions among individuals, but on the global level, in fact, new qualities emerge which, retroactive to individuals—language, culture— permit them to be fulfilled as individuals. Individuals produce the society that produces individuals. (The Reform of Thought, 25)

Frost's Mending Wall neatly embodies this loop, which by the way, is never resolved, for resolution is death. Mending Wall begins with the narrator's feed forward: Something there is that doesn't love a wall. The neighbor is a bit slow on the return, but finally in Line 27, he feeds back: Good fences make good neighbors. The narrator muses over this return shot, but volleys again in Line 36: Something there is that doesn't love a wall. Unperturbed, the neighbor returns the volley in the last line, Line 46: Good fences make good neighbors. The two mantras anchor the poem in the first and last lines, and they echo through the poem in Lines 27 and 36. And so they loop, round and round, and this circular causality gives the poem its life. It is the game between the narrator and neighbor that keeps them engaged that feeds both with information first, and then with energy. Each brings energy to the wall, exchanging both energy and information in a relationship that seems satisfactory and satisfying to them both. This circular causality is the bootstrap operation that creates the relationship that defines the two of them together and that makes the adjoining farms what they are.

I don't mean to suggest that this particular loop between this narrator and this neighbor is static and unchanging. It is not. Eventually, the exchanges of energy and information through this loop, especially when compounded with all the other loops at other boundaries in the lives of these two men, will lead to enough changes within the men that the exchanges between them will also change, and then the boundary itself will change. But the poem gives us a pleasing snapshot of the dynamic engagement between the narrator and his neighbor, and for me, that captures much of the dynamic nature of boundaries. It also says to me that boundaries are absolutely necessary. We must have those zones of engagement between ourselves and our environments. Otherwise, we die.

Morin draws two important inferences from this circular causality. First, "we have to deal with the product-producer" (25). This is a common theme on the Internet, where consumers of information have been turned into producers of information: or prosumers. More and more, we find it impossible to ignore the loop of energy and information between individuals and their societies as technology moves the means of production into the hands of individuals. At first, technology was only for the elite and privileged, but now it is for everyone. Not everyone likes that.

Second, we need "to understand the notion of self-production and self-organization" (25). This self-organization involves us in one of those fundamental, paradoxical dialogics: independence within dependence. As Morin says, "When we reflect on self-organization, we understand it as an ultimately paradoxical notion: a self-organized, self-producing reality consumed by energy. It therefore deteriorates; it therefore has a need to draw energy from its environment and, by the same token, to depend on this environment, which at the same time provides it with its autonomy" (25, 26).

These inferences capture some wonderful nuances in the relationship between the narrator and his neighbor. First, they are the products of the boundaries that they themselves produce. This production is not once and for all, but it deteriorates and requires regeneration; thus, as the narrator says, "on a day we meet to walk the line And set the wall between us once again." Our boundaries require maintenance. Finally, the boundary defines both the autonomy and the dependence of the narrator and his neighbor. They are both decidedly what they are because of their interactions. They both have the integrity of self, but only within the context of each other. I think I like this loopy thinking.

Boundaries and the Dialogic

The included middle of Lupasco and Nicolescu gives me a convenient handle for understanding Edgar Morin's concept of the dialogic, which I first encountered in his book On Complexity but which is also discussed in his Seven Complex Lessons in Education for the Future (1999) and in his article The Reform of Thought, Transdisciplinarity, and the Reform of the University (in Nicolescu's Transdisciplinarity: Theory and Practice, 2008).

Dialogic is a form of thinking and talking that allows us to juxtapose antagonistic points of view without seeking to resolve them in a reductionist, Hegelian dialectic that simply moves "beyond contradictions through synthesis" (Reform of Thought, 26). As Morin explains it, dialogic "allows us to connect ideas within ourselves that are thrown back on each other" and allows us to contemplate "the necessary and complementary presence of antagonistic process or instances." Morin gives the profound examples of Life and Death, which are as antagonistic as is possible and yet which are both bound up with the other. Indeed, Reality unfolds as the constant engagement and interaction of Life with Death, and the one does not make sense without the other, and yet they are still antagonistic. Order and Disorder are similar antagonistic concepts, which complexity theory shows us are absolutely bound with each other and define each other. Life itself is a function of the engagement and interplay of Order and Disorder. Too much Order freezes and fixes a living thing—kills it—and too much Disorder leads to chaos—and again, death. Life exists in that fertile included middle that is the zone of engagement between Order and Disorder.

