RhizoRhetoric: Writing as a Complex System

I've been reading about complexity science and thinking — I prefer here the active form thinking over the static form thought, verb over noun, doing over being — and I want to write a few posts about writing as a complex adaptive system. I will shamelessly pilfer from some of the works that I've been reading to see if I can make some connections between the ancient art of rhetoric and the modern science of complexity. I start with Joss Colchester's short (57 pages) introduction into complexity: Complexity Theory (2016), which is accessible to most anyone interested in the topic.

For Colchester, complex systems are subsets of systems in general. He defines a system as "a group of parts called elements and relations between these parts through which they can function together and form a whole" (5). Colchester then adds complexity to the idea of systems, presumably to distinguish complex systems from other types of systems, presumably complicated or even simple systems, though he is not clear about this. I find it useful, then, to use Snowden's categories of the simple, complicated, complex, and chaotic domains to understand the distinction that Colchester is trying to make with complex systems.

As do many writers dealing with complexity, Colchester begins by noting that "there is no formal definition for it" (5), and then like the others, he lists some characteristics of complexity, noting that complexity can be treated as a parameter, or a measurement of something:

• Complexity is a measurement of the number of elements in a system, with a rule of thumb that the more elements a system has, then the more complex it is.
• Complexity is a measurement of the number of connections among the elements within a system, with a similar rule of thumb: the more connections, the more complexity.
• Complexity is a measurement of the adaptability of the elements. The more elements can adapt to themselves and to their environment, the more complex they are.
• Finally, "complexity is also a measure of the degree of diversity between elements within a system" (6). The more diverse the elements, then the greater the complexity of the system, as a general rule.

This can be a useful starting point for thinking of writing systems such as academic English as complex. Let's see how.

First, and obviously, writing itself is a system. It is a "group of parts" and "relations between these parts" that enable the system to "function together and form a whole". We can start with the small elements: marks (letters and punctuation) and work upwards through words, phrases, clauses, paragraphs, and more which all function together to make memos for your boss, tweets to your peeps, poems for your lovers, and research papers in your college chemistry class. All of the elements of writing relate in regular ways to other elements, and these relationships form the documents that make writing useful to us humans.

But writing is a system not just within itself but also within other systems — social systems, for instance. Within other systems, writing can act as both one of the elements within the system and as one of the connectors and connections among other elements within the system. Writing connects people — especially texting. Writing is also a part of educational and commercial systems, which I will explore more in future posts.

But is writing a complex system? Yes.

First, writing has lots of elements. I'm not particularly happy with number as a defining parameter of complexity. I think that some systems with few elements (slime mold, for instance) can be complex and some systems with many elements (jet airplanes, for instance) can be merely complicated. Still, by most any measure, writing systems have sufficient number of elements to be considered complex. A study by Google and Harvard estimates over a million words in the history of English, while the Second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary lists about 600,000 words with 171,000 words in current use, and an average of 20,000 to 30,000 words used by individuals. Those are big numbers.

Second, the elements in writing (from letters and punctuation marks to paragraphs) can be connected in countless ways to form an almost infinite number of different documents, most of which feature a surprising degree of novelty. Almost any writer of English can form a sentence that has never before been written yet is still recognizable as English writing. This is astounding.

Third, writing systems can adapt in almost infinite ways to each other and to their environments. We are all witness to the new writings (words, grammars, documents, and more ) that have emerged with modern electronic technology. This blog is itself witness to how a writing system can both map and adapt to new landscapes. Of course, spoken language adapts just as well, but I'm focusing here on writing systems. This means that writing can learn. More on that in later posts.

Finally, writing systems have a sufficient diversity among the elements within the system. In this respect, English writing is somewhat like DNA: it has only 26 letters and a handful of punctuation marks with which to generate countless documents. Though we start with only 26 letters, they can combine and recombine to form countless other elements, just as the four DNA bases can (A, G, C, and T).

So, based on Colchester's brief definition of complex systems, I'm quite comfortable saying that writing systems meet the cut. I'll continue to look at other definitions, but I'm confident that writing will meet those definitions as well. So writing is a complex system. What does that mean? More on that in future posts.

The Rhizo Classroom: The Flow of Ethics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ethics for MOOCs: Imagination

I want to finish my series about rhizo-ethics before Dave Cormier posts another #rhizo15 challenge. We'll see.

Woermann and Cilliers' discussion of complex ethics in their article The ethics of complexity and the complexity of ethics (2012) insists that ethics in complex spaces requires a self-critical rationality and that this rationality is supported by four principles: provisionality, transgressivity, irony, and imagination, or creativity. Imagination engages us with the future, they say, whereas irony engages us with the present incongruity between what we expect and what is. They quote Peter Allen's Knowledge, Ignorance, and Learning article (caution: link downloads PDF): that creativity "is the motor of change, and the hidden dynamic that underlies the rise and fall of civilizations, peoples, and regions, and evolution both encourages and feeds on invention" (457). Imagination, then, points us toward a more sustainable future and provides the means to get there, and, they claim, "no one can contest the urgent need to move towards a more sustainable future" (457). It is this more sustainable future that seems to connect imagination to ethics for Woermann and Cilliers.

I have mostly enjoyed Woermann and Cilliers' argument, but I have problems with them just here. While I agree that it takes imagination and some creativity to move toward a better future, however one defines it, I do not agree that "no one can contest the urgent need to move towards a more sustainable future." While I would not contest our need to move beyond where we are now, I know many who believe that things are pretty good just as they are or that we should, in fact, move back to something in the past. Woermann and Cilliers' point touches precisely on the differences among those who want to preserve society as it is, return society to some better past, or move society forward to a better future. All these groups are well represented in the population. They are all well represented in education. I don't think the progressives are in the majority.

Still, despite these quibbles, I have learned from Woermann and Cilliers, and I do agree with them that imagination and creativity are important for ethically negotiating complex, open spaces.

First, imagination is the engine for creating options, choices, and new paths, an ability that so far has served humanity quite well. Indeed, it is the engine of evolution, of everything. The Universe is imaginative to the extreme. Some physicists hypothesize a Multi-verse, an infinity of universes in which every thing that can exist and can happen does. Maybe so, but even if there is only one Universe, this one, it is still rich enough in imagination and creativity for life, including The Beatles, to emerge. How wonderful is that!

This capacity for imagination—which is not limited to humans, by the way, but is available to flowers, rocks, and quarks as well—is a requirement for negotiating a space/time path through an open, complex universe. Or through a rhizo-MOOC. Imagination is required even if you are following a path pioneered by someone else. You have to imagine that you can get up and go there without falling off the edge of the Earth, so you draft in behind some trusted, lead bird, and once you are confident that the air won't fail beneath your wings, you can start charting your own path from this new position. This is learning. Even for the most daring and brilliant of us. We all start by drafting in someone's path. Without a John Clerk Maxwell charting a new path through electromagnetism, we would have had no Einstein. Maybe even no Beatles. Imagine!

