I said in an earlier post that the first objective of a writing across the curriculum program is "to enable students to learn more and better." In this mode, students are using writing as a tool for mapping knowledge networks both in their own minds and in the world about them. The second objective is to enable students to connect with others. In this mode, students are using writing as a tool for exchanging knowledge networks with others.
I think that even a casual reader will sense that these are not unrelated goals; rather, they are interconnected goals. Often, we writers learn best when we are connecting with others, and we connect best when we are learning. From a writer's point of view, the distinction is a matter of focus rather than a change of goals. When writing to learn, we are focused on ourselves; when writing to connect, we are focused on others. For the writer, however, this shift is a complex and dynamic boundary along which a skillful writer constantly checks and refines what she knows with what she wants to achieve with the reader and vice versa. This shift is dynamic because the skillful writer is constantly looking back and forth, and it is complex because what she finds in her own knowledge feeds into and affects what she wants to achieve with another just as her interaction with the other feeds back into her own knowledge.
By the way, I am using the phrase writing to connect rather than my earlier phrase writing to communicate. I want to emphasize the connectivity that writing enables, and of course, that connectivity includes communication, but I think it can include more. Connectivity also resonates with the concepts of networking and connectivism in a way that communication does not. Let's see.
So writing is a network phenomenon that connects us to other people. A writing across the curriculum program can first cultivate writing to connect through the development of personal learning networks (PLNs) for each student. This, of course, connects us back to writing to learn, but as should be obvious, I see no separation between the two modes of writing (the one hardly makes sense without the other, though over the years I have found it convenient and useful to talk about them and to teach them separately). A PLN, built mostly through writing and reading in both electronic and print modes, connects each student to other students, to teachers, and to a profession (I am not using profession merely in the sense of a future job, but more so in the sense of a community of practice). Ample research shows that successful college students form strong connections to one or more of three aspects of college: other students, favorite professors, or a discipline. Students who do not connect to at least one of the aspects of college tend to falter, fail, and leave.
The original purpose of college, of course, was to foster such personal learning networks through close, physical proximity on a campus. Such physical proximity is still important, but physical connectivity is now supported and extended through electronic networks that allow any person to connect usefully with so many more people. A useful writing across the curriculum program must rely heavily, then, on these electronic networks.
In addition to helping students build PLNs, a useful WAC program helps students connect to a community of practice (COP). In one sense, one can view a college education as an introduction to and indoctrination in the conversation germane to a particular community of practice. Colleges teach students to walk the walk and talk the talk of some scholarly or professional community of practice. WACs help students first become familiar with the conversation of a COP and gradually to participate in that conversation. It's useful to say that one becomes a professional member of a community of practice when one can engage in the dominant conversations of that community (to rip-off a phrase from George Siemens). WACs cultivate the abilities of students to engage those conversations.
Finally, useful WACs should help students to connect to the world through project-based learning relevant to the students' COPs. Project-based learning is an ideal vehicle for enabling the kind of real-world writing that engages the world (a customer or client, for instance) to effect some change or elicit some response.
Hmm. Does this wear well? I'll have to think on that.
Showing posts with label PLN. Show all posts
Showing posts with label PLN. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 30, 2012
Thursday, May 5, 2011
ePortfolios and Networks
In our roles as coordinators of Albany State's writing across the curriculum program, Tom and I have been talking about adding student ePortfolios to the program. We see ePortfolios as great tools for organizing student writing in any given class, resulting in enhanced learning in that class and an enhanced presence on the Web for the student. This seems promising. Then a few weeks ago, when we were discussing what to do this coming academic year with our next cohort of WAC faculty, I got the idea that we might have each faculty member create their own ePortfolio. I want to think through that idea a little more in this post, and I want to feed off an essay by Chris M. Anson called Portfolios for Teachers: Writing Our Way to Reflective Practice. The essay was originally published in Laurel Black's 1994 collection New Directions in Portfolio Asessment, but I found it in T. R. Johnson's Teaching Compositions: Background Readings (2005).
Anson seems to view teaching portfolios as a form of story-telling. He says that "teaching portfolios invite teachers to tell the story of their work and in doing so to become more reflective of their own practice" (3). Thus, a teaching portfolio is more than just a collection of artifacts, or "a container for storing and displaying evidence of a teacher's knowledge and skills" (4); rather, a teaching portfolio is, first "something programmatic or anchored in a community, [and not] a 'file' stored away in a department cabinet" (5). Given my conception of writing as a function of networks, this notion of ePortfolios "anchored in a community" seems promising, but as I read his essay, I came to realize that Anson was writing in 1994, the Dark Ages of the Web, long before Web 2.0, and so I found the promise more latent than realized. The shift from print-based portfolios to ePortfolios is much more than the addition of a letter – it's a shift from an ossuary to a lively street corner. By the way, I don't think Anson v. 2011 would necessarily disagree with what I say in this post – it's just that Anson v. 1994 couldn't see Web 2.0 coming down the pike.
A traditional portfolio is a collection of artifacts that demonstrates one's roles, knowledge, and experiences. It defines one in some public, professional manner, as Anson's own, now web-based portfolio demonstrates. Even though Anson has moved his own teaching portfolio to the Web, it is still recognizable as a traditional portfolio: a collection of lists and artifacts. It has not become the living hub of Anson's own PLN, or professional/personal learning network, nor his Net brand, and this is what I think an ePortfolio can be. It's what I want to teach our teachers and what I want them to teach their students. In short, I want our teachers to use the ePortfolio to define themselves on the Web from the center outward (to follow Morin's dictum) in a dynamic document that orchestrates the shifting connections in their PLN, or community of practice. Unlike the portfolio, the ePortfolio is not a series of still shots; rather, it is a window into an unfolding drama.
An ePortfolio does all that a portfolio does. It keeps all the artifacts that Anson lists:
Anson seems to view teaching portfolios as a form of story-telling. He says that "teaching portfolios invite teachers to tell the story of their work and in doing so to become more reflective of their own practice" (3). Thus, a teaching portfolio is more than just a collection of artifacts, or "a container for storing and displaying evidence of a teacher's knowledge and skills" (4); rather, a teaching portfolio is, first "something programmatic or anchored in a community, [and not] a 'file' stored away in a department cabinet" (5). Given my conception of writing as a function of networks, this notion of ePortfolios "anchored in a community" seems promising, but as I read his essay, I came to realize that Anson was writing in 1994, the Dark Ages of the Web, long before Web 2.0, and so I found the promise more latent than realized. The shift from print-based portfolios to ePortfolios is much more than the addition of a letter – it's a shift from an ossuary to a lively street corner. By the way, I don't think Anson v. 2011 would necessarily disagree with what I say in this post – it's just that Anson v. 1994 couldn't see Web 2.0 coming down the pike.
A traditional portfolio is a collection of artifacts that demonstrates one's roles, knowledge, and experiences. It defines one in some public, professional manner, as Anson's own, now web-based portfolio demonstrates. Even though Anson has moved his own teaching portfolio to the Web, it is still recognizable as a traditional portfolio: a collection of lists and artifacts. It has not become the living hub of Anson's own PLN, or professional/personal learning network, nor his Net brand, and this is what I think an ePortfolio can be. It's what I want to teach our teachers and what I want them to teach their students. In short, I want our teachers to use the ePortfolio to define themselves on the Web from the center outward (to follow Morin's dictum) in a dynamic document that orchestrates the shifting connections in their PLN, or community of practice. Unlike the portfolio, the ePortfolio is not a series of still shots; rather, it is a window into an unfolding drama.
An ePortfolio does all that a portfolio does. It keeps all the artifacts that Anson lists:
- syllabi & course overviews
- assignments & exams
- study guides & other classroom materials
- student papers with teacher's comments
- student evaluations
- teacher reflections on peer-observations & course evaluations
- self-evaluations
- narrative accounts of problem-solving
- responses to case studies
- journals documenting thoughtfulness about instructional issues
- goal statements & philosophies
- letters of assessments from others
But it does more. So much more. First, an ePortfolio is a nerve center that orchestrates and tweaks the connections that make up who and what the owner knows and can do. An ePortfolio is very much like Sporns' concept of the brain: an intensely rich neurological hub, an electronic substrate, that has the tools and connective tissue to self-organize into meaningful patterns and that has the resources to interact with its environment to augment and to extend its patterns of meaning.
But that is a bit abstract. What does such an ePortfolio actually look like, and how does it work? Let me envision the ePortfolio that I want to create for myself and then help my faculty to create for themselves.
I might start with one of the public wiki services such as Google Sites. Wikis are a most flexible tool that can accommodate much of what might be created in an ePortfolio. For instance, a wiki can house all those different kinds of documents listed above. Thus, I am not overlooking or denigrating the repository function of an ePortfolio. My ePortfolio will house work that best exemplifies my professional skills and expertise, including Word-style documents, PDFs, and web documents, but because all this is on the Web, I can link to documents rather than physically house them all in the same space. Moreover, I can link to Google Docs which will update automatically as I continue to work with them and edit them. Of course, I can also create static, archive copies. The point is that I can display static and dynamic documents depending on what suits my purpose.