The dialogic, then, captures for me the interplay and engagement between the narrator and the neighbor in Mending Wall. The narrator begins the poem with a bold, bald assertion of his point of view: something there is that doesn't love a wall. The neighbor counters with an equally bold, bald, and contradictory statement: good fences make good neighbors. It is, as Frost says, "a kind of outdoor game." Frost is giving us a thesis and antithesis, and in our reductionist manner of thinking, we might reasonably expect a synthesis. I don't think there is one. There is only the dialogic between not wanting a wall and wanting a wall.

The dialogic in this poem juxtaposes two antagonistic positions and does not resolve them. We might think this a failure, but I don't think so. Rather, the resulting tension of the unresolved antagonism is the very source of the engagement between the narrator and his neighbor. It is the game between them, and this game, this engagement, joins them. Without the opposition, there is no game. Without the game, their is very little life. There is no diversity, no possibility of the exchanges of energy and information that make so rich our physical, social, intellectual, and spiritual lives. The dialogic recognizes and formalizes the dynamic, complex, and antagonistic engagements at the heart of all our games.

Because of our reductionist habits of mind, we see this juxtaposition of antagonistic sides as necessarily leading to the destruction of one side by the other through intellectual, emotional, or physical power or to the destruction of both sides in a synthesis, but Frost, Morin, Lupasco, and Nicolescu suggest a third way: "a way of reconnecting ideas without denying their opposition" (Reform of Thought, 26).

The Subject/Object Connection, #cck12, #change11

I want to talk more about defining from the middle-out rather than from the out-in, as this change in vantage changes the relationship between the subject (the defining agent) and the object (the defined agent). And by the way, I want to shift to first-person singular case. I've been using the more inclusive second- and third-persons, but I want to speak only for myself for a bit.

In his tidy little book On Complexity (2008), Morin spends a fair amount of time showing how complex thought restructures the relationship between subject and object, leaving the relationship reflective and reflexive. Morin insists, and I believe, that the past three hundred years of Western thought has worked out of a subject/object dualism that encourages the subject to reduce, disjoin, and simplify the object through scientific analysis and overcoding. This is typical of society's method of defining, for instance. Thus, in defining connectivism, the conventional impulse can be to reduce connectivism to a few essential characteristics that distinguish it from other ideas—especially from those ideas closest to it, such as cognitivism and constructivism—and that leave connectivism simple at best, complicated if necessary, but certainly not complex. I'm working here intentionally with Snowden's Cynefin framework, and relying on Dave Cormier's observation that connectivism, rhizomatic learning, and MOOCs all belong to the complex domain in the Cynefin framework. I haven't thought this next idea through, but I'll say it anyway: all good theory belongs in the complex domain, and as soon as a theory is reduced down through the complicated to the simple, it ceases to be theory and becomes dogma. (I really will have to think on this some more, but it sounds pretty good just now, so I'll leave it; otherwise, I might forget it.)

Through a fairly involved argument which I will not repeat here, Morin insists that as open systems both subject and object are constitutive of each other. "The world is interior to our mind, which is inside the world. … In the same way that as in microphysics, the observer disturbs the object, which disturbs the perception, in the same way the notions of object and subject are profoundly disturbed each by the other: each opens a crack in the other" (26). So is reality in the mind (the subject) or out there (the object)? Well, it's in the dynamic interplay between the two. It's in the connection. It isn't a case of either/or, it's a case of and/and.

So as I define connectivism, connectivism defines me. Moreover, my observations about connectivism change it, which changes my observations (my self), which changes connectivism, and so on. There is always, then, an indeterminism and uncertainty which must be allowed for in my definition from the middle.

This definition from the middle does introduce at least one problematic issue: I am in the middle. This can be construed to say that I am the center of connectivism, or indeed, of the entire Universe. Of course, I am in the middle of the Universe. If it is infinitely expansive one way and infinitesimally shrinking the other way, then I must be in the direct middle. How do I keep such a view from degenerating into an oppressive  narcissism?

Well, two correctives come to mind immediately. First, the Universe and I have a quite recursive and reflexive relationship, and it defines me as much as, if not more than, I define it. I am as defined as I am defining. Second, and perhaps more importantly, everyone else is at the direct center of the Universe. Moreover, their lives, activities, and knowledge become part of the Universe that I am in a reflexive relationship with, just as my life, activities, and knowledge are fed back; thus, I must account for their knowledge as an integral part of the Universe I'm trying to know. I may be at the center of the Universe, but the Universe does not revolve about me. I may be at the middle of connectivism, but it does not revolve about me. Rather, my knowledge of connectivism is fed back into the eco-system where it must work out its own salvation among all the other ideas, and those ideas feedback into me to change my ideas, and round and round, in and out, up and down, or in whatever motion I want to envision it.