This is a radical over-turning of our usual conception of ethics, which usually means conforming to the prescribed pattern of behavior. In complex spaces, proper behavior implies the imagination to change your paths and patterns—to believe and behave differently than before. And really, if you are not willing to chart new paths, or at least to consider new paths, then why go to school at all?

According to Woermann and Cilliers, Timothy Hargrave argues that imagination is not merely an individual capability, but a social one that, I say, is enhanced and amplified by the swarm. Hargrave says imagination and creativity emerges within "pluralistic processes in which multiple actors with opposing moral viewpoints interact, and [where] no single actor is in control" and within the "lived tensions between contradictory perspectives" (458). That sounds like a swarm to me. Again, this overturns our usual view of the purpose of ethics: to reduce conflict. Instead, complex ethics recognizes the inherent tensions within the multiplicity of a rhizo-swarm. Without this tension, no movement or change is possible. Ask the rocks along the San Andreas fault—without the tension among them, they could never move or change. In some ways, earthquakes are rocks learning to live together. Rock ethics. We can regret when their tensions spill over on us humans, but then, it should remind us of how much non-humans have suffered when our tensions spill over on them. Complex ethics are ecological—never limited to the contracting or conflicting entities.

How do we ethically cope with this tension in human behavior and beliefs? The conservative approach is to make everyone behave and believe the same way. The Way. Complex ethics takes a more imaginative approach based first on recognizing the existence of different ways of believing and behaving. It's amazing how stubborn we humans can be about conceding the existence of views other than our own. We are always surprised when we discover that another person drives to the store along a different highway than we take. Can't they see that this is the correct Way? Rhizo-ethics, then, can conceive of different beliefs and behaviors.

Then rhizo-ethics is tolerant, which as Woermann and Cilliers point out is not some wishy-washy, weak indulgence of strange belief and behavior. Rather, tolerance is an imaginative recognition of the possibilities of other beliefs and behaviors. Woermann and Cilliers rely on James Mensch's observation that "in Latin, tolerance has the sense of supporting or sustaining, rather than enduring or suffering" (459). They quote Edmund Husserl's definition that tolerance is when I affirm for the other "his ideals as his, as ideals which I must affirm in him, just as he must affirm my ideals – not, indeed, as his ideals of life but as the ideals of my being and life" (459). I want to add here that imagining other beliefs and behaviors is a call, even a challenge, to us to transgress or rethink our own beliefs and behaviors. Rhizo-ethics means the imagination to consider what different constellations in the sky might mean even if we keep to our own constellations. Mensch says that tolerance "can be understood as the attitude that actively sustains the maximum number of compatible possibilities of being human" (459).

Finally, I think an imaginative rhizo-ethics involves trust. We usually think of trust as interpersonal, but consider it first as ecological.  We must trust first that a minimum "requisite diversity" is "needed for a system to cope with its environment" (457) and that some excess diversity is "needed for long-term systems survival, since the ‘fat’ of excess knowledge and diversity is needed both for breaking out of our conceptual schema and for imagining, and thereby experimenting and innovating for the future" (458). We humans are here because of the excess diversity in some cyanobacteria that emerged a few billion years ago. That bacteria existed because of the excess diversity in some nucleotides that lead to RNA. Trust diversity. It has worked magnificently well ever since hot gases started clumping into stars and galaxies. Likewise, mistrust anyone who claims that they know what we all should believe and how we all should behave. They do not have our best interests at heart.

So rhizo-ethics says that the proper stance toward a complex, open space calls for imagination and creativity. We do not know The Way through, and at times, we must imagine a path where none exists. We must expect others to follow other paths, to already be on other trajectories with different subjectives in mind. We must expect different beliefs and behaviors and challenge ourselves to understand them, even if we do not accept them. We must expect that our own beliefs and behaviors are as strange to them and as difficult to understand. Ours is not the only way to model a useful, beautiful, and productive world. It may not even be a comparatively good way.

And Dave posted a new #rhizo15 challenge last night, so I didn't finish this in time (whatever that means), but it doesn't matter, as I think I have one more rhizo-ethics post to write anyway.

Ethics for MOOCs: Provisional Boundaries

Woermann and Cilliers posit four mechanisms that reinforce and promote the critical attitude: provisionality, followed by transgressivity, irony, and imagination. To my mind, mechanism is an unfortunate term, as none of the four seem mechanical; rather, I would call them heuristics, having more to do with experimentation in contact with the real, as Deleuze and Guattari say it, than with a device for reliably and regularly framing the world. These four mechanisms are bricolage for bricoleurs.

Given our incomplete knowledge of any complex system—and I think that all naturally occurring systems are complex as are many human-created systems such as MOOCs—it should be obvious that knowledge is provisional and, thus, the ethics based on that knowledge is provisional. While we must frame knowledge and ethical responses to complex spaces, we must simultaneously hold that our frames are in some way inadequate both when shifted to other contexts and within our own contexts. Let's see how.

That meaning, knowledge, and ethics change when we shift contexts is almost trivial to say. Even children can sense, if not adequately explain, the different meaning in the words "I love you" when spoken by different people in different situations. Indeed, the words don't mean much without a context. Likely when you just read the words I love you, you automatically supplied a context in your mind to help the words mean something. Without context, there is almost no meaning, and different contexts mean different meanings. Most of the world's love stories are based on two people using the same words from different contexts. Much of humor relies on things said or done in the wrong context (this touches both on transgressivity and irony, which I'll discuss later).

But the provisional nature of knowledge and ethics is even more subtle than this as both knowledge and ethics are uncertain even within a given context. Language, knowledge, and ethics never come to us pure, but they are always stained with their use in other contexts. Woermann and Cilliers quote Bakhtin, who says in his 1984 book Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics:

The life of the word is contained in its transfer... from one context to another context... In this process the word does not forget its own path and cannot completely free itself from the power of these concrete contexts into which it has entered. (452)

When we say "I love you", we cannot unsay all the other times we have said the same, for better or for worse, in other contexts, nor can we unsay all the other times the other has heard these words said. We cannot even unsay all the times countless others have said and heard these words. Our boundaries leech. Our frames do not hold absolutely against the outside. Perhaps this is one reason we so often envelope ourselves in emotional frames: to insulate ourselves from the knowledge of other contexts, to focus ourselves on taking the desired action quickly regardless of what we know, to forbid our knowledge and ethics from interfering with what we are passionate to do.