Then, my ePortfolio should have a blog component that captures my current thinking and my reflection on my work and professional learning network. My blog – this blog that you are reading just now – is often the incubator for ideas that turn into professional presentations and publications, and it helps me figure out what I mean. It helps me reflect on my thinking over the past few years as I uncover trends and patterns in my posts. Most traditional portfolios don't have this reflective, creative component – certainly not one that is as dynamic as a blog can be.
But my blog captures more than just my thoughts – it also captures my interaction with people who read the blog and make comments. Now we are adding a feature that the traditional portfolio simply cannot do as well as an ePortfolio: connectivity. A lively blog shows both those who read me and me myself the kinds of professional connections and conversations that I am cultivating. As most professionals know, my network of connections and conversations can say as much about my professionalism as anything I might say about myself.
Then my ePortfolio should have a reading component, links to my RSS feeds and social bookmarks and any other publicly available Web documents that mean something to me. Do you want to know what's really been on my mind for the past couple of years? Then look at my Diigo bookmarks. I should display those on or link to them from my ePortfolio.
My ePortfolio should display or link to my slideshows, podcasts, instructional videos, and whatever other multimedia documents I have hosted on the Web. It should display or link to online classes and webinars that I have participated in. Of course, it should also list, or better yet, link to any classes that I have taken or taught.
Well, this is already a rather involved list of things that my ePortfolio should do. Those of you familiar with building personal learning networks will immediately seen how indebted this idea of ePortfolios really is. Some might argue that a portfolio should remain a static snapshot created solely for the purpose of demonstrating ones professional expertise to very specific people for very specific reasons. Obviously, my idea of a dynamic ePortfolio doesn't agree. I should start building my ePortfolio soon, and I'll link it back to this post when I have something to show (if I remember). By then, I'm sure I will think of more things that the ePortfolio can do. and it would be great if some of you would drop some suggestions in the Comment box.
And thanks to Chris Anson for kicking off this exploration about teaching ePortfolios.
Monday, October 18, 2010
Gaps Between Galaxies: Learning in MOOCs
(I started this post, then published it unfinished. My apologies to any who saw that unfinished, briefly published post. I know better.)
I involved myself in a wonderful conversation over at Dave Cormier's blog about #PLENK2010 and PLEs, and I want to reflect on that experience and draw some lessons for myself. Also I want to move my comments back to my blog and not clutter Dave's blog, though the links are still here if anyone wants.
First, I think that such conversation is among the best things that can happen in a MOOC (massively open online course) such as PLENK 2010. The organized sessions and the prepared spaces on the wiki are also quite beneficial and educational, but nothing quite matches the spontaneous learning that happens in these open web spaces. Deep space, the gaps between galaxies, that's where the best learning is for me.
As often happens in such conversations, we conversants formed some agreements and some disagreements. While I found the agreements satisfying and validating [I'll have to explore later the role of agreement in supporting knowledge formation], I found the disagreements more stimulating, as they forced me to look again at my thoughts. I think that agreement can sometimes close a discussion too early. The main complaint that grabbed my attention was that Dave and I were engaging in a bit of hand-waving and loose talk about the nature of PLEs, which I interpret to mean that we had slipped into arcane, esoteric pedantry at best or into sloppy writing at worst. So I looked back at the conversation and found that it still struck me as relatively clear writing (writing can ALWAYS be clearer) about an important issue. So what was I to make of the complaint? Why did three seemingly bright people NOT see the same issue in the same way, consider the same evidence and arrive at the same conclusions?
It occurs to me that this is a fine illustration of the kind of rhizomatic learning that I have been trying to talk about. Let me explore this with the help of a metaphor: people and groups as galaxies. PLENK 2010 is a massively large galaxy (a rhizome) composed of 1,500 people, massive content, the Internet, computers, languages, theories, and so on. I visualize it as a galaxy not from on high, as a god might, but from the inside, as I do the Milky Way. Moreover, each of those 1,500 people and other points of light (content, Net, etc.) is itself a galaxy just as large as PLENK 2010, or larger.
To my mind, this is not loose talk. This metaphor is quite pointed (in the complex way that all metaphors are pointed) in addressing a misconception that most of us struggle under: what Edgar Morin calls the simplified thought of reduction and disjunction. We are in the habit of speaking of people or knowledges as single things, closed units, when we know that they are not. Each person is a complex constellation of physical and mental points, each of which is also a complex constellation of yet other points, and each of which is a point within some other complex constellation of points. This is a fractal, complex way of envisioning reality, and it is quite scientific and hard-headed. Quite concrete. And yet quite foreign to the way we've been thinking for the past several hundred years of scientific positivism and reductionism.
Actually, this complex view of people and classes seems to account best for the confusion many expressed when first trying to engage PLENK 2010. They seemed to view PLENK 2010 as a massive field of stars, a galaxy, that at first seems like so much white noise, an undifferentiated background. They frantically look for a Northstar to get their bearings, and if they don't find one, they panic. This is where Dave Cormier's advice about clustering comes in handy. When approaching a new galaxy, we must pick a point of light or two and map to those to see if there is a match to any points in ourselves. If not, we move on until we find some points that map. We then connect with what we can recognize. We anchor to a couple of points of light: to people, concepts, theories, or interesting conversations. It hardly matters what so long as we anchor. If we never find those anchors, then we fall away (as many seem to) and turn our attention back to the other galaxies (rhizomes) to which we are already linked: work, family, etc. etc.
But if we can and do anchor, then we change the galaxy, the rhizome, to which we anchor. In this case, we change PLENK 2010. As we come to know it, map to it, it comes to know us, or map to us. We change the group, and the group changes us. To use other metaphors, we exchange energy and DNA and fluids. Or as I said so loosely before: “The individual learns from the environment, and the environment learns from the individual. In the interplay, they shape and reshape each other, learn and relearn from each other, teach and reteach each other.” This is precisely what happened in this conversation on Dave's blog. This happens all the time among cells, and it happens to us as cells in a society, or a class. To quote perhaps too much from Morin:
As near as I can tell, Connectivism has as good a chance of explaining this kind of complex learning as any learning theory that I know of, and that is why I'm attracted to it. Finally, it's this kind of complex learning that interests me. While behaviorism has taught me a few things about learning, in the end, if learning is no more than stimulus-response, then let computers do it. They don't get bored.
I suspect that I'll continue to write about this, but I have a paper to finish for publication. Later, scholars, and thanks for the wonderful ride. And special thanks to Dave Cormier and Scott Leslie.
I involved myself in a wonderful conversation over at Dave Cormier's blog about #PLENK2010 and PLEs, and I want to reflect on that experience and draw some lessons for myself. Also I want to move my comments back to my blog and not clutter Dave's blog, though the links are still here if anyone wants.
First, I think that such conversation is among the best things that can happen in a MOOC (massively open online course) such as PLENK 2010. The organized sessions and the prepared spaces on the wiki are also quite beneficial and educational, but nothing quite matches the spontaneous learning that happens in these open web spaces. Deep space, the gaps between galaxies, that's where the best learning is for me.
As often happens in such conversations, we conversants formed some agreements and some disagreements. While I found the agreements satisfying and validating [I'll have to explore later the role of agreement in supporting knowledge formation], I found the disagreements more stimulating, as they forced me to look again at my thoughts. I think that agreement can sometimes close a discussion too early. The main complaint that grabbed my attention was that Dave and I were engaging in a bit of hand-waving and loose talk about the nature of PLEs, which I interpret to mean that we had slipped into arcane, esoteric pedantry at best or into sloppy writing at worst. So I looked back at the conversation and found that it still struck me as relatively clear writing (writing can ALWAYS be clearer) about an important issue. So what was I to make of the complaint? Why did three seemingly bright people NOT see the same issue in the same way, consider the same evidence and arrive at the same conclusions?
It occurs to me that this is a fine illustration of the kind of rhizomatic learning that I have been trying to talk about. Let me explore this with the help of a metaphor: people and groups as galaxies. PLENK 2010 is a massively large galaxy (a rhizome) composed of 1,500 people, massive content, the Internet, computers, languages, theories, and so on. I visualize it as a galaxy not from on high, as a god might, but from the inside, as I do the Milky Way. Moreover, each of those 1,500 people and other points of light (content, Net, etc.) is itself a galaxy just as large as PLENK 2010, or larger.
To my mind, this is not loose talk. This metaphor is quite pointed (in the complex way that all metaphors are pointed) in addressing a misconception that most of us struggle under: what Edgar Morin calls the simplified thought of reduction and disjunction. We are in the habit of speaking of people or knowledges as single things, closed units, when we know that they are not. Each person is a complex constellation of physical and mental points, each of which is also a complex constellation of yet other points, and each of which is a point within some other complex constellation of points. This is a fractal, complex way of envisioning reality, and it is quite scientific and hard-headed. Quite concrete. And yet quite foreign to the way we've been thinking for the past several hundred years of scientific positivism and reductionism.