Teacups and CCK12

I said yesterday that a definition is about the least you can say about something. My wife and I had friends over today, and the talk turned to teacups and my wife's impressive collection.

The Net defines a teacup as: a cup from which tea is drunk.

I don't know about you, but I can hardly imagine saying less about a teacup, but I can imagine saying more.

I recall when, as a newly married couple, Daphne and I were first visiting my parents' home. Wanting to impress her new daughter-in-law, my mother served hot tea for breakfast instead of the usual coffe. Daphne's face went ashen as Mom passed her a coffee mug full of Luzianne tea. The breach of that moment has been bridged, but not forgotten. Of course, you only serve tea in fine china teacups, and you should use only Yellow Label Lipton or Red Rose teas for breakfast.

When my family arrived in Nassau for the summer break from teaching, we were always greeted with a cup of tea. We would unload the bags in our bedrooms, and by the time we had returned to the family room, the tea was on, usually accompanied by a slice of Ma Gwennie's pound cake, a rich, buttery bit of yellow heaven that melted on the tongue and in the heart. All the family would usually pop in to greet us, and before the pot was finished more water was brewing. My boys learned to love their Nassau family over a cup of tea.

An auntie gave us a particularly beautiful Tuscan teacup not long before she was diagnosed with breast cancer. A sister-in-law gave us several teacups from the collection of her grandmother who had passed away in Idaho at the age of 100. A dear friend returned from a cruise of the Rhine River with a teacup. My father returned from the Ukraine with a set of teacups. My dear mother-in-law left her entire Shelley collection to my wife in her will. Those teacups are precious.

Just this afternoon, I served tea to my wife, sister-in-law, and a couple of cousins from the Bahamas. Honestly, the teacups were not the center of conversation, but they were witnesses. So much of the life of my family has flowed through teacups.

And this doesn't even begin to cover all the things that a maker of fine porcelain could tell you about clay, calcined bone ash, molds, casting, firing, and glazing. You could spend years becoming a master craftsman, and quite likely, even if you  were gifted as well with words, you could not define teacup as you really know it.

A dictionary definition, then, is an example of what Edgar Morin calls simple thought. Such thought is convenient and handy, and sometimes it is sufficient for the need, as Dave Cormier explains in his post about the Cynefin framework of Dave Snowden. But simple, dictionary definitions are not sufficient for complex, open systems such as Connectivism and Rhizomatics. This, I think, is why Cormier and Siemens do not want to define either concept.

Still, people want to know what they are talking about when they say Connectivism or Rhizomatics, and they are reasonable to ask for definitions. How, then, does one define without reducing to an almost meaningless statement? I like this question.

Connectivity and Open Systems, #cck12

Sometimes you follow a line of thought like a crack in the ice, excited to see where it goes but also wondering if all break-throughs are such a good thing.

Anyway, in my last post I tackled the issue Frances Bell posited about "the connections between humans and non-human in understanding learning," and I suggested that Morin's concepts of open and closed systems might contribute in some way. An open system, by Morin's definition, exchanges energy, matter, organization, and information with its eco-system, which includes both closed and open systems. This exchange makes for a stabilized dynamism that is self-organizing and in some fashion aware of its environment. By awareness, I mean that the open system—an amoeba or a sunflower or human—can perceive changes and options in its environment and make choices that help it respond to those changes. For instance, an amoeba can perceive a drop of acid in its petri dish and can turn away. It seems to me that most open, living systems have relatively few perceptions and choices, but as we move toward more complex systems, we can see an increase in the relative number and variety of perceptions, choices, and responses, but this might be an entirely chauvinistic bias on my part. Amoeba may live in a world as rich with potential as mine is. I don't know. Anyway, we humans commonly believe that the dynamic relationships between the open, living system and its eco-system become more complicated and more nuanced, more distanced from a simple stimulus-response, though never losing that simple basis for interaction. In other words, stimulus-response always remains necessary for explaining the behavior of living systems, but it seems to become less sufficient an explanation as we move toward the human.

The open system, then, participates in defining itself in and through its interactions with its eco-system, and it participates in graduated degrees from the most simple life form to the most complex, us humans. Again, my chauvinism is showing. The open system starts, of course, with a given configuration of energy, matter, organization, and information from its genetic parents, but it can modify that basic configuration as it interacts with its eco-system.