Not only do contexts leech the outside in, they are never complete in themselves. As Woermann and Cilliers note (453), Derrida says in Living On: Border Lines (1979) that "no context permits saturation." Woermann and Cilliers add that "every context is open to further description" and "[t]here are no final meanings that arrest the movement of signification" (453). Even when we position ourselves within a context in order to know what we know and to act as well as we can, our given context is open to further description, further interpretation. We can always know more, and that more always changes our knowledge and understanding.

We are always in trouble. We must make decisions, and the frames that inform our decisions are provisional. Most people do not like this tension, and they work very hard to simplify the complexity of life to render decision-making—which is the heart of ethics—into binary choices, into Thou shalt or Thou shalt not, into nothing can exceed the speed of light or you can understand any phenomenon by breaking it down into its smallest constituents and describing its fundamental interactions. Here is my problem with fundamentalists: not that they do or do not have a different frame than I, but that they insist that theirs is the only frame, the only context. Moreover, the true fundamentalists see it as their job or calling to destroy all frames and contexts other than their own. We have a long history of religions trying to stamp out competing religious frames, but we currently have a strong movement among atheists to stamp out all religious frames. To my mind, both are highly unethical attempts to destroy competing frames and to force their one, true frame onto others.

In a way, fundamentalists want to destroy ethics or to reduce it to a binary choice. Fundamentalism always posits absolute, universal rules, which reduces the complexity of ethics to simple choices: either one honors thy father and thy mother or one does not. A complex ethics rejects simple, binary choices.

A complex ethics also rejects an anything goes relativism that says all choices are the same. This is another way to reduce the burden of ethical choices. If all choices are the same, then just pick whatever is convenient. A complex ethics, however, accepts the constant burden of making choices with incomplete knowledge within restricted contexts.

This, I think, is a key stance for anyone engaging a complex learning space such as a MOOC. Even within the context of the MOOC, one cannot have complete knowledge, can't read it all, can't know everyone. MOOCs seem to work better if participants declare their own points of view, while opening space for others to do the same. MOOCs seem to work better when participants constantly reassess their own frames in light of other frames. Finally, MOOCs seem to work better when participants are willing to transgress their own boundaries when those boundaries, those frames, become inadequate to accommodate different, insistent knowledge and behaviors. This sounds like a recipe for ethics, but that's a trick of language—it isn't a recipe, it's a stance, a habit of mind, a heuristic, a cultivated tendency. It can happen in a moment, in a flash of insight, or it can unpack and emerge over the course of many MOOCs. It's a practice that is never mastered, never finished. It's a way of acting. It's complex ethics. It isn't the Way—it's a manner of walking. It isn't the Truth—it's a manner of conversing and mapping. It isn't neat and tidy enough to be a rule, but at best, a rule of thumb. It is not a social contract. I'm not opposed to contracts, but that ain't what I'm talking about.

I'll talk more about transgressions next. It seems that they are ethical after all.

Ethics for MOOCs: Provisional Imperatives

I think I should say something about what I mean by the term ethics, especially as distinguished from morals. In fact, I do not distinguish much between ethics and morals; rather, I follow what Bruce Weinstein says about the distinctions between the two: "[J]ust about everyone understands that both ethics and morality have to do with identifying right conduct and good character. To keep everyone on the same page, and to honor the linguistic history of these two noble concepts, it’s much better to treat ethical and moral as synonymous."

That said, I recognize that some conversations find it useful to distinguish the two:

• ethics are social standards, while morals are personal beliefs
• ethics deals with right conduct, while morals deals with good character (or the other way around—I forget)
• ethics belong to the secular realm, while morals belong to the religious
• ethics are absolute and objective, while morals are relative and subjective

In this conversation, I don't think I will use these distinctions, but I'm free to do so if the need arises.

At any rate, I'm talking about how people choose to behave in groups, specifically MOOCs. Those choices are both social and personal at the same time. They can also be secular and religious, absolute and relative, objective and subjective at the same time. I said in a comment on Frances Bell's blog that "new structures demand new ethics", and Jenny Mackness questions this assertion in her post New structures (MOOCs) demand new ethics? She raises a vital question. If there is no stable, enduring ethical system, then what prevents us from all simply doing what we want to do? Are we left with a totally relativistic, anything goes melee?

Woermann and Cilliers say not, but does their answer imply a new ethics? I want to explore these two questions.

Woermann and Cilliers avoid an anything goes relativism by asserting a  provisional imperative modelled after Kant's categorical imperative. They begin by noting that "the ethics of complexity cannot do more than generate awareness of the fact that we are always in trouble. In other words, it cannot provide substantive guidelines for an ethical system" (451). This is uncomfortable. What use is an ethics that can't tell us how to behave? Doesn't this leave us in an anything goes situation? They answer that "despite not being able to provide a substantive ethics, it is possible to develop a type of meta-ethical position, which serves to highlight important considerations that underscore the ethical strategies that we employ when engaging in the particularities of situations."

What they are aiming for, I think, are heuristics, rules-of-thumb rather than rules. Strategies that can be employed and adjusted on-the-fly as we traverse new territory, encounter new people, and shift contexts across a complex topography, which sounds like most of the MOOCs I've engaged. They capture this type of meta-ethical position, this critical stance, in a provisional imperative:

When acting, always remain cognisant of other ways of acting.

To get a sense of the distinction and importance of this imperative, it helps me to compare it to Kant's categorical imperative, which Woermann and Cilliers phrase this way:

When acting, always follow only universal rules, or only rules which you will want all other people to follow.

So what is different about a provisional imperative as opposed to a categorical one? First, note that Woermann and Cilliers' provisional imperative is a contradiction in terms, while Kant's imperative is not. As Woermann and Cilliers readily note:

The idea of a provisional imperative seems to suggest that the imperative itself is subject to change, and in this regard we seem to be advocating an impossible position. This is, to a large extent, exactly the point: we cannot do away with moral imperatives, but, if we take complexity seriously, we should also realise that our imperatives are the outcome of certain framing strategies or ways of thinking about the world, and are thus necessarily exclusionary. Thus the provisional imperative stipulates that we must be guided by the imperative, whilst simultaneously acknowledging the exclusionary nature of all imperatives.

To my mind, their imperative embodies the very complexity they are trying to address. It dialogically juxtaposes two terms that cannot be reconciled: provisional and imperative. The one term suggests open-ended change and flexibility while the second suggests closed, unchanging rigidity. Complexity says we are suspended between these two, irreconcilable positions, and our lives play out in the tensions between them. No relief, no exit. Provisional imperative is similar to the phrase assertive humility that I used in my last post: a dialogic that suspends us between equally demanding and yet irreconcilable positions. This is part of the nature of complex systems, for as Woermann and Cilliers quote theoretical biologist, Robert Rosen: "a system is complex precisely ‘to the extent that it admits non-equivalent encodings; encodings which cannot be reduced to one another'" (450). Morin is quite clear that these non-equivalent encodings are part of the core logic of complex systems: "the dialogic is not the response to these paradoxes, but the means of facing them, by considering the complementarity of antagonisms and the productive play, sometimes vital, of complementary antagonisms" (Restricted Complexity, 16).