Actually, this complex view of people and classes seems to account best for the confusion many expressed when first trying to engage PLENK 2010. They seemed to view PLENK 2010 as a massive field of stars, a galaxy, that at first seems like so much white noise, an undifferentiated background. They frantically look for a Northstar to get their bearings, and if they don't find one, they panic. This is where Dave Cormier's advice about clustering comes in handy. When approaching a new galaxy, we must pick a point of light or two and map to those to see if there is a match to any points in ourselves. If not, we move on until we find some points that map. We then connect with what we can recognize. We anchor to a couple of points of light: to people, concepts, theories, or interesting conversations. It hardly matters what so long as we anchor. If we never find those anchors, then we fall away (as many seem to) and turn our attention back to the other galaxies (rhizomes) to which we are already linked: work, family, etc. etc.
But if we can and do anchor, then we change the galaxy, the rhizome, to which we anchor. In this case, we change PLENK 2010. As we come to know it, map to it, it comes to know us, or map to us. We change the group, and the group changes us. To use other metaphors, we exchange energy and DNA and fluids. Or as I said so loosely before: “The individual learns from the environment, and the environment learns from the individual. In the interplay, they shape and reshape each other, learn and relearn from each other, teach and reteach each other.” This is precisely what happened in this conversation on Dave's blog. This happens all the time among cells, and it happens to us as cells in a society, or a class. To quote perhaps too much from Morin:
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. … This connection is absolutely crucial epistemologically, methodologically, theoretically, and empirically. Logically, the system cannot be understood except by including the environment. The environment is at the same time intimate and foreign: it is a part of the system while remaining exterior to it. … Theoretically and empirically, the concept of an open system opens the door to a theory of evolution, that can only come from the interaction of system and eco-system … In other words, it is a theory of living systems. (On Complexity, 11)To my mind, then, education is a theory of living systems, and as such, it must include both the individual system and the eco-system, considered together as a meta-system, both dependent on the other and both autonomous. Morin is, of course, approaching his topic in the above quote from the point of view of the individual system (person, cell, star, whatever). Later, he adds that the eco-system cannot be understood except in terms of its included systems. In short, a learning theory must account for the individual system (the learner) and the eco-system (the world), and it must account for the complex interaction between the two, or among the many, to be more precise. It must account for the knowledge within the system and the eco-system and how the interplay (including the random and the black swans) within the eco-system changes the knowledge flowing in both systems and eco-system.
As near as I can tell, Connectivism has as good a chance of explaining this kind of complex learning as any learning theory that I know of, and that is why I'm attracted to it. Finally, it's this kind of complex learning that interests me. While behaviorism has taught me a few things about learning, in the end, if learning is no more than stimulus-response, then let computers do it. They don't get bored.
I suspect that I'll continue to write about this, but I have a paper to finish for publication. Later, scholars, and thanks for the wonderful ride. And special thanks to Dave Cormier and Scott Leslie.
Thursday, October 7, 2010
Complexity and Personal Learning Environments
In a recent post to Dave's Educational Blog, Dave Cormier made a number of comments about MOOCs (massively open online courses) in general, #PLENK2010 in particular, and personal learning networks/environments. Most of what he had to say was, as usual, quite insightful and very much in line with the way I tend to think about these issues, but he expressed a rather forceful caveat about the phrase personal learning environment (PLE). In short, he does not like its potential emphasis on the personal, or individual learner distinct from the group. He says:
Dave is right that we do not learn much alone, at least not until we have gained sufficient learning apparatus and context (language, heuristics, concepts, worldview, etc) from our group that we can begin to make some discoveries on our own, and even then, we almost always take this somewhat solitary learning back to the group for verification and validation. However, I think his efforts to avoid defining learning as primarily the work of an individual (the personal in personal learning environment) has blinded him to the rich and complex potential of the phrase personal learning environment, and I'd like to offer an alternative reading that explores that complexity and avoids reducing learning to the exercise of a single, solitary, individual mind. My discussion here is informed by Edgar Morin's short book On Complexity (2008), and I am perhaps as much trying to understand Morin as I am trying to illuminate personal learning environments. Complexity has its rewards.
If I understand Dave correctly, then he is arguing against the tendency to reduce learning to the exercise of a solitary brain. This tendency is shared by many learning theories which view learning as something that happens within each individual. Behaviorism focuses on the change in the behavior of the individual, and even social constructivism places learning in the minds of the individuals of the social group. Most learning theories tend to see learning as some operation an individual mind performs on the external world of objects, internalizing ideas, concepts, behaviors, or patterns that existed independently in the objective world. These theories, in turn, are institutionalized in an educational system that issues individual grades to individual students, and those educational institutions are couched in a culture that preaches and rewards individual achievement, as if Bill Gates alone was Microsoft.
If Edgar Morin is correct, then this tendency to reductionism is part of a scientific habit of mind, or paradigm, that we have inherited from Descartes. "Descartes formulated this master paradigm of Western civilization by disjoining the thinking subject … and the thing being thought of … and by positing 'clear and distinct' ideas as principles of reality" (3). Science has bought into this paradigm of simplicity, and the results have been stunning, in all the connotations of that word. As Morin says: "This paradigm has dominated the adventure of Western thought since the seventeenth century. It has without doubt allowed for very great progress in scientific knowledge and in philosophical reflection. Its ultimately noxious consequences did not begin to become clear until the twentieth century" (3).
For Morin, this reductionist tendency works in two ways, both quite familiar to us today: we either reduce reality to a collection of discrete parts, logically arranged, and logically interacting (scientists do this) or we reduce reality to a unified New Age Whole, Gaia, the Force, God, or the Big Soup (spiritualists do this). In terms of personal learning networks, we either reduce learning to the personal and lose sight of the network, or we reduce learning to the network and lose sight of the personal. For most of us, reality is either/or: either all interacting parts (a unified field theory) or one big, vibrating w/hole (a different unified field theory). A thing is either this or that, but not both; either here or there, but not both.
Morin says that both reductions are too simple to account for the complexity of reality. Rather, we need to keep both in mind. We must replace the connectors either/or with and/and/and. To my mind, this line of thinking is strongly reminiscent of Deleuze and Guattari's complaint against arborescent thinking in A Thousand Plateaus (1987): "One becomes two [Unity and Parts]: whenever we encounter this formula … what we have before us is the most classical and well reflected, oldest, and weariest kind of thought. Nature doesn't work that way" (5). For D&G, reality is a rhizomatic multiplicity, and "multiplicities are rhizomatic, and expose arborescent pseudomultiplicities for what they are. There is no unity to serve as a pivot in the object or to divide in the subject. … A multiplicity has neither subject nor object, only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions" (8).
Perhaps a simple (too simple) illustration is in order. I'm an English teacher, so this example comes easily to mind.
Consider the period (punctuation mark) at the end of this sentence --> . I made it big and supplied an arrow so that you would notice it; otherwise, you might not. We can address this period as a discrete element of punctuation, a subset of grammar, itself a subset of semantics. It has a name, period, which gives it a unique identity. It has a definition, a role, a verifiable existence. Clearly, a period has scientific meaning as an entity all unto itself. It is an individual.
Yet, all by itself, its meaning is trivial to the point of meaninglessness. On a line by itself, it's just a silly little dot:
.
Ahh, we say, right! The period means nothing as an individual. Only the whole sentence/paragraph/post/blog (whatever holistic level you wish to use) has meaning. And so we merge the period into the whole, and again we see that it becomes meaningless (it also raises hell with spell check and word wrap):
Considertheperiod(punctuationmark)attheendofthessentence.Imadeitbigandsuppliedanarrowsothatyouwouldnoticeit;otherwise,youmightnot.wecanaddressthisperiodasadiscreteelementofpunctuation,asubsetofgrammar,itselfasubsetofsemantics.ithasaname,period,whichgivesitauniqueidentity.ithasadefinition,arole,averifiableexistence.clearlyaperiodhasscientificmeaningasanentityalluntoitself.itisanindividual.
Obviously, reduction of the period into either scientific objectivism or holistic subjectivism (or any other duality you choose) destroys the meaning of the period. We must see the period as both itself and as a part of the whole. Both these simple views are at times expedient and even enlightening, yet if they become the only approach to the period, then we lose the meaning. In Morin's terms, we lose the complex reality of even something so relatively un-complex (I won't say simple) as a punctuation mark. According to Morin, individuals must have a complex autonomy based on dependence rather than freedom. We must see that the period emerges from the ecosystem of language. Though it draws its energy and structure from printed language as a whole, it must maintain its integrity as a period. It cannot droop into a , or rise into an i. The individual and the whole have a recursive reciprocity that defines them both. The period defines the paragraph, which defines the period, which defines the paragraph, and so on, back and forth.
Brains are like this. They are composed of neurons, all of which must remain individually unique, and yet all of which must be organized into a functioning brain. By itself, a neuron is almost as meaningless as a period, though not as un-complex. And if enough neurons join together into enough brain, then mind or consciousness emerges out of the interplay between micro and macro. This is where the magic happens, and as of yet, we do not have the language that captures this complexity. Still, reducing mind either to the interplay of discrete neurons in the brain or to some cosmic consciousness or Soul misses the complex, concrete reality of mind.
So what does all this have to do with personal learning environment? I'm so glad you asked. I was beginning to think I'd never get there.
Learning as simply a personal activity or as simply a group activity misses the complex reality of learning. Though it can be helpful to look at either the individual or the group, learning is the interplay of the individual with her environment. The individual learns from the environment, and the environment learns from the individual. In the interplay, they shape and reshape each other, learn and relearn from each other, teach and reteach each other.