The task for the open, living system is to constantly monitor its environment and to open itself to good things in the environment and close itself to bad things. Open systems have evolved different mechanisms for opening and closing themselves to manage the flow of energy, matter, organization, and information between themselves and their environments—in other words, to manage their connections—but they all seem to have some mechanism. We humans appear to have quite sophisticated mechanisms, including the ability to develop new mechanisms. This constant opening, closing, and reopening of the self effectively makes the boundaries between the individual open system and its environment dynamic, malleable, and porous, and it effectively changes the way we should define the individual. Traditionally, we have defined open, living systems from their skin, hide, cell wall inward. Now, as Morin shrewdly observes, we must define living systems from their center outward, knowing that the skin, hide, or cell wall is porous and that the boundary between the individual and her eco-system is open to negotiation, growth, and dynamic shift.

This negotiation, this interplay between the individual and its environment, introduces the concepts of intentionality and power for me. When an amoeba swims forward into a drop of acid, it has a choice to make: continue forward into a bad environment or swim away into something better. Its decision to move away forms the rudiments of intentionality and power. While the amoeba's decision may be much closer to an automatic stimulus-response kind of decision than to the complicated moral choices that humans make, it is the bedrock of intentionality and power, the sort of bedrock that a stone, for instance, does not have. As far as we know, a stone has no choices.

This allows me to distinguish between force and power. A stone has force, but no power, at least not as I am using the terms. If moving, a stone can strike another thing with force, and if the stone is bigger and harder and, thus, carries more force, then it demolishes the smaller thing, or if the other thing is bigger and harder and, thus, carries more force, then the stone is demolished. As open, living systems, we humans have force, but we also have power. If I encounter you, then I exert a gravitational force on you that does not depend on my intention, but if I hit you or hug you, then I have exerted a power on you that is dependent on intentionality. Force is independent of power; whereas, power emerges from force. Because power is an emergent property of open, living systems, force is not sufficient to explain power, though understanding force can clarify power. Power functions at a more complex level than force, and as such, it has rules and capabilities and implications that force does not.

I'll worry later about the differences between force and power, but I want to shift now to talking about humans, non-human appliances, learning, and how they all connect before I get any further out on this very thin ice.

It seems to me that much of what we humans do as open, living systems is learn about our environments: we learn what good things to connect with and bad things to avoid. Infants start learning early what to put into their mouths, what not; what to stick their fingers into, what not; when to sleep, when not; when to cry, when not. They learn to distinguish good energies and matters from bad and to choose appropriately, but infants also start learning very early about organizational and informational exchanges and how to distinguish the good from the bad. They learn family and not-family, group and not-group. They learn truth and lie, how to get to school and how not. The various connections or flows that humans cultivate or deny begin to redefine who they are. The physical, genetic substrate for any individual remains, of course, but it is not sufficient to sustain the individual, or to define them. The sustenance and definition of an individual depends as much on the interactions with the individual's eco-system as it does on the core genetic material that the individual starts with. Perhaps sustenance and definition depend more on our connections. At any rate, our connections are indispensable, and we cannot understand ourselves without understanding those connections. Our meaning emerges in our dynamic connections, and these connections seems to inevitably involve matters of intentionality, power, and learning.

When closed systems interact, we can describe the interactions as forces and regularities, but when open systems interact, even with closed systems, then we must add power and intentionality to the description, especially if we are looking at the interaction of two or multiple open systems—a student and a teacher, for instance, or a shopper and a recommendation engine.

To my mind, then, the connection between a shopper and a recommendation engine always involves intention on the part of both, but that intention cannot be understood apart from the connection. Yes, each individual brings core characteristics such as emotional dispositions and programs, but the intention of each emerges in the interaction of the two, as each shapes the other, learns the other and learns the rules of the interaction. This way of viewing intentionality is reminiscent of Randall Collins' treatment of the situation as defining the individual, rather than the other way around. In his book Interaction Ritual Theory (2004), Collins says:

We get more by starting with the situation and developing the individual, than by starting with individuals; and we get emphatically more than by the usual route of skipping from the individual to the action or cognition that ostensibly belongs to him or her and bypassing the situation entirely. … The human individual is a quasi-enduring, quasi-transient flux in time and space … This is not to say that the individual does not exist. But an individual is not simply a body, even though a body is an ingredient that individuals get constructed out of. My analytical strategy … is to start with the dynamics of situations; from this we can derive almost everything that we want to know about individuals, as a moving precipitate across situations. (3,4)

I like that. An individual is a moving precipitate, a nexus for the dynamic connections it attracts, carries, sustains, and abandons on its nomadic way.