Neither Kant's categorical imperative nor Woermann and Cilliers' provisional imperative is substantive. Neither gives us explicit guidance about how to behave, but I think that the provisional imperative describes a stance that is more useful for determining behavior in complex systems: act as well as you can within the context you define, but always be aware that others may act in different ways that may be as good or better within the same context and that are quite likely better in different contexts, so always be ready to question your context.

This seems to me a useful ethical stance to take in a complex space such as an rMOOC. I must engage a MOOC within my frame, presented as honestly and as clearly as I can. For instance, when I showed up to Rhizo14 last year, I came with a keen interest in Deleuze and Guattari and complexity thought and wanted to explore how both of these might inform a discussion about rhizomatic learning and the community as the curriculum. Given the title of the MOOC, I thought it was a reasonable frame. As the MOOC emerged, however, Deleuze and Guattari were not the central focus of the discussions. Others brought other frames to the MOOC. The clash of frames disappointed and offended some, causing them to leave the MOOC, and the emerging discussions that were often more artistic than philosophical disappointed others. The reframing of the discussion on Facebook and Twitter at first annoyed me, as I don't like either of those platforms, but the others in the discussion didn't like Google+. I could have stubbornly clung to my original framing of the MOOC, which would have forced me to either abandon the MOOC or try to twist everyone into my frame. I'm pleased that I chose the third way: relax my frame and engage other ways of acting.

I claim no moral high-ground here. I did almost abandon the MOOC. Like everyone else, I'm a busy professional, and I could have easily told myself and others that I was just too busy. They would have believed me. I would have believed me. Of course, now I'm glad I didn't leave, not just because of all the wonderful connections, real friendships, that I've made, but because I learned first-hand Woemann and Cilliers' provisional imperative: When acting, always remain cognisant of other ways of acting.

I should note that I did not exactly abandon my D&G frame for another frame; rather, I enlarged my frame to accommodate the others. I still mentioned D&G and complexity, quite often actually, because after all that is the value that I had to bring to the conversation, but my comments were framed not in a narrow, philosophical way, but in a more general community as curriculum way. In other words, I continued to declare the value that I could bring, but I worked to reframe that value into different contexts. I think it worked for others, and I know it worked for me. I was able to expand my understanding of D&G and of complexity by pushing the discussion into different frames. By the way, I also eventually joined the more artsy discussions, which I had at first resisted as they didn't fit my narrow frame. I introduced the haiku form of poetry, which led to a round of haiku among Simon Ensor, Terry Elliot, Kevin Hodgson, and me. Again, I was able to expand my understanding of D&G and complexity and, more importantly, make some treasured friends.

I think this provisional imperative informs Dave Cormier's list of suggestions on Youtube about how to be successful in a MOOC, especially the first three:

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

We orient ourselves within a MOOC by constructing an initial frame. We anchor to some aspect of the MOOC—a person, a concept, an activity—and look about through our frame. We declare ourselves part of the MOOC and present. Here we can state our frame, our value, our expectations, our point of view. From this position, we begin to connect to others, to network, and this is where we must always remain cognizant of other ways of acting. We must begin working with our frame to accommodate, complement, or stand in dialogical opposition to other frames and points of view.

This, of course, is where the rub comes in. It may be that we find no one to cluster with and we remain alone. We may have to accept that this conversation is not for us. I'm okay with that, but many feel that we should be all inclusive. I may blog about this later, but I'll say here that I don't agree with this point of view. If a group of people wants to play futbol except for one who wants to play baseball, then that one should disengage or decide to embrace the futbol game, and the group should not feel compelled to quit playing futbol to accommodate the one. Fortunately, MOOCs can be large enough to accommodate both futbol and baseball games, if the players will organize themselves that way. What isn't acceptable is for the one baseball player to stay and poison the futbol game. It would have been wrong of me, for instance, to insist that Rhizo14 focus its discussion on Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome metaphor just because that was the game I wanted to play.

Anyway, the provisional imperative may still seem both too vague and too demanding for many. Self-criticality is a difficult, tiring position to maintain and even harder to tell if you're doing it correctly, and so next I want to discuss four mechanisms that Woermann and Cilliers promise will "serve to reinforce and promote the critical attitude, namely provisionality, transgressivity, irony, and imagination."

Ethics for MOOCs: Assertive Humility

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

****

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

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

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

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

Ethics for MOOCs: Complex vs. Simple Learning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Connections, Flows, and Freire in #moocmooc

I'm taking a break from prepositions—at least from writing about them—to talk about MOOCMOOC and critical pedagogy. MOOCMOOC assigned reading for this week included Chapter 2 of Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1993). It's been many years since I read Freire, and it's pleasant to see how my latest readings are re-informing my understanding of him now. The most surprising idea to emerge from this week's reading was his reliance on movement and flow in his critique of the traditional banking model of education. He doesn't actually discuss flow as such—the term doesn't appear in the translation of Chapter 2 that I read—but I see the concept informing much of what he does discuss.

For instance, early in Chapter 2 he talks about inquiry as a practice necessary for humanity: "For apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, individuals cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other" (1). His words imply movement: knowledge emerges … restless, impatient continuing … human beings pursue. Inquiry is not passive, cannot be passive, but is active, moving, flowing. It reminds me of Deleuze and Guattari's flows of desire that drive all human activity—and I would say desire drives all natural activity.

One of the big problems with the banking model of education is that it stops the flow of inquiry physically, mentally, socially. Students are anchored in seats and forbidden to talk to their neighbors (real or virtual), they can't look on each others papers. The banking model has a very truncated, highly controlled flow that stops with the individual student: teacher > student—STOP, with the only expectation that the student can send the information back to the teacher on a test, but with no expectation that the information has any immediate use. The information will be useful in the distant, adult future, which for children especially is the same thing as never.

All students, of course, have drives for inquiry: they all desire to connect to their worlds and their societies to understand better, to engage that world, but the banking model dams all of those desires, those flows toward connection and engagement with the real world, restricting students to the sanctioned flow of information. The problem is, as Freud has helped us to see, those desires for connection may be dammed but they are not eliminated. They squirt out around the sides of the dams, cutting new channels, and flowing into the dark, forbidden corners of school hallways, lavatories, and playgrounds. Desires will not be denied, but they can be perverted, and that is mostly what the banking model of education does. It perverts the natural desires of students to connect to their worlds and understand it. It tries to stop the flows of desire that all students have to connect to each other and to their worlds, desires that are obvious to anyone who has engaged or observed a kindergarten class.