Thus, as personal learning environment suggests, learning is framed by personal and environment and cannot exist without both. Another way to interpret this phrase is that learning is one of those activities that joins the individual to his environment. Or perhaps a better way to say this is that learning describes a particular kind of interplay, a particular dance, between the individual and the environment. And if that isn't complex enough, then imagine that all six and a half billion humans are all engaged in a similar dance—each with her own nuance, steps, rhythms, intensities, or determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions—world without end, one hell of a whopper rhizome.
The problem, of course, is that we don't have much language yet to talk intelligently about this kind of complexity. Our notions of critical thinking (interpretation, analysis, evaluation, inference, explanation, self-regulation, and so on) are all pretty much individual mental exercises aimed at reducing complexity to simple clarity. We need new ways to examine and think about complex, rhizomatic structures. Morin mentions three ways to think, or principles, that help us approach the complex: a dialogic principle (dia-logic), the principle of organizational recursion, and the holographic principle (by which I think he means what I would call fractal). Deleuze and Guattari mention cartography and decalcomania. I was pleased in our Elluminate session yesterday (Wed, 2010 Oct 06) when George Siemens spoke about mapping learning and knowledge to real life and listed resonance, synchronicity, wayfinding, amplification, and learning/knowledge symmetry aspects of connectivist learning. I don't know if he intends them as critical (or perhaps higher order) thinking skills, but they resonate with me that way. Recognizing and engaging pockets of resonance in an environment seems to be a critical thinking skill needed for mapping the rhizome.
Anyway, I think Cormier would do well to reconsider and find another way to read personal learning environments.
It is easy to see the transition to PLE as the ‘rebel yell’ of education. The splitter leaving the fold to strike out on their own to a place where they can make their own decisions, commune with knowledge on their own terms, thank you very much, and not be under the evil yoke of a power mongering educator and not have to suffer the ignominy of working in groups with other classmates. The lone learning warrior, learning on their own, without guidance. It is an easy vision to have as the discussion around PLEs is often put in opposition to LMSs and this often degenerates to “institution bad, learn on your own”. While this is a very interesting debate, it is not the same as the debate around learners managing their own learning content.I appreciate his concern that the debate around this phrase "can easily move the focus to THE LEARNER and not THE LEARNERS' and his conviction that "we don't learn much alone," though I worry that he overstates his case. I think most educators recognize "the lone learning warrior" as a romantic myth somewhat akin to the myth of the starving poet, scribbling away in his lonely garret overlooking the smokey rooftops of Paris, plumbing the depths of the human soul in a fearless and solitary obscurity. If such creatures exist, then they are such black swans as to be outside the theories of either learning or writing. They are gunslingers, high plains drifters, steppenwolves, and like black swans, we cannot account for them.
I see learning as a social activity. I don’t care if you’re engaging with dead white men in a book, it’s still a conversation. (albeit one sided in that case) The problem with the PLE (when contrasted with the LMS) is that it can easily move the focus to THE LEARNER and not THE LEARNERS. In this way the move from LMS to PLE can be seen as a move from with people, to without people. We don’t learn much alone. We need to keep the focus of the discussion on the disaggregation of power, not the disaggregation of people.
Dave is right that we do not learn much alone, at least not until we have gained sufficient learning apparatus and context (language, heuristics, concepts, worldview, etc) from our group that we can begin to make some discoveries on our own, and even then, we almost always take this somewhat solitary learning back to the group for verification and validation. However, I think his efforts to avoid defining learning as primarily the work of an individual (the personal in personal learning environment) has blinded him to the rich and complex potential of the phrase personal learning environment, and I'd like to offer an alternative reading that explores that complexity and avoids reducing learning to the exercise of a single, solitary, individual mind. My discussion here is informed by Edgar Morin's short book On Complexity (2008), and I am perhaps as much trying to understand Morin as I am trying to illuminate personal learning environments. Complexity has its rewards.
If I understand Dave correctly, then he is arguing against the tendency to reduce learning to the exercise of a solitary brain. This tendency is shared by many learning theories which view learning as something that happens within each individual. Behaviorism focuses on the change in the behavior of the individual, and even social constructivism places learning in the minds of the individuals of the social group. Most learning theories tend to see learning as some operation an individual mind performs on the external world of objects, internalizing ideas, concepts, behaviors, or patterns that existed independently in the objective world. These theories, in turn, are institutionalized in an educational system that issues individual grades to individual students, and those educational institutions are couched in a culture that preaches and rewards individual achievement, as if Bill Gates alone was Microsoft.
If Edgar Morin is correct, then this tendency to reductionism is part of a scientific habit of mind, or paradigm, that we have inherited from Descartes. "Descartes formulated this master paradigm of Western civilization by disjoining the thinking subject … and the thing being thought of … and by positing 'clear and distinct' ideas as principles of reality" (3). Science has bought into this paradigm of simplicity, and the results have been stunning, in all the connotations of that word. As Morin says: "This paradigm has dominated the adventure of Western thought since the seventeenth century. It has without doubt allowed for very great progress in scientific knowledge and in philosophical reflection. Its ultimately noxious consequences did not begin to become clear until the twentieth century" (3).
For Morin, this reductionist tendency works in two ways, both quite familiar to us today: we either reduce reality to a collection of discrete parts, logically arranged, and logically interacting (scientists do this) or we reduce reality to a unified New Age Whole, Gaia, the Force, God, or the Big Soup (spiritualists do this). In terms of personal learning networks, we either reduce learning to the personal and lose sight of the network, or we reduce learning to the network and lose sight of the personal. For most of us, reality is either/or: either all interacting parts (a unified field theory) or one big, vibrating w/hole (a different unified field theory). A thing is either this or that, but not both; either here or there, but not both.
Morin says that both reductions are too simple to account for the complexity of reality. Rather, we need to keep both in mind. We must replace the connectors either/or with and/and/and. To my mind, this line of thinking is strongly reminiscent of Deleuze and Guattari's complaint against arborescent thinking in A Thousand Plateaus (1987): "One becomes two [Unity and Parts]: whenever we encounter this formula … what we have before us is the most classical and well reflected, oldest, and weariest kind of thought. Nature doesn't work that way" (5). For D&G, reality is a rhizomatic multiplicity, and "multiplicities are rhizomatic, and expose arborescent pseudomultiplicities for what they are. There is no unity to serve as a pivot in the object or to divide in the subject. … A multiplicity has neither subject nor object, only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions" (8).
Perhaps a simple (too simple) illustration is in order. I'm an English teacher, so this example comes easily to mind.
Consider the period (punctuation mark) at the end of this sentence --> . I made it big and supplied an arrow so that you would notice it; otherwise, you might not. We can address this period as a discrete element of punctuation, a subset of grammar, itself a subset of semantics. It has a name, period, which gives it a unique identity. It has a definition, a role, a verifiable existence. Clearly, a period has scientific meaning as an entity all unto itself. It is an individual.
Yet, all by itself, its meaning is trivial to the point of meaninglessness. On a line by itself, it's just a silly little dot:
.
Ahh, we say, right! The period means nothing as an individual. Only the whole sentence/paragraph/post/blog (whatever holistic level you wish to use) has meaning. And so we merge the period into the whole, and again we see that it becomes meaningless (it also raises hell with spell check and word wrap):
Considertheperiod(punctuationmark)attheendofthessentence.Imadeitbigandsuppliedanarrowsothatyouwouldnoticeit;otherwise,youmightnot.wecanaddressthisperiodasadiscreteelementofpunctuation,asubsetofgrammar,itselfasubsetofsemantics.ithasaname,period,whichgivesitauniqueidentity.ithasadefinition,arole,averifiableexistence.clearlyaperiodhasscientificmeaningasanentityalluntoitself.itisanindividual.
Obviously, reduction of the period into either scientific objectivism or holistic subjectivism (or any other duality you choose) destroys the meaning of the period. We must see the period as both itself and as a part of the whole. Both these simple views are at times expedient and even enlightening, yet if they become the only approach to the period, then we lose the meaning. In Morin's terms, we lose the complex reality of even something so relatively un-complex (I won't say simple) as a punctuation mark. According to Morin, individuals must have a complex autonomy based on dependence rather than freedom. We must see that the period emerges from the ecosystem of language. Though it draws its energy and structure from printed language as a whole, it must maintain its integrity as a period. It cannot droop into a , or rise into an i. The individual and the whole have a recursive reciprocity that defines them both. The period defines the paragraph, which defines the period, which defines the paragraph, and so on, back and forth.
Brains are like this. They are composed of neurons, all of which must remain individually unique, and yet all of which must be organized into a functioning brain. By itself, a neuron is almost as meaningless as a period, though not as un-complex. And if enough neurons join together into enough brain, then mind or consciousness emerges out of the interplay between micro and macro. This is where the magic happens, and as of yet, we do not have the language that captures this complexity. Still, reducing mind either to the interplay of discrete neurons in the brain or to some cosmic consciousness or Soul misses the complex, concrete reality of mind.
So what does all this have to do with personal learning environment? I'm so glad you asked. I was beginning to think I'd never get there.