Well, I let this sit overnight for a fresh look, and I don't think the crack in the ice took me where I thought it would, but I'm okay with that. I'll let this stand. I wanted to think about an issue I hadn't really thought about before: the connections between humans and their non-human appliances, and I did a bit of thinking. Did I reach a conclusion? Nothing that I'm willing to bet on, but I did lay some groundwork to continue thinking. I think relationships between humans and smart machines cannot be explained simply in terms of amoral force. The machines themselves are coming to simulate open systems so well that we must begin to relate to them as open systems. This necessarily involves intentionality and power, and Connectivism which focuses on connections must recognize this intentionality and power and offer an explanation for it, or at least an examination of it.

Intentionality in the Rhizome, #cck12

Yesterday, I tried to explain why I think that Connectivism may be guilty of focusing too much on the network and not enough on the individuals in the network. I suggested that Edgar Morin may have the correct stance: it isn't either the network or the individual; rather, it's each that must be accounted for in the examination of the other.

This is not some philosophical compromise or a happy medium in which opposing viewpoints each get a little something to save face; rather, it's a radically different way of viewing reality. I'll explain by starting with an objection to something that Frances Bell said in reply to my comments about intentionality being another point of entry into the rhizome: "I agree that intentionality emerges from more than just an individual ‘forming intentions’ and to some extent may be seen as a local network effect." To be fair, this is basically an introductory statement to her real point about connectivism overplaying the network effect, so I do not suggest that it adequately expresses Bell's point of view, but I can say that it represents the common view about human cognition, including intentionality. For most people, intentionality is a function of the individual brain or mind, even if it involves some local neural networks. If we want to understand any given intention, then we need only look to the individual who has, or creates, or forms, or expresses that intention.

I disagree with this point of view. I insist that if we look only to the individual, then we simply cannot understand the intention. Why? Because as Olaf Sporns says in his book Networks of the Brain, cognition is a function of networks. Olaf devotes much of his book to the neural networks that are the most obvious scale of the networks that support cognitive activity such as intentionality, but he quite clearly opens the discussion to the networks functioning at higher and lower scales. Networks depend upon other networks and form the basis for yet more networks. Limiting a study to one scale can be a useful fiction that allows for great focus and parsimony, but it is not reality—it's a fiction. And I say that in the very best sense of the term and with the utmost respect for fiction. I happen to believe that good fiction is the best we humans can do.

But … I start to wander.

Back to intentionality as a function of the individual. We simply cannot reduce intention (or any other cognitive function, such as learning) to the given individual said to be forming the intention or doing the learning. We can understand any given intention only as the complex interaction of an open system (the individual) with its eco-system. As an open system, any individual is defined in great part by the flow of energy, matter, organization, and information between itself and its eco-system. While the brain of the individual forms a necessary substrate for intentionality, it is not sufficient for intentionality. Rather, intentionality requires the dynamic interaction—what Morin calls stabilized dynamics (On Complexity, 11)—between the individual and his physical, social, emotional environment. Morin goes on to say that "the intelligibility of the system has to be found, not only in the system itself, but also in its relations with the environment, and that this relationship is not a simple dependence: it is constitutive of the system. Reality is therefore as much in the connection (relationship) as in the distinction between the open system and its environment" (11). Thus, if we want to understand anyone's intentions, then we must understand not only their individual reasoning but also the dynamics between them and the world. It's an impossible task to understand even one single intention completely, a human condition for which I am most grateful. We will never have an end to learning. Never. There are simply too many connections to follow, and each intention is the nexus of innumerable arcs, trajectories, flows, and asignifying ruptures.

But, God, can we create some magnificent fictions, full of real insight, beauty, and helpful hints about reality. If Deleuze and Guattari are correct, then we use cartography and decalcomania to accomplish these fictions.

So to sum it all up: yeah, it's all in the connections. Probably even more so than Siemens and Downes know or can imagine. Those connections, of course, include non-human, even non-living, entities.

But the Oscars are on, and my wife wants me to watch them with her, so let's talk tomorrow about how cartography and decalcomania aid the individual in managing the flow of organization and information between the individual and her world.