Freire points out that the main way to open the natural desire to inquire into the world is to change the flow between student and teacher: "The raison d'etre of libertarian education, on the other hand, lies in its drive towards reconciliation. Education must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students" (1). Not until we teachers reconnect to our own desires for genuine inquiry of the world, can we hope to remove ourselves as an impediment to our students' desires for inquiry, for sustained engagement of the world. In their chapter about rhizomes in their book A Thousand Plateaus (1988), Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between mapping the world and tracing the world. The banking model is focused on tracing sanctioned simulacra of the world, while genuine inquiry focuses on mapping. Deleuze and Guattari explain the difference between the two in ways that illuminate Freire for me:

What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real. … It fosters connections between fields, … It is itself a part of the rhizome. The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation. It can be drawn on a wall, conceived of as a work of art, constructed as a political action or as a meditation. Perhaps one of the most important characteristics of the rhizome is that it always has multiple entryways … as opposed to the tracing, which always comes back "to the same." The map has to do with performance, whereas the tracing always involves an alleged "competence." (12, 13)

Inquiry has to do with performance, whereas the banking model always involves an alleged competence. You can't measure competence unless you freeze a flow into a traceable model against which to measure the student's tracing. Inquiry is always oriented away from the model toward an experimentation in contact with the real.

I think Freire speaks directly to this experimentation in contact with the real when he says that "only through communication can human life hold meaning. The teacher's thinking is authenticated only by the authenticity of the students' thinking. The teacher cannot think for her students, nor can she impose her thought on them. Authentic thinking, thinking that is concerned about reality [italics added], does not take place in ivory tower isolation, but only in communication. If it is true that thought has meaning only when generated by action upon the world, the subordination of students to teachers becomes impossible" (4). When both the teacher and the students, together, are flowing beyond the classroom and into contact with the real, then can they have genuine communication. In other words, their speech is not just tracing, but mapping the real.

Stopping the flow of our lives is painful, violent, and fatal. Freire is quite clear about this, as are Deleuze and Guattari: "Oppression—overwhelming control—is necrophilic; it is nourished by love of death, not life. The banking concept of education, which serves the interests of oppression, is also necrophilic. Based on a mechanistic, static, naturalistic, spatialized view of consciousness, it transforms students into receiving objects. It attempts to control thinking and action, leads women and men to adjust to the world, and inhibits their creative power. When their efforts to act responsibly are frustrated, when they find themselves unable to use their faculties, people suffer" (4).

The only way out, the only path of liberation, is to open the flows of inquiry and communication in contact with the real. As Freire says, "Authentic liberation—the process of humanization—is not another deposit to be made in men. Liberation is a praxis: the action and reflection of men and women upon their world in order to transform it" (5).

This physical, mental, and social practice of inquiry and communication to engage and transform the world joins not only the teacher and student but also the objects of inquiry. The things learned themselves join the flow of inquiry and engagement, both making and marking the connection of the student/teachers and teacher/students to each other and to the real world. We all become mediated by the world, changing both ourselves and our worlds, as Freire says:

It is a learning situation in which the cognizable object (far from being the end of the cognitive act) intermediates the cognitive actors—teacher on the one hand and students on the other. Accordingly, the practice of problem-posing education entails at the outset that the teacher-student contradiction to be resolved. Dialogical relations—indispensable to the capacity of cognitive actors to cooperate in perceiving the same cognizable object—are otherwise impossible. … Through dialogue, the teacher-of-the-students and the students-of-the-teacher cease to exist and a new term emerges: teacher-student with students-teachers. The teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is himself taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach. They become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow. In this process, arguments based on "authority" are no longer valid; in order to function authority must be on the side of freedom, not against it. Here, no one teaches another, nor is anyone self-taught. People teach each other, mediated by the world, by the cognizable objects which in banking education are "owned" by the teacher. (6)

Life, then, our own lives right here and now, make sense only as mediated by the world, by cognizable objects. This mediation is not static, but a flow which the banking model tries to dam and restrict. These flows of desire to engage the world, the real world, are not ours alone. Rather, they flow through us. All humanity desires to engage, and we share in those desires with the world. When we open those flows, we are authentically engaged with the world and become real, here and now people. Freire says, "Education as the practice of freedom—as opposed to education as the practice of domination—denies that man is abstract, isolated, independent and unattached to the world; it also denies that the world exists as a reality apart from people. Authentic reflection considers neither abstract man nor the world without people, but people in their relations with the world. In these relations consciousness and world are simultaneous: consciousness neither precedes the world nor follows it" (6).

Education can flow with this desire to engage and to know, or it can try to subvert that desire for its own ends or the ends of State, Church, or Business. Damming the desires of people to inquire into the real does not stop those desires but tragically turns the desires in on themselves, cutting people off from the real and locking them into their own fantasies. What Freire calls genuine inquiry and D&G call mapping frees us from the dammed, perverse desires. As Deleuze and Guattari say, "The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious. It fosters connections between fields, the removal of blockages" (12).

As it happens, Freire, Deleuze, and Guattari are just trying to save our souls.

Educational Research: At the Heart of Things

In a 2008 article entitled Complexity as a theory of education, Brent Davis and Dennis Sumara discuss the unique qualities of educational research, especially in light of complexity theory, suggesting to me that complexity plays a unique and insistent role in educational research. Complexity has been on my mind for a few years now, especially in its metaphorical expression as a rhizome and specifically as a way to approach the Rhizo14 auto-ethnography, so I want to map Davis and Sumara's ideas to rhizomatic thinking in Rhizo14.

Davis and Sumara begin by noting the appropriateness of complexity thought for educational research. Both are relatively young and emerging systems of thought and they share some common approaches to the study of reality.

First, both complexity and educational theories approach systems that learn. Davis and Sumara say, "Brains, social collectives, bodies of knowledge, and so on can all become broader, more nuanced, capable of more diverse possibilities." I'm sorry that Davis and Sumara seem to limit learning to higher order life systems with sophisticated neuronal structures such as brains, as it seems to me that almost all scales of the universe are capable of becoming broader, more nuanced, capable of more diverse possibilities. For instance, the antibodies and antigens that help make up my innate immune system learn to recognize and defeat new attacks on my body, and as far as I know, they learn this without benefit of a brain. Of course, the pathogens attacking me also learn how to get around my innate defenses and any medicine that I might add to the mix. I don't think bacteria have brains either. So for me, learning is one of the fundamental processes of reality as entities at all scales exchange not only energy and matter, but also information and organization, in order to adapt to and thrive within their environments. Learning theories go to the heart of everything and every theory. Thus, educational theory should be informing all other theories, from sociology and psychology down to chemistry and physics, rather than always pulling its frameworks from those other theories. Educational theory is not derivative, it is generative. Down to the core.