Learning as simply a personal activity or as simply a group activity misses the complex reality of learning. Though it can be helpful to look at either the individual or the group, learning is the interplay of the individual with her environment. The individual learns from the environment, and the environment learns from the individual. In the interplay, they shape and reshape each other, learn and relearn from each other, teach and reteach each other.
Thus, as personal learning environment suggests, learning is framed by personal and environment and cannot exist without both. Another way to interpret this phrase is that learning is one of those activities that joins the individual to his environment. Or perhaps a better way to say this is that learning describes a particular kind of interplay, a particular dance, between the individual and the environment. And if that isn't complex enough, then imagine that all six and a half billion humans are all engaged in a similar dance—each with her own nuance, steps, rhythms, intensities, or determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions—world without end, one hell of a whopper rhizome.
The problem, of course, is that we don't have much language yet to talk intelligently about this kind of complexity. Our notions of critical thinking (interpretation, analysis, evaluation, inference, explanation, self-regulation, and so on) are all pretty much individual mental exercises aimed at reducing complexity to simple clarity. We need new ways to examine and think about complex, rhizomatic structures. Morin mentions three ways to think, or principles, that help us approach the complex: a dialogic principle (dia-logic), the principle of organizational recursion, and the holographic principle (by which I think he means what I would call fractal). Deleuze and Guattari mention cartography and decalcomania. I was pleased in our Elluminate session yesterday (Wed, 2010 Oct 06) when George Siemens spoke about mapping learning and knowledge to real life and listed resonance, synchronicity, wayfinding, amplification, and learning/knowledge symmetry aspects of connectivist learning. I don't know if he intends them as critical (or perhaps higher order) thinking skills, but they resonate with me that way. Recognizing and engaging pockets of resonance in an environment seems to be a critical thinking skill needed for mapping the rhizome.
Anyway, I think Cormier would do well to reconsider and find another way to read personal learning environments.
Saturday, April 10, 2010
PLN: Connect to Others
Another step in creating a personal learning network is to connect to others. You have a starting point and an identity in the Net wilderness, you have some tools for cutting paths through the bush, so now it's time to start blazing a path to some other points of interest. Don Juan tells Carlos how to do this:
This is the best practical advice I have seen for navigating the Net, and it graphically captures my own sense of how I explore my own personal learning network: watch the crevices, determine the direction of the flow, follow the watercourse from each point along the way. It fits nicely with what Cheun-Ferng Koh says about mapping the rhizome: a process of active construction based on flexible and functional experimentation, requiring and capitalizing on feedback. Follow this crevice, often to a dead-end, back up, float further downstream, follow another crevice, find something interesting, and link it to my blog, reader, social bookmarking tool, or all three. Gradually, over time, my PLN has emerged with some well-worn pathways between me and others, and with a wealth of offshoots still to explore.
I want to stop for a quick aside. I started this exploration of how to build a PLN with Step One: Create an Online Identity and Presence. Well, I had to start somewhere, but I must note that I could as easily have started here, with Step One: Connect to Others. In some ways, it makes more sense to start here, but either way, it really doesn't matter. Indeed, you might as well start with both steps, doing both simultaneously. Writing demands something of a linear progression in describing a process, and most of us want a clearly delineated Step One, Step Two process, but that strict linear progression does not really capture the dynamic, experimental approach required of navigation in the rhizome. Strict, classically arranged process papers do not allow for asides, such as this one, but descriptions of the rhizome demand it. So start with whatever step makes sense at the time.
Actually, our decision early on to emphasize either creating an identity or connecting to others depends a great deal on our own status. If we are already professionals with a firm professional identity and a grasp of the scope of our professional conversation, then we may begin our PLN with establishing our own online identity. If on the other hand, we are students with an embryonic professional identity and only a shaky grasp of the profession's conversation, then we may begin our PLN with an emphasis on connecting to others more experienced than ourselves. And in true rhizomatic fashion, we will sometimes emphasize one approach and sometimes the other, depending on the PLN we are creating. When I started both my professional and my personal PLNs, I initially emphasized my own identity, having a fairly strong sense of what I already thought about connecting and collaborating in online environments on the one hand and my role in my network of friends and family on the other. I was confident that I already had value to add to both those networks, so I emphasized my stuff. However, when I began to develop a network about creating online videos, I emphasized connecting to others who knew much more about video cams, storyboarding, filming, editing, and YouTube. I had no identity as a videographer, so I wisely kept my mouth shut and read and watched until I was familiar with the conversation.
And this brings me nicely to what could be a separate point about creating PLNs, but I'll include it here as an aside to an aside: Step One: Learn the Conversation.
When you find an interesting conversation on the Net, spend some time learning the scope and tone of the conversation before you butt in. This is obviously important for newbies and students, but it is just as important for professionals, who can assume that they know where the conversation is going when they really don't. Nothing will annoy an existing group more than having a new person speak in a loud voice either about something they don't understand as well as the group does or about something that the group has already discussed and closed. If you don't want to get a curt RTFM or an annoyed bugger off message, then read the freaking manual before you talk. Review the group's FAQ, scan the blog's archives, google the people in the conversation, look at the group's video channels, attend to the group's tone of conversation. Form some idea of who you're talking to and what they're talking about and how they want to relate to each other. Then jump in if the conversation still interests you.
Well, let's return to connecting to others. How do you find interesting sites to begin with? Lots of ways. Make note of sites that you hear about in the actual world from your colleagues and other experts—at this conference, for instance. Net links are a ubiquitous and common aspect of professional life, and if you are attentive, then you will have no problem picking up the addresses of more interesting sites than you will have time to visit.
Then, conduct your own network search. Google your favorite passion, something such as massively multiplayer online role-playing games to connect to more than you will ever want to know about Second Life and World of Warcraft. Google a noted scholar or personality. Use more than one search engine. As fine a tool as it is, Google is not the only way to search the Net. Want to find music files? Try MP3Realm and TuneFind. Want to find videos? Use ClipBlast and Blinkx. And don't overlook the other general purpose search engines: Yahoo!, Bing, and WolframAlpha. Each of them can do something that Google doesn't. Study the advanced search techniques for the various search engines, and become more adept at extending and refining your searches. Trust me: with more than one hundred terabytes of information on the public Net, you'll have no problem finding something about anything.
While using the search engines are wonderful, they have one shared problem: they too often lead you down unproductive paths. A more focused method for finding new connections is following the connections your connections follow. Most every blog that I read avidly has links to other blogs that share similar interests and orientations, or often better, to blogs that provide a rich and fertile access point to an entirely different conversation that can still contribute to the current conversation. These cross-boundary links are often the most productive for me.
Go first to your old plant and watch carefully the watercourse made by the rain. By now the rain must have carried the seeds far away. Watch the crevices made by the runoff, and from them determine the direction of the flow. Then find the plant that is growing at the farthest point from your plant. All the devil's weed plants that are growing in between are yours. Later … you can extend the size of your territory by following the watercourse from each point along the way. (88)
This is the best practical advice I have seen for navigating the Net, and it graphically captures my own sense of how I explore my own personal learning network: watch the crevices, determine the direction of the flow, follow the watercourse from each point along the way. It fits nicely with what Cheun-Ferng Koh says about mapping the rhizome: a process of active construction based on flexible and functional experimentation, requiring and capitalizing on feedback. Follow this crevice, often to a dead-end, back up, float further downstream, follow another crevice, find something interesting, and link it to my blog, reader, social bookmarking tool, or all three. Gradually, over time, my PLN has emerged with some well-worn pathways between me and others, and with a wealth of offshoots still to explore.
I want to stop for a quick aside. I started this exploration of how to build a PLN with Step One: Create an Online Identity and Presence. Well, I had to start somewhere, but I must note that I could as easily have started here, with Step One: Connect to Others. In some ways, it makes more sense to start here, but either way, it really doesn't matter. Indeed, you might as well start with both steps, doing both simultaneously. Writing demands something of a linear progression in describing a process, and most of us want a clearly delineated Step One, Step Two process, but that strict linear progression does not really capture the dynamic, experimental approach required of navigation in the rhizome. Strict, classically arranged process papers do not allow for asides, such as this one, but descriptions of the rhizome demand it. So start with whatever step makes sense at the time.
Actually, our decision early on to emphasize either creating an identity or connecting to others depends a great deal on our own status. If we are already professionals with a firm professional identity and a grasp of the scope of our professional conversation, then we may begin our PLN with establishing our own online identity. If on the other hand, we are students with an embryonic professional identity and only a shaky grasp of the profession's conversation, then we may begin our PLN with an emphasis on connecting to others more experienced than ourselves. And in true rhizomatic fashion, we will sometimes emphasize one approach and sometimes the other, depending on the PLN we are creating. When I started both my professional and my personal PLNs, I initially emphasized my own identity, having a fairly strong sense of what I already thought about connecting and collaborating in online environments on the one hand and my role in my network of friends and family on the other. I was confident that I already had value to add to both those networks, so I emphasized my stuff. However, when I began to develop a network about creating online videos, I emphasized connecting to others who knew much more about video cams, storyboarding, filming, editing, and YouTube. I had no identity as a videographer, so I wisely kept my mouth shut and read and watched until I was familiar with the conversation.