The Problem of Intentionality, #cck12

In a recent exchange on Dave Cormier's post Embracing Uncertainty and the strange problem of habituation, Frances Bell challenged that Connectivism "tends to overplay the network effect and underplay human agency." It seems that she does not see much room in Connectivism for intentionality. I am not as familiar with the actor network theory that she referenced, so I did a bit of reading, including France's own article Network theories for technology-enabled learning and social change: Connectivism and actor network theory, (and graded 70 papers from my first year college students), and while I've much thinking to do yet on the issue, I want to make a few remarks.

I'll start by addressing Bell's complaint that Connectivism overplays "the network effect." She may very well be correct. While I won't speak for other Connectivists, I will say that I have a tendency to focus way too much on networks, or its more robust big sister—the rhizome. I do have a defense, though, and it has to do with contrast between the individual on one hand and the network on the other. Let me say up front that my discussion draws heavily from Edgar Morin's excellent little book On Complexity (2008), a book that I recommend to all who are interested in Connectivism and its related discussions.

Western culture has three hundred years of intense scrutiny of the individual by a science and philosophy that habitually reduced phenomena to closed systems, or discrete individuals, understandable in and of themselves. In educational terms, we have studied students as individuals, pretty much limited to what's inside their skins and brains. We teach them as individuals, we certainly test and assess them that way, and we promote them that way. We tend to think of knowledge as a function of individual brains (materialists) or minds (mentalists and spiritualists). My own field, rhetoric, has reduced writing to the use of proper grammatical and syntactical structures combined in regular ways—something like a fine watch. This is a mechanistic world view at its finest.

This science has had almost unbelievable run of successes that is difficult to challenge, but of course, it has been challenged. As Morin notes, the epistemology of classical science was undermined in the 20th century by a microphysics "which revealed the interdependence of subject and object, the insertion of randomness into knowledge, the de-reification of the notion of matter, [and] the eruption of logical contradiction in empirical description" (9) and by a macrophysics which "unites in a single entity the concepts of space and time" (9). And now, "the pedestal of knowledge is cracking" (8).

We now recognize that most systems in the Universe are not closed, especially those systems that we find most interesting: living systems, including us humans. We living things are open systems in a constant and dynamic exchange with our various eco-systems, or the networks within which we are embedded. (Forgive me here as I use eco-systems and networks interchangeably. I know that they are not synonymous.)

This brings me to my point: this blossoming awareness of open systems (Morin's term) and networks (Connectivism) and rhizomatics (Deleuze and Guattari) has proven to be among the most engaging and captivating strain of intellectual thought, at least to my mind, in the latter half of the 20th century. I suppose there are still things to say about the individual, but the rhizome is such rich and fertile ground that I, for one, am seduced by it and spend most of my time talking about it. I suspect that others find it equally attractive.

However, the emergence of the rhizome/network/open systems line of thought really should not dismiss all that we have learned through such great effort about the individual. That knowledge is still critical to our understanding. In fact, I think that we cannot understand the rhizome/network/open system without including the individual. Again, Morin says it best: "Reality is therefore as much in the connection (relationship) as in the distinction between the open system and its environment" (11).

For me, the Sunday School lesson is this: if you want to understand any phenomenon, especially any phenomenon such as intentionality that involves living systems, then you must consider both the individual and the network, the system and the eco-system. We've had 300 years of emphasis on the individual, and now some of us are perhaps over-emphasizing the network. I'm okay with that, but only up to a point, and I'm always pleased when someone reminds me that my point of view is just a bit skewed. It usually is.

Frances said more things, but I will address them later. This is a start.

#change11 Defining the Rhizome

I just watched the Ed Tech Weekly interview with Dave Cormier about rhizomatic learning, and by the end of the hour, I found myself chafed by the attempt to encourage Cormier to define the concept. The interviewers Jeff Lebow and Jennifer Maddrell seem very pleasant, engaged educators who really wanted to understand Cormier's point, and I do not even slightly suspect them of badgering Cormier; rather, I think the very nature of academic language itself forces us to seek definitions first and then talk later. All of the participants wanted to distinguish rhizomatic learning as a particular learning theory or process or way of knowing (it can be all of those) that is distinct from, say, the positivist way of knowing or the constructivist way of learning. The hope, I think, is that the concept of rhizomatic learning can lead to specific teaching and learning behaviors that will improve education. I think there are a few problems with this attempt to wrangle the rhizome into something it isn't.