Still, Rhizo14 certainly meets Davis and Sumara's concept of a learning system, and their implied definition of learning might guide investigation of Rhizo14: did Rhizo14 learn, becoming broader, more nuanced, and capable of more diverse possibilities? If not, why not? If so, why and how? Did Rhizo14 exchange information and organization within itself and with its environment? If so, how and why? If not, why not? What values emerged from this exchange? What was the new, emergent information? What was the new, emergent organization? What are the salient characteristics and values of this emergent information and organization?

The term emergent leads to another shared characteristic of complexity and educational theories: emergence. Davis and Sumara say, "each of these phenomena is emergent—that is, each arises in the interactions of many sub-components or agents, whose actions are in turn enabled and constrained by similarly dynamic contexts." Learning has always been an emergent event, but courses such as Rhizo14 make emergence explicit and attempt to ride the emergent wave, assuming that emergence is the source of broader, more nuanced, more diverse possibilities.

Emergence is certainly relevant to the study of a cMOOC such as Rhizo14. The course arose in the interactions of many sub-components or agents, whose actions [were] in turn enabled and constrained by similarly dynamic contexts. Any study of Rhizo14 must be constantly aware of the sub-components and agents that embodied the course and must be aware that each of those sub-components and agents are themselves emergent entities informed by yet another scale of sub-components and agents, all the way down to the core, and learning takes place on each scale and between scales. In other words, information and organization is exchanged in circularly causal loops within a scale and across scales. Learning is unbelievably complex, and while any particular study of learning will out of cognitive necessity focus on a particular human scale (usually an individual or a social group), it must acknowledge that its particular scale is not discrete, but is an integral part of scales within it and without it. Any processes on one scale are fully understandable only in context.

And this brings me to another objection to Davis and Sumara's treatment of complexity: a failure to recognize the transcendent. Perhaps Davis and Sumara are too influenced by the very reductionistic sciences that they are trying to move beyond, but they seem to me trapped just here. Davis and Sumara can see emergence coming up from the core in the sub-components and agents, but they don't recognize in this article the scales above us, the transcendent scales. Western culture has a strong bias—scientific, social, and religious—toward seeing humanity as the highest expression of either nature or the gods. We regularly hear that the human brain is the most highly advanced, most complex structure in the Universe. Being scientific these days, we've traded the soul for the human brain, but the effect is about the same: humans are the pinnacle of creation, the apple of Nature's eye, blessed above all else. What a profound failure of imagination and insight!

Many spiritual traditions, but also complexity science itself, suggest the limitation of this point of view. With ever better tools, science has continued to push out the immanent and transcendent scales of reality: inward/downward to vibrating strings and outward/upward to multi-verses. Just when we think we've hit rock bottom or soared to the absolute ends of the Universe, we find more layers. We humans are somewhere in the middle. Not insignificant, but not so important either, and our normal, unsupported vision is limited to a very narrow scale, a very narrow band of the light spectrum. We don't see the infra-red or the ultra-violet, so we think it isn't there, but it is. Complexity thought says that any scale of reality depends both on the scales below/within it and the scales above/without it. And there are always scales beyond. There is always a transcendent.

Now I do think that it is somehow easier for us, in the West especially, to see the scales below/within us, but this may just be our reductionistic habits and heightened sense of importance over the past few centuries. Still, educational studies must be conscious of and allow for the influences of scales beyond the individual learner or the group learners. The enclosing ecosystem always pulls the emerging learner or group into shapes and processes that it might not otherwise assume, and of course, the ecosystem is then affected itself by the emergence of this new structure within. Imagine a new and beneficial organ emerging in your body to provide some new capability. The organ cannot take any shape it chooses, but must find its shape and place with the existing body, which must rearrange itself to benefit from the new organ. The local causality of the new organ is not enough to explain it. We must include the circular and global causalities also at work.

There is always a higher body, and if cMOOCs such as Rhizo14 are beneficial, affording us new capabilities, then they will shape themselves within existing systems while changing the shapes of those systems. They will exchange information and organization with a transcendent scale of reality. Thus, Rhizo14 should ask what local causes were at work within Rhizo14 to make it behave as it did, but also what circular causalities were at work among the various scales and what global causalities pulled Rhizo14 into its emergent shapes. For instance, a number of Rhizo14 participants wanted to discuss Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the rhizome and how it informs our thinking about education, but that conversation was short-circuited and other conversations emerged. This was certainly not caused simply by any local decision, though local decisions can be identified; rather, it was a pull, a global cause, that emerged from the group and transcended any individual decision or cause. How did that work? How does that work? Leaders in the group emerge. How? Why? In short, there are wonderful dynamics at play in a cMOOC such as Rhizo14 that can only be accounted for by reference to scales beyond the individual or even the group. Of course, that pushes into the fog, the noise, enclosing us. It's a bit akin to a single neuron in a human brain trying to understand the consciousness that emerges on a scale several levels beyond it. It may not even know that it is a part of consciousness. We likely don't know what entities we are part of on the scales beyond us, either, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't be open to those scales and recognize their influences on us.

I'll explore more of Davis and Sumara again.

How to Study a cMOOC: A list for #CLMOOC

I’ve joined CLMOOC, and the first two tasks are underway:

1. to create a how to as a way of introducing ourselves, and 
2. to create a list.

This is my attempt to do both at the same time. I propose here a list of approaches to studying cMOOCs, such as CLMOOC and Rhizo14. Many of my Rhizo14 friends are here as well, so they will recognize some of the themes I touch on here, and those who are not familiar with me will learn something about me. This series of posts that I propose to write (I already see that I can’t do this all in one post) comes from a Rhizo14 Facebook conversation that started when Maha Bali asked how Rhizo14 was different from earlier cMOOCs such as CCK008. She sparked a long conversation that is well worth reading, but along the way, someone mentioned Pierre Dillenbourg’s study of collaborative learning. I was not familiar with Dillenbourg, but he seemed to have some respect amongst the Rhizo14 group, so I moved him to the top of my reading list to see if I could learn something about how to investigate a cMOOC, which I take to be a particularly enjoyable and rewarding instance of collaborative learning.

So I read first Dillenbourg’s introductory chapter What do you mean by ‘collaborative learning’? in his book Collaborative-learning: Cognitive and Computational Approaches (1999). Keep in mind that MOOCs did not exist in 1999, so Dillenbourg cannot be held accountable for them; still, I hoped that he might provide a useful approach to studying online, collaborative courses such as Rhizo14 and CLMOOC. I am particularly interested in wrapping my head around an auto-ethnographic study that is emerging in the Rhizo14 community. In his introduction, Dillenbourg explores collaborative learning “along three dimensions: the scale of the collaborative situation (group size and time span), what is referred to as ‘learning’ and what is referred to as ‘collaboration’. This seemed promising to me, so I want to see if his experience and insights can inform the Rhizo14 auto-ethnography (AE). 