And this brings me nicely to what could be a separate point about creating PLNs, but I'll include it here as an aside to an aside: Step One: Learn the Conversation.
When you find an interesting conversation on the Net, spend some time learning the scope and tone of the conversation before you butt in. This is obviously important for newbies and students, but it is just as important for professionals, who can assume that they know where the conversation is going when they really don't. Nothing will annoy an existing group more than having a new person speak in a loud voice either about something they don't understand as well as the group does or about something that the group has already discussed and closed. If you don't want to get a curt RTFM or an annoyed bugger off message, then read the freaking manual before you talk. Review the group's FAQ, scan the blog's archives, google the people in the conversation, look at the group's video channels, attend to the group's tone of conversation. Form some idea of who you're talking to and what they're talking about and how they want to relate to each other. Then jump in if the conversation still interests you.
Well, let's return to connecting to others. How do you find interesting sites to begin with? Lots of ways. Make note of sites that you hear about in the actual world from your colleagues and other experts—at this conference, for instance. Net links are a ubiquitous and common aspect of professional life, and if you are attentive, then you will have no problem picking up the addresses of more interesting sites than you will have time to visit.
Then, conduct your own network search. Google your favorite passion, something such as massively multiplayer online role-playing games to connect to more than you will ever want to know about Second Life and World of Warcraft. Google a noted scholar or personality. Use more than one search engine. As fine a tool as it is, Google is not the only way to search the Net. Want to find music files? Try MP3Realm and TuneFind. Want to find videos? Use ClipBlast and Blinkx. And don't overlook the other general purpose search engines: Yahoo!, Bing, and WolframAlpha. Each of them can do something that Google doesn't. Study the advanced search techniques for the various search engines, and become more adept at extending and refining your searches. Trust me: with more than one hundred terabytes of information on the public Net, you'll have no problem finding something about anything.
While using the search engines are wonderful, they have one shared problem: they too often lead you down unproductive paths. A more focused method for finding new connections is following the connections your connections follow. Most every blog that I read avidly has links to other blogs that share similar interests and orientations, or often better, to blogs that provide a rich and fertile access point to an entirely different conversation that can still contribute to the current conversation. These cross-boundary links are often the most productive for me.
Thursday, April 8, 2010
PLN: Add Value
Don Juan counsels Carlos to "go first to your old plant and watch carefully the watercourse made by the rain. By now the rain must have carried the seeds far away." This is a subsequent step in mapping the rhizome, or building a PLN: distribute seeds, add value.
Building a PLN requires that we determine our own value-add. What do we bring to the conversations we are exloring? Networks are built on value, both what we take and what we add. At first, we may be more interested in taking value from the work of others on the Net who are exploring topics that interest us, but that is only half a network, with value flowing only in toward us. If we want a vibrant, lively, sustainable PLN, then we must add value back to the Net. This is very important. A node that adds no value to the Net will eventually be ignored, dropped, isolated, and in a network structure, an isolated node is a dead node. Connectivity between you and others requires that you add value. You must bring something to the conversation, or eventually, people will quit talking to you.
So how do you add value to the Net, thus increasing your own PLN? There are more ways to add value than anyone of us will become accomplished with, but you begin with your own interests and with your familiarity with the various Web 2.0 tools. If you are interested in writing, then you could consider building a blog, such as this one. There's a huge network of over 126 million blogs out on the Net for you to fit into and a variety of blogging tools such as Blogger, Wordpress, and Posterous. It's a rich environment, but it is far from the only one.
The Upside Learning Solutions Blog has a fine image that captures just a bit of the range of tools available for constructing a vibrant PLN:
Are you interested in building a PLN that gathers, vetts, and shares online information? Then look into RSS readers such as Google Reader, Bloglines, or Newsgator and consider social bookmarking tools such as Diigo and Delicious.
Want to build networks not around the written word but around images and videos? Then consider image sharing tools such as Picasa, Photobucket, and Flickr and video sharing tools such as YouTube and Vimeo. Again, this is a very rich environment, with YouTube alone serving up over one billion videos per day. You can find a place for your interests, whatever they are.
Want to host your own talk show? Then consider podcasting tools such as iTunes, Audacity, and Winamp. Your thoughts about the role of Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the rhizome in modern social networks can sit on iTunes along with lectures by professors from Berkeley, MIT, and Oxford. It's a very rich environment with lots of room for you.
Want to talk face-to-face with people? Then look into video-conferencing tools such as Google Chat, Skype, DimDim, or one of the instant messengers. There are millions of people out there who are also looking for someone like you to talk to. You can connect.
Want to connect through a game? As too often happens in the serious world of education, business, and government, games are overlooked as valid tools for connectivity and collaboration. Note that they don't have a place in the pretty graphic above, but games are serious business, so consider World of Warcraft, Battlefied 2, or Second Life. They all have millions of online players, and they have proven both their entertainment value and their connectivity value. Many major universities are holding online classes in Second Life, and BestBuys' Geek Squad unit uses BF2 to facilitate online connectivity among its agents. In the book Wikinomics, Tapscott and Williams include an account from Geek Squad founder Robert Stephens about how his geeks were self-organizing themselves through BF2 even as he was trying to create a sophisticated company wiki to help keep them organized:
There are more tools, but you get the idea, so I'll conclude with some good news and some better news and some best news: The good news is that Web 2.0 has an incredibly wide range of tools that will help you create and navigate a vibrant PLN. The better news is that most of them are free and rather easy to use. The best news is that you need use only a few of them.
For instance, I have built my own PLN with just a few tools:
Building a PLN requires that we determine our own value-add. What do we bring to the conversations we are exloring? Networks are built on value, both what we take and what we add. At first, we may be more interested in taking value from the work of others on the Net who are exploring topics that interest us, but that is only half a network, with value flowing only in toward us. If we want a vibrant, lively, sustainable PLN, then we must add value back to the Net. This is very important. A node that adds no value to the Net will eventually be ignored, dropped, isolated, and in a network structure, an isolated node is a dead node. Connectivity between you and others requires that you add value. You must bring something to the conversation, or eventually, people will quit talking to you.
So how do you add value to the Net, thus increasing your own PLN? There are more ways to add value than anyone of us will become accomplished with, but you begin with your own interests and with your familiarity with the various Web 2.0 tools. If you are interested in writing, then you could consider building a blog, such as this one. There's a huge network of over 126 million blogs out on the Net for you to fit into and a variety of blogging tools such as Blogger, Wordpress, and Posterous. It's a rich environment, but it is far from the only one.
The Upside Learning Solutions Blog has a fine image that captures just a bit of the range of tools available for constructing a vibrant PLN:
Are you interested in building a PLN that gathers, vetts, and shares online information? Then look into RSS readers such as Google Reader, Bloglines, or Newsgator and consider social bookmarking tools such as Diigo and Delicious.
Want to build networks not around the written word but around images and videos? Then consider image sharing tools such as Picasa, Photobucket, and Flickr and video sharing tools such as YouTube and Vimeo. Again, this is a very rich environment, with YouTube alone serving up over one billion videos per day. You can find a place for your interests, whatever they are.
Want to host your own talk show? Then consider podcasting tools such as iTunes, Audacity, and Winamp. Your thoughts about the role of Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the rhizome in modern social networks can sit on iTunes along with lectures by professors from Berkeley, MIT, and Oxford. It's a very rich environment with lots of room for you.
Want to talk face-to-face with people? Then look into video-conferencing tools such as Google Chat, Skype, DimDim, or one of the instant messengers. There are millions of people out there who are also looking for someone like you to talk to. You can connect.
Want to connect through a game? As too often happens in the serious world of education, business, and government, games are overlooked as valid tools for connectivity and collaboration. Note that they don't have a place in the pretty graphic above, but games are serious business, so consider World of Warcraft, Battlefied 2, or Second Life. They all have millions of online players, and they have proven both their entertainment value and their connectivity value. Many major universities are holding online classes in Second Life, and BestBuys' Geek Squad unit uses BF2 to facilitate online connectivity among its agents. In the book Wikinomics, Tapscott and Williams include an account from Geek Squad founder Robert Stephens about how his geeks were self-organizing themselves through BF2 even as he was trying to create a sophisticated company wiki to help keep them organized:
Then one day Stephens asked a deputy director of counterintelligence at corporate how things were going in the field. “I worry about those agents in Anchorage, Alaska,” he said. “There’s about twenty of them there, and I worry about them staying connected to the mission.” The deputy director said to Stephens, “Oh, those Anchorage guys, I talk to them all the time.”
Curious, Stephens prodded him to reveal more details. So the deputy director sheepishly told him that they all play Battlefield 2 online. “With each server you can have 128 people simultaneously fighting each other in a virtual environment,” said the director. “We wear headsets and use Ventrilo software so that we can talk over the Internet while we are running around fighting.” Stephens, who now joins in himself from time to time, says the agents taunt each other, saying, “Hey, I see you behind the wall. But then, you know, while we’re running along with the squadron with our rifles in our hands, one of the agents behind me will be like, ‘Yeah, we just hit our revenue to budget,’ and somebody else will be like, ‘Hey, how do you reset the password on a Linksys router?’ ”
Stephens was aghast when he first learned of the agent’s antics. “I just stood there in the hallway going, ‘Oh my God,’ I’m sitting here trying to build this shiny playground with all these tools for collaboration and I failed to notice what the agents were already doing. While I had my head down doing this in preparation to open the wiki’s floodgates, the agents had self-organized online in probably the most effective and efficient collaborative tool that’s already out there.”