First, the rhizome is a metaphor, not a theory or a procedure based on a theory. When speaking of rhizomatics in the interview, Jeff Lebow says, "I think the metaphor is helpful." To my mind, this is spot on. A metaphor is a help in understanding something else, it is not the something else itself. Rhizomatic learning speaks of a more or less helpful way of looking at and thinking about learning. It is not a prescription for learning — it is at best a somewhat helpful description of how learning happens. Through the metaphor of the rhizome as first explored so nicely by Deleuze and Guattari in their book A Thousand Plateaus (1987) educators can look afresh at learning and see things that they had not seen before. At least, this has been the case for me.

For instance, the metaphor of the rhizome is a fine antidote to our tendency toward reductionism. This reductionism lies in the background of the interviewers' attempts to define rhizomatic learning, I think. Like most of us, they want a handy nugget that says, "Oh, yes, that is rhizomatic learning."  The metaphor of the rhizome, however, helps us to see that reductionism is always a fiction. No thing can ever actually be reduced to a discrete thing, or not in reality. We can think of ourselves as discrete and alone in the Universe, a train of thought that usually leads to all sorts of misery and suffering, but none of us are discrete, however convenient or persuasive the reductionist fiction might be.

I am not saying that we should avoid reductionist thinking. That is silly. As Morin has shown, science has scored huge successes through reducing an aspect of reality to a single point, studying it in great detail, and discovering things about this reduced entity that it could hardly have discovered in any other way. Reductionism has great focus and, thus, great power. Rhizomatic thinking, on the other hand, encourages us to replace the discrete thing into its ecosystem, to recontextualize it, and to integrate what we learned through our extreme focus into our knowledge of the whole. In short, we can learn a great deal by studying a single tree, but what we learn only makes sense in the context of a forest. We must see both forest and tree. The rhizome metaphor helps us to do that.

The second thing that bothers me is that a definition of rhizomatic learning reduces the rhizome to the status of one thing among other things: rhizomatic learning as opposed to constructivist or behaviorist learning. Here's the thing: the rhizome is not a thing, it is nothing. This is partly what makes the rhizome so difficult to discuss within a language made of nouns and verbs, or things doing things. This is partly why D&G are so difficult to read: they are trying to map a structure through a language primarily adapted to mapping different kinds of structures. Modern academic language is a fine tool for mapping linear, hierarchical, positivistic structures. Mapping the rhizome with this tool is a bit like building an igloo with hammers and screwdrivers. It can be done, I suppose, but … In their discussion of the rhizome, Deleuze and Guattari are not trying to focus our attention on the rhizome so much as they are trying to get us to relax our focus, our critical intellect, to capture the arcs, the asignifying ruptures, the starts and fits and interconnectedness of things. From this point of view, then, things are the precipitate of experience (to use Randall Collins' term) at the intersection of multiple arcs of existence at any given time. Think of a plate of spaghetti. Keith Hamon is one noodle strand intertwined and thoroughly embedded in the mass of noodles, and my sense of myself or your sense of me as a discrete entity totally depends upon where along the noodle strand you or I happen to be focusing and what other noodles intersect me there.

Reductionism wants to disentangle the single noodle of my life, stretch it out on an examination tray, name and number the parts, establish the tidy sequences of cause and effect, and finally declare that it understands me. And here's the thing: it will understand a great deal about me that could not have been understood so easily while I was tangled up in the plate of spaghetti. But it will also lose a great deal, if not most, of the contours, the arcs, the twists and turns, the connections and intersections, the forces and counterforces that truly make my life interesting to me, if not to others. Stretched out on the examination table, washed clean of sauce, separated from all the other noodles, and allowed to harden, the noodle of my life will be reduced to the bare facts. Boring. Reductionism reveals nicely what about me is like other spaghetti noodles, but it hardly captures the unique contours that make me interesting, or me.

Rhizomatic thinking, then, is a useful strategy for looking at learning in a different way. It includes positivist thought and reductionist thought and all the other systems of thought, but at the same time that the rhizome provides a rich context for those systems of thought, it is also shifting, deterritorializing and reterreitorializing, and thereby undermining the very systems of thought that it incubated. Our job is to build these structures within the rhizome because they are useful, while remaining very aware that their usefulness has a shelf life. The danger is when we become attached to a system, an ideology, and refuse to acknowledge that it no longer helps.