The variety of scales: Dillenbourg insists that different scales of collaborative learning require “different theoretical tools in order to grasp phenomena on various scales” and that we should not generalize the results from studying a handful of people collaborating in one location for an hour to 40 or 50 people (he seems not to have imagined hundreds or even thousands of collaborators back in 1999) collaborating in different locations over the course of a year, and vice versa. Moreover, scale is not so much a property of the object as it is “a property of the observer, who selects the most appropriate unit of analysis.” Likewise, the observer defines the agents, or “functional units”, within a collaborative learning, which can include devices and systems as well as humans.

I like that Dillenbourg begins with scale issues, as I believe that online, collaborative learning is a function of complex, multi-scale networks, or what Deleuze and Guattari call rhizomes. (Networks and rhizomes are not synonymous, but they share some characteristics, and I find it easy to shift between the terms, using networks when I want a more precise model and rhizomes when I want a more expansive metaphor.) For instance, Rhizo14 has generated an auto-ethnographic study that begins with a collection of stories from Rhizo14 participants about how and why they engaged Rhizo14. The raw material for the study, then, is a collection of discursive snapshots taken of Rhizo14 from the different angles and perspectives of each of the story tellers. At one scale, these snapshots can be aggregated and merged into a more complete image of whatever Rhizo14 is. This is something similar to what Blaise Agüera y Arcas does with Microsoft's Photosynth, which collects images, say of the Eiffel Tower, from around the Net, aggregates those images, and produces one multi-dimensional image that is far richer and more informative than any single image. Thus, the multiplicity of the network produces an image that exceeds the sum of all the parts.

But this resulting, single image is just one scale. Fortunately, the Rhizo14 auto-ethnography is conducted by a group of scholars, each of whom can explore the snapshots at different scales and from different points of view with different critical methods. For instance, Rhizo14 featured a wealth of creative responses (poems, animations, stories, etc), and I see no reason why the auto-ethnography should be limited to typical, scholarly papers. Some aspects of Rhizo14 are better and more accurately captured in poetry. Others of the group might tie the auto ethnographic stories to Facebook discussions or Twitter streams. Some might focus on a single participant’s story. Another might analyze the narrative structures of the various stories to explore how people construct their participation within a cMOOC. My point here is that there are more scales and points of view than there are researchers in Rhizo14, and we can preserve the multiplicity of Rhizo14 by looking at it from different scales and different angles.

I’m also pleased that Dillenbourg emphasizes the role of the observer in his analyses of collaborative learning. According to him, the observer defines both the scale of the network and the characteristics of the agents within the network. This positions the observer within the system observed instead of privileging the observer with some objective, godlike view outside the observed system. Thus, the Rhizo14 auto-ethnography group must recognize its position within Rhizo14 and account for its presence and interactions there as an integral part of the effects and processes that it is studying. Said another way, the auto-ethnography group must recognize its own considerable gravitational impact in the solar system that it is studying. While it is easy and natural to define the various Rhizo14 human participants as agents within the Rhizo14 system, the auto-ethnography group is still responsible for its characterizations of those agents and even more so for the configurations and groupings of those agents into Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ cohorts, bloggers, lurkers, the auto-ethnography group itself, and whatever other large-scale agents they may devise. The AE group must accept its creative, imaginative role in defining a particular Twitter stream or blog conversation, say, as an agent in Rhizo14, and though the AE group did not create Facebook, they do create Facebook as an agent in Rhizo14, in large part, by choosing to treat it as an agent, or not.

In sum, the study of a complex, online, collaborative learning system starts, as Dillenbourg suggests, by positioning the researcher within the system studied and forcing the researcher to account for her own role within and impact on the system, accepting that the system is different than it would have been had the researcher been someone else or had there been no researcher at all. This repositioning of the observer from outside the observed system to inside challenges the traditional notion about the stability of reality. If the characteristics and behaviors of the observed cMOOC depend at least in part upon the presence and imagination of the observers, then can we say anything stable and lasting about the cMOOC? Probably not. But stability is likely a problematic expectation anyway. The more promising aim of research, I think, is to say something useful about cMOOCs. We should aim to provide actionable knowledge, not absolute knowledge. The absolute, even if it exists, has always been beyond our abilities. Einstein tried to give us our last absolute when he said that nothing could exceed the speed of light, and then quantum physics came along with its spooky action at a distance to suggest that something is moving faster than light. Damn!

And even actionable knowledge may exceed necessity. Maybe what the AE group should aim for is an expansion of the field of education to include the possibility of courses such as cMOOCs. In her post Reflections on the value of MOOCs, Rhizo14 participant Tanya Lau says:

What I get out of the cMOOC experience is not necessarily practical strategies, ideas or actions that I can apply directly to my workplace (which I might get from say, an industry event, workshop, conference targeted to the field of corporate L&D that I work – or indeed, an xMOOC targeted to a domain of knowledge or skill I have a need to develop). Yet it’s something that actually has greater value than practical application: it’s the shift in mindset that results from engaging with people who are driven to continually question, experiment, explore and improve -> it’s that you start to adopt this mindset yourself too. Start to see challenges as opportunities to explore possibilities, become a little braver, make the leap from thinking about experimenting to actually doing it. No longer (as) afraid of being challenged, but open to it – inviting challenge rather than being defensive. It’s more than just being inspired. It’s inspiration + action to = change. Change in the way you think, learn and act – about life, work, learning, and yourself. It is the personal, human connections and inspiration that Clarissa speaks eloquently of in her posts on #CLMOOC and #Rhizo14.

It’s the type of engagement that most conventional courses and programs dream of achieving, and it’s the reason why I get so frustrated with the continual focus on ‘completion’ as a means to evaluate the effectiveness or value of MOOCs. It’s not about completion; it’s about engagement. And thought-provoking, behaviour-changing engagement can be triggered even through one conversation or experience – as long as it’s with the right people, at the right time, and at the right level.

This is brilliant, and I thank Tanya for saying it just so. You don’t finish a rhizome, you engage it, and when the rhizome has reterritorialized within you and you within it, then you are never free of it, even after its intensity has faded. You certainly can’t study it without becoming part of it. Like gardening, the dirt gets under your nails.

So writing about a cMOOC, defining it from within, aims not so much at giving teachers practical strategies and formulae for modifying their classroom practice as at helping them to shift their mindset and to engage “with people who are driven to continually question, experiment, explore and improve”. And if the AE group can identify a reusable practice or technique—well, that’s okay, too.
I see that I have pushed beyond what Dillenbourg was suggesting, so I have to give my usual caution when I’m discussing the work of another. I am a somewhat poor scholar in that I am much less interested in figuring out what someone else means than in figuring out what I mean. Take my reading of Dillenbourg, then, not as critique of Dillenbourg but as an exploration of how I think we might systematically map a complex, multi-scale system such as a cMOOC.