Stephens says that the agents now have up to 384 colleagues simultaneously playing at any one time. “They’re talking and they’re hanging out, and often they’re talking shop and swapping tips,” Stephens said. Geek Squad agents had just unofficially added another collaboration tool to the palette. Stephens says the experience changed his thinking completely. “Instead of trying to set an agenda,” he said, “I’m now going to try and discover their agenda, and serve it.” Stephens even muses that he may get the agents to hack Battlefield 2 into a Geek Squad video game that he can use for training and recruitment.
There are more tools, but you get the idea, so I'll conclude with some good news and some better news and some best news: The good news is that Web 2.0 has an incredibly wide range of tools that will help you create and navigate a vibrant PLN. The better news is that most of them are free and rather easy to use. The best news is that you need use only a few of them.
For instance, I have built my own PLN with just a few tools:
- a blog (Google Blogger),
- an RSS reader to track online information (Google Reader),
- a social bookmarking tool to capture, annotate, and share online information (Diigo), and
- a wiki to include others in building new information (Google Sites).
On reflection, I notice that I left out email, but I think I'll leave it out. Email is so standard, so expected, that it is hardly worth noting, though that doesn't mean that it is not important. It is.
PLN: Fix a Point
In the book The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, Don Juan tries to help Carlos get his bearings in this new, strange world of the Yaqui shaman that Carlos is exploring, having left the familiar security and terrain of the university. In some ways, then, Carlos Castaneda is like those of us who leave the familiar learning environment of the university for the unfamiliar environment of the Internet. And like Carlos, we often cannot quite figure out where we are or how to proceed. Don Juan gives Carlos some advice that may help us as well.
First, fix a point on the Net. Don Juan says to Carlos, "Go first to your old plant." To my mind, this is key, and so I want to explore fixing a point for yourself and creating an identity as one of the early steps to building a personal learning network, or PLN.
We always build our personal learning networks from the center, from where we are and what we are; thus, defining ourselves is a key early element in constructing a PLN. Constructing the self is a lesson far outside what I want to discuss here, but we are all familiar with the task. Perhaps the first practical question for us to ask is, "Do I want a public, professional self or a private, personal self?" If you want to create a public, professional self, then perhaps gravitate toward a blog, such as Google's Blogger. If you want to create a private, personal self, then perhaps gravitate toward a social network such as Facebook. Or do both. Or build a professional self on Facebook and a personal self on Blogger. You can easily have multiple selves on the Net, but for the rest of this discussion, I want to talk about building a professional self, fixing a professional point.
In general, we should decide what we are about on the Net, and we should be authentic. We must ask what we are truly interested in learning more about and talking with others about. Being authentic is as much practical advice as moralistic. Building a PLN is hard work, and most of us will grow tired of cultivating a false interest and identity. For instance, I want to explore and talk about how the emerging world network is affecting the way we live, think, and communicate. This blog is the center point of my online professional identity. It is ground zero of my professional PLN. It is where I synthesize the information I glean from the Net and where I create new and hopefully valuable insight into how networks (or what I'm now calling rhizomes) are changing humanity, especially education, though I feel free to wander along any crevice like Carlos Castaneda to follow any asignifying rupture into whatever looks promising to me at the moment.
This blog gives me a known reference point from which I can branch out to other places and people on the Net. With it, I don't feel quite so lost, as I know how to get back to here, but this blog does more than just provide a reference point for me: it also provides a reference point for others on the Net. This blog is a beacon that signals my interest in social networks, personal learning networks, rhizomes, Deleuze and Guattari, education, writing, and so forth and that demonstrates whatever competence or expertise I have in these fields, assuming any. Others can readily enough decide if they want to stop here for a moment, testing the site before they decide whether or not to connect to it and to me. If they like the content here, if they find an interesting voice, if they find some value for their own PLNs, then they will connect, and both their and my PLNs will grow. If they don't find some value, then they will move on. No offense implied, none taken. In a PLN, no one is ever stuck in a boring class that adds no value to their education.
First, fix a point on the Net. Don Juan says to Carlos, "Go first to your old plant." To my mind, this is key, and so I want to explore fixing a point for yourself and creating an identity as one of the early steps to building a personal learning network, or PLN.
We always build our personal learning networks from the center, from where we are and what we are; thus, defining ourselves is a key early element in constructing a PLN. Constructing the self is a lesson far outside what I want to discuss here, but we are all familiar with the task. Perhaps the first practical question for us to ask is, "Do I want a public, professional self or a private, personal self?" If you want to create a public, professional self, then perhaps gravitate toward a blog, such as Google's Blogger. If you want to create a private, personal self, then perhaps gravitate toward a social network such as Facebook. Or do both. Or build a professional self on Facebook and a personal self on Blogger. You can easily have multiple selves on the Net, but for the rest of this discussion, I want to talk about building a professional self, fixing a professional point.
In general, we should decide what we are about on the Net, and we should be authentic. We must ask what we are truly interested in learning more about and talking with others about. Being authentic is as much practical advice as moralistic. Building a PLN is hard work, and most of us will grow tired of cultivating a false interest and identity. For instance, I want to explore and talk about how the emerging world network is affecting the way we live, think, and communicate. This blog is the center point of my online professional identity. It is ground zero of my professional PLN. It is where I synthesize the information I glean from the Net and where I create new and hopefully valuable insight into how networks (or what I'm now calling rhizomes) are changing humanity, especially education, though I feel free to wander along any crevice like Carlos Castaneda to follow any asignifying rupture into whatever looks promising to me at the moment.
This blog gives me a known reference point from which I can branch out to other places and people on the Net. With it, I don't feel quite so lost, as I know how to get back to here, but this blog does more than just provide a reference point for me: it also provides a reference point for others on the Net. This blog is a beacon that signals my interest in social networks, personal learning networks, rhizomes, Deleuze and Guattari, education, writing, and so forth and that demonstrates whatever competence or expertise I have in these fields, assuming any. Others can readily enough decide if they want to stop here for a moment, testing the site before they decide whether or not to connect to it and to me. If they like the content here, if they find an interesting voice, if they find some value for their own PLNs, then they will connect, and both their and my PLNs will grow. If they don't find some value, then they will move on. No offense implied, none taken. In a PLN, no one is ever stuck in a boring class that adds no value to their education.
Building a Personal Learning Network
I have become quite interested in the emerging concepts of personal learning networks, personal learning environments, and social learning environments. For me, the phrases are somewhat interchangeable, but I most commonly use the phrase personal learning network, or the acronym PLN. Whichever phrase we choose, I think all of them refer to our creation and exploration of rhizomatic spaces, and building a PLN can be disorienting for students who are schooled in traditional hierarchical structures that tell them what to study, when and where to study it, with whom to study, and why, and then tell them when they have studied enough, and finally, validate that study for the rest of society. The hierarchical institution, whether K12, university, or yeshiva or madrasah, provides all the signposts and pathways for a student's learning. In the words of D&G, the institution provides the tracing onto reality that the student demonstrates competence in following. Seldom are students encouraged to explore on their own, with or without an experienced guide, and yet, that is exactly what a personal learning network demands.
Landing in the middle of the Internet with the notion of building a personal learning network can be quite disorienting, somewhat similar to being set loose in the middle of a virgin rain forest. We know that the forest teems with life both wonderful and dangerous, with great treasures and equally great perils, but we do not know where we are or how to navigate to someplace we want to be, while avoiding places we don't want to be. What do we do? How do we proceed? How do we navigate the forest?
Or how do we map the rhizome? Deleuze and Guattari are of some help. They provide us with a quote from Carlos Castaneda's book The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge that may be instructive. In the quote, the Yaqui shaman Don Juan is trying to teach Carlos how to determine the extent and shape of his garden of hallucinogenic plants:
Go first to your old plant and watch carefully the watercourse made by the rain. By now the rain must have carried the seeds far away. Watch the crevices made by the runoff, and from them determine the direction of the flow. Then find the plant that is growing at the farthest point from your plant. All the devil's weed plants that are growing in between are yours. Later … you can extend the size of your territory by following the watercourse from each point along the way. (88)
For my purposes here, Don Juan seems to be teaching Carlos how to map his way through the rhizome, and I think we can draw a nice Sunday School lesson from the given text. Note first that Don Juan is not telling Carlos to follow a tracing onto reality. He does not say, "Measure out a plot of land twenty feet by thirty, plow straight rows two feet apart, and then plant seeds every twenty-four inches atop each row." In educational terms, Don Juan does not provide Carlos with a set curriculum to follow, with tests and measurements at fixed intervals along the way to measure progress, and a certificate of achievement at the end of the harvesting season. Rather, Don Juan's advice is to proceed by fixing a point (the first, old plant) and then following crevices from that point. Carlos is to proceed with mapping reality, not tracing over it. Remember the quote from Chuen-Ferng Koh in Internet: Towards a Holistic Ontology that mapping is an “active construction based on flexible and functional experimentation, requiring and capitalizing on feedback. The map is not … a blueprint whose workability has to be taken on faith; the map is never fixed, but a changing flux of adaptation and negotiation.”