This makes me think of the night sky. We humans look at the panoply of stars, and we select a few with which to structure constellations, pictures and stories. Because from our vantage point the stars seem to shift so slowly — in our lifetimes hardly at all — then we are seduced into thinking that our pictures and stories are eternal. Modern astro-physics has taught us better. The rhizome of the universe is shifting at incredible speeds constantly, and eventually our treasured stories and pictures will no longer map well to reality. The stars will have moved. The challenge of the rhizome is to look afresh at those stars and to create new stories and new pictures. That's what the rhizome does.

Connectivism and Ideology Too

I'm still troubled by some of the claims that James Berlin makes in Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class, but I think I prefer to start with what makes sense to me.

I see that a connectivist rhetoric – and I just realized that defining such a rhetoric is probably the point of this post – belongs to the rhetorical tradition that Berlin calls social-epistemic. First, why wouldn't a connectivist rhetoric belong to the cognitive or expressionistic schools? To explain why, I will borrow an insight from Saul Newman who, in his book From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-Authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power (2001), identifies essentialism as the key political and, perhaps, philosophical problem of our age. Essentialism states that for any entity there are "inherent characteristics or properties which any entity of that kind must possess," and most importantly, these inherent, defining properties "are universal, and not dependent on context."

By Berlin's definitions of cognitive and expressionistic rhetorics, both are essentialist. Cognitive rhetoric, for example, asserts that "the real is the rational" (482) and that this essentially rational world is empirically knowable to an essentially rational mind, or as Berlin says it:

Although the heuristics used in problem solving are not themselves rational, the discoveries made through them always conform to the mensurable nature of reality, displaying "an underlying hierarchical organization" (10) that reflects the rationality of the world. Finally, language is regarded as a system of rational signs that is compatible with the mind and the external world, enabling the "translating" or "transforming" of the non-verbal intellectual operations into the verbal. There is thus a beneficent correspondence between the structures of the mind, the structures of the world, the structures of the minds of the audience, and the structures of language. (482,483)

 For the cognitivists then, reality and our knowledge of it is essentially rational and mensurable. The non-rational and immeasurable is nonsense and hardly worth discussing. The expressionists, meanwhile, draw heavily from traditional anarchism to posit a core of pristine human spirit that is corrupted by "economic, political, and social pressures to conform – to engage in various forms of corporate-sponsored thought, feeling, and behavior" (Berlin, 486). As one expressionist Donald Murray says in his book A Writer Teaches Writing (1968): "The writer is on a search for himself. If he finds himself he will find an audience, because all of us have the same common core. And when he digs deeply into himself and is able to define himself, he will find others who will read with a shock of recognition what he has written" (4).

Like Berlin's social-epistemic, connectivism tries to avoid essentialism. If Newman is correct in his analysis, then this puts both the social-epistemic and connectivism in the same camp with the poststructuralists. This may surprise no one.

As I understand them, both social-epistemic rhetoric and connectivism see reality and especially our knowledge of that reality as a function of complex networks, or what Deleuze and Guattari call a rhizome. According to Berlin, social-epistemic rhetoric insists that "the real is located in a relationship that involves the dialectical interaction of the observer, the discourse community (social group) in which the observer is functioning, and the material conditions of existence. Knowledge is never found in any one of these but can only be posited as a product of the dialectic in which all three come together" (488). In his article Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age (2004), George Siemens says that "Personal knowledge is comprised of a network, which feeds into organizations and institutions, which in turn feed back into the network, and then continue to provide learning to individuals" (5). I've not read anything by connectivist thinkers that specifically addresses the nature of reality, but their theory of knowledge easily fits the non-essentialist mold.

The most coherent expression of this non-essential view of reality and knowledge that I know about comes from Edgar Morin's book On Complexity (2008), which I have quoted many times in this blog and must quote again:

The intelligibility of the system has to be found, not only in the system itself, but also in its relationship with the environment, and … this relationship is not a simple dependence: it is constitutive of the system. Reality is therefore as much in the connection (relationship) as in the distinction between the open system and its environment. This connection is absolutely crucial epistemologically, methodologically, theoretically, and empirically." (11)

Here, then, is where I think I most agree with Berlin. Reality and our knowledge of that reality are both functions of complex networks, and therefore by extension, writing is a function of complex networks. There it is. That is the starting point of a connectivist rhetoric, and it throws me into that briar patch that we call – mostly out of convenience – poststructuralism. Along with Berlin and his social-epistemics, I think. Though if Berlin is a real poststructuralist, then he will deny the association, and rightly so.

My job, then, is to start filling in the details of this connectivist rhetoric. Not a bad summer's project. One of the first ways to do that is to explore how this rhetoric differs from Berlin's social-epistemic rhetoric. More about that later.