This seems to be exactly what Don Juan is telling Carlos, and to my mind, this is good advice for building a personal learning network. Let's follow it for a few posts and see where it takes us.
Landing in the middle of the Internet with the notion of building a personal learning network can be quite disorienting, somewhat similar to being set loose in the middle of a virgin rain forest. We know that the forest teems with life both wonderful and dangerous, with great treasures and equally great perils, but we do not know where we are or how to navigate to someplace we want to be, while avoiding places we don't want to be. What do we do? How do we proceed? How do we navigate the forest?
Or how do we map the rhizome? Deleuze and Guattari are of some help. They provide us with a quote from Carlos Castaneda's book The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge that may be instructive. In the quote, the Yaqui shaman Don Juan is trying to teach Carlos how to determine the extent and shape of his garden of hallucinogenic plants:
Go first to your old plant and watch carefully the watercourse made by the rain. By now the rain must have carried the seeds far away. Watch the crevices made by the runoff, and from them determine the direction of the flow. Then find the plant that is growing at the farthest point from your plant. All the devil's weed plants that are growing in between are yours. Later … you can extend the size of your territory by following the watercourse from each point along the way. (88)
For my purposes here, Don Juan seems to be teaching Carlos how to map his way through the rhizome, and I think we can draw a nice Sunday School lesson from the given text. Note first that Don Juan is not telling Carlos to follow a tracing onto reality. He does not say, "Measure out a plot of land twenty feet by thirty, plow straight rows two feet apart, and then plant seeds every twenty-four inches atop each row." In educational terms, Don Juan does not provide Carlos with a set curriculum to follow, with tests and measurements at fixed intervals along the way to measure progress, and a certificate of achievement at the end of the harvesting season. Rather, Don Juan's advice is to proceed by fixing a point (the first, old plant) and then following crevices from that point. Carlos is to proceed with mapping reality, not tracing over it. Remember the quote from Chuen-Ferng Koh in Internet: Towards a Holistic Ontology that mapping is an “active construction based on flexible and functional experimentation, requiring and capitalizing on feedback. The map is not … a blueprint whose workability has to be taken on faith; the map is never fixed, but a changing flux of adaptation and negotiation.”
This seems to be exactly what Don Juan is telling Carlos, and to my mind, this is good advice for building a personal learning network. Let's follow it for a few posts and see where it takes us.
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Motivation in the Rhizome
In a wonderful TED talk, Daniel Pink explains how we must rethink motivation in the 21st Century, if we are to move from motivating people to do routine, mechanical, factory-type work—or what I associate with work within hierarchical structures—to motivating people to do open-ended, creative work—work within rhizomatic structures. First the video:
Pink makes a case for changing the way we handle motivation in modern businesses by showing that the traditional ideas about rewarding positive behavior and punishing negative behavior do not work so well in the new forms of 21st Century businesses. He says that research into motivation has demonstrated that extrinsic incentives (money, grades, etc.) either have no effect or a negative effect on the performance of people engaged in complex, open-ended tasks that require strong problem-solving skills and creativity, while extrinsic incentives still have a positive effect on the performance of those engaged in rote, routine tasks with clear objectives and explicit performance routines. Extrinsic incentives narrow our focus, and thus, work very well with mechanistic, narrow tasks; however, they actually interfere with those tasks that require a broad point of view. A study of motivation by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston reports that in their study as long as the task involved only mechanical skill, bonuses worked as they would be expected: the higher the pay, the better the performance, but once a task called for "even rudimentary cognitive skill," a larger reward "led to poorer performance." The London School of Economics reports: "We find that financial incentives … can result in a negative impact on overall performance."
However, Pink claims, most businesses still primarily use extrinsic incentives to motivate their people; thus, there is a mismatch between what science knows to be true and what business actually does. If we want to work our way out of the current economic mess, says Pink, then we must use intrinsic incentives for most of our workers, and he mentions three:
Traditional management is great for enforcing compliance, but self-direction, or autonomy, is better for promoting engagement. Tech companies such as Atlassian and Google give their employees free time (autonomy) to engage in personal projects at the company expense. These companies find that many of their most productive, innovative new ideas come from this free time. Pink then describes ROWE (Results Only Work Environments) where employees have no schedule or imposed routine—how they do their work is totally up to them. In the case of two online encyclopedia, Microsoft's Encarta and Wikipedia, Microsoft provided all the correct extrinsic, old-style, hierarchical incentives, while Wikipedia provided intrinsic, new-style, rhizomatic incentives. Wikipedia wins.
I think we can easily apply this thinking to education, where we are accustomed to motivating students with carrots and sticks, rewards and punishments, with grades and detention. Old style rewards and punishments work well in classes where the outcomes and the methods for reaching those outcomes are fixed and explicit. If, however, we want to encourage creativity and a sense of exploration and amazement in our students, then traditional rewards and punishments do not work. They actually hinder.
What works? According to Pink, autonomy is a fine place to start. If we want to encourage creativity and problem-solving in our students, then we must give them more ability to self-organize. Autonomy, however, frightens most schools, even colleges. Teachers are way too afraid of it. After all, they might lose the little bit of authority that they have. However, this is the situation of the rhizome. Connectivity—the principle that every point can and must connect to every other point—overturns the hierarchy and its command-and-control structures. Rhizomes are self-organizing, even under extreme duress of the most fascist states.
Then mastery is a fine way to continue. I truly believe that the desire to be really good at something that is important to you is a core desire in humans. I'm amazed that we've been able to create a system of education that destroys that desire in so many.
Finally, purpose is a fine way to wind it all up. Again, I believe that most of us want to be of use in something that is larger than ourselves, and if these are the things that we really want from our students—autonomy, mastery, and purpose—then we need to reconsider the structures through which we try to inculcate those values. Command-and-control, hierarchical structures just won't do the job.
Pink makes a case for changing the way we handle motivation in modern businesses by showing that the traditional ideas about rewarding positive behavior and punishing negative behavior do not work so well in the new forms of 21st Century businesses. He says that research into motivation has demonstrated that extrinsic incentives (money, grades, etc.) either have no effect or a negative effect on the performance of people engaged in complex, open-ended tasks that require strong problem-solving skills and creativity, while extrinsic incentives still have a positive effect on the performance of those engaged in rote, routine tasks with clear objectives and explicit performance routines. Extrinsic incentives narrow our focus, and thus, work very well with mechanistic, narrow tasks; however, they actually interfere with those tasks that require a broad point of view. A study of motivation by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston reports that in their study as long as the task involved only mechanical skill, bonuses worked as they would be expected: the higher the pay, the better the performance, but once a task called for "even rudimentary cognitive skill," a larger reward "led to poorer performance." The London School of Economics reports: "We find that financial incentives … can result in a negative impact on overall performance."
However, Pink claims, most businesses still primarily use extrinsic incentives to motivate their people; thus, there is a mismatch between what science knows to be true and what business actually does. If we want to work our way out of the current economic mess, says Pink, then we must use intrinsic incentives for most of our workers, and he mentions three:
- autonomy - the urge to direct our own lives,
- mastery - the desire to get better at something that matters, and
- purpose - the yearning to serve something larger than ourselves.
Traditional management is great for enforcing compliance, but self-direction, or autonomy, is better for promoting engagement. Tech companies such as Atlassian and Google give their employees free time (autonomy) to engage in personal projects at the company expense. These companies find that many of their most productive, innovative new ideas come from this free time. Pink then describes ROWE (Results Only Work Environments) where employees have no schedule or imposed routine—how they do their work is totally up to them. In the case of two online encyclopedia, Microsoft's Encarta and Wikipedia, Microsoft provided all the correct extrinsic, old-style, hierarchical incentives, while Wikipedia provided intrinsic, new-style, rhizomatic incentives. Wikipedia wins.
I think we can easily apply this thinking to education, where we are accustomed to motivating students with carrots and sticks, rewards and punishments, with grades and detention. Old style rewards and punishments work well in classes where the outcomes and the methods for reaching those outcomes are fixed and explicit. If, however, we want to encourage creativity and a sense of exploration and amazement in our students, then traditional rewards and punishments do not work. They actually hinder.
What works? According to Pink, autonomy is a fine place to start. If we want to encourage creativity and problem-solving in our students, then we must give them more ability to self-organize. Autonomy, however, frightens most schools, even colleges. Teachers are way too afraid of it. After all, they might lose the little bit of authority that they have. However, this is the situation of the rhizome. Connectivity—the principle that every point can and must connect to every other point—overturns the hierarchy and its command-and-control structures. Rhizomes are self-organizing, even under extreme duress of the most fascist states.
Then mastery is a fine way to continue. I truly believe that the desire to be really good at something that is important to you is a core desire in humans. I'm amazed that we've been able to create a system of education that destroys that desire in so many.
Finally, purpose is a fine way to wind it all up. Again, I believe that most of us want to be of use in something that is larger than ourselves, and if these are the things that we really want from our students—autonomy, mastery, and purpose—then we need to reconsider the structures through which we try to inculcate those values. Command-and-control, hierarchical structures just won't do the job.
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