Okay, that’s Item 1 in my list about how to study a cMOOC. Items 2 & 3 soon.

Emergence and Crying in Public

Before I engaged with Rhizo14, I was writing a series of posts about complexity and how it affects education in general and my own field, composition, in particular. I want to return to that line of thought, but from an oblique angle.

This past February, I found myself on a panel at the Southern Humanities Conference annual meeting with Linnéa Franits of Utica College, and two others. I delivered a paper entitled Missing God: Meditations on Time, Complexity, and Serres, and Linnéa gave a paper entitled Authentic Narratives Elicited from Photographs: History, Memory or Fantasy? I'm not sure what brought these two papers together in the mind of the conference organizers, but I'm glad it worked that way. Unfortunately, though, I read first that day.

I had written a meditation on the absence of signal, in part to explore the side of life that is not covered by positivistic communications theories that model signal generation, propagation, reception, and response. All of those approaches to communications assume that communications begins with a signal, and I wanted to think about those times when the signal is absent: no signal. As is often my tendency, I was wallowing in the deep end of cosmic chaos, and I tried to balance the far reaches of remote galaxies and epochs with some concrete examples from my own local life. So I spoke of three times in my family history when I looked for a signal and did not get one, and the meaning that emerged from no signal.

One example spoke about a particularly difficult time when my youngest sister did not communicate with me about my oldest son's health crisis. I knew this was an emotionally charged issue and that was, in part, why I used it, or so I thought. I wanted to give some heated emotion to a discussion that was too cool and airy. Though writing reminded me of some raw emotions in my past, I wrote the part calmly. I then practiced my delivery several times, editing to get the cadence and tone right, inserting pauses for dramatic and emotional effect, and each time I spoke the part just fine. I was pleased with myself. I was striking just the right emotional, minor, bluesy chord at just the right time.

Well, I wanted the part to move my audience, but I didn't expect it to move me. As I started reading the part about my sister, however, I could feel my throat tighten, my face tingle, and tears swell in my eyes. I almost panicked. I can't do this, I thought, I can't cry at an academic conference. Well, I was wrong. I could cry, and I did.

I didn't completely break down, I don't think. At the last second, I decided to embrace the moment and ride it, and that gave me the ability to lean into the reading, though with a wavering voice, and complete the presentation. So the paper worked, though not at all in the way I thought it would. After our panel, Linnéa promised to share with me her own account of crying in public, and a week after I returned home, she emailed me a copy of her article Mothers as Storytellers in the Lewiecki-Wilson and Cellio book Disability and Mothering: Liminal Spaces of Embodied Knowledge (2011). I've just read her article, and it helps me understand what happened to me. She describes a retelling of a well-crafted story about her own son's disability, which I quote at length:

This telling became completely different. I found myself becoming more and more moved by the words I was reading, to the point where my eyes welled up with tears, which eventually spilled out onto my face as l was overcome with sobs. I was a mess. My kind peers passed tissues my way, and the professor was gracious and gentle as I tried to regain my composure. I was perplexed by my response and struggled to figure out why this telling of the story was such a different experience for me than my typical presentations. For some reason, reading my written word aloud multiplied the emotional impact it had on me. The story was the same as it always had been, and I already knew the admittedly constructed happy ending. The words on the page were somehow more real, more powerful because of their written and then aural form. As I heard myself reading these words to my classmates I became a listener as well as narrator, a participant who received the story and who was not in control of the happy ending. The roller-coaster track had become unfamiliar to me, and the turn startled me as it did the rest of the group. I was reminded that the story of my son’s birth and early life was not the one I had mentally written before it happened, the one that other mothers had told me to expect.

By the way, you should read Linnéa's article, as it is about so much more than crying in public, but that is the part I want to respond to here.

Our experiences were similar: we both had a speech that we already knew, but when we spoke it before a different audience, then a new meaning emerged that neither of us expected. My leading question is, where did this new meaning come from? We both wrote our articles, and that emotional meaning was not there, at least not in that way. We both delivered the articles at other times, and that meaning was not there. So where was it hiding?

It was hiding in the noise, along with everything else. Meaning is an emergent property of events which are themselves the emergent properties of countless trajectories that intersect just here and now, which are themselves emergent properties of things all the way back to the noise. It's emergence after emergence, ad infinitum. But to talk about this, I need simpler models.

The communications triangle will do, though it is a static, flat model of an emerging dynamism. Think of this model as a snapshot of a football game—it makes no sense and is useless unless you already understand football. This model says that any written communications is made up of a writer, a reader, a subject, and a text to connect the other three, like this:

Literary scholars have variously located meaning in one or the other of these four points: in the writer's mind, in the reader's mind, in the world, or in the text itself. More progressive minded folk of the latter part of the 20th century attributed meaning to the interaction and social agreements between writer and reader. The emergent (think complexity) view says that meaning is not a static property of any one of these points but a dynamic property of the interaction of all four trajectories. Change any one of these trajectories, and a different meaning emerges. This makes meaning the emergence of a very complex set of interactions. Actually, it's more complex than that when you consider that each of these trajectories—writer, reader, subject, and text—is also an emergent property of countless other trajectories. And it's more complex still when you consider more than just these four trajectories: throw in the technology, the social context, economics, philosophy, and so on.

Then consider this: all of that is lying in wait in the undifferentiated noise, the background, until a reader engages this nexus of trajectories, bringing it/them into relief against the noise, and then releasing them to fade back into the noise. If you are reading this post, for example, you are bringing into relief a number of ideas to which I, the text of my post, and the subject contribute only a part, maybe a small part of the meaning you see emerging. All of your other readings (to pick just one other stream of many) is also contributing meaning to your reading, and I am likely oblivious to this trajectory of readings as are the other readers of this post. Your meaning cannot be my meaning, and should you read this post later in life, your meaning now will no longer be your meaning.

The principle of emergence appears to work throughout reality, and not just in books and blog posts. In their article The Sacred Emergence of Nature (2006, in Clayton and Simpson's The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science, 853-871), Goodenough and Deacon explain that emergence works from the ground up, and maybe from below the ground up:

Emergent properties arise as the consequence of relationships between entities. Robert Laughlin (2005) intriguingly suggests that emergent properties arise even at the level of relationships between subatomic entities—indeed, he suggests that the very ‘laws’ of nature may prove to be emergent—but since we are not trained in discourse at this level, we will begin with relationships between atoms. Atoms interact with one another, and hence generate emergent outcomes, in accordance with two general features: their energy and their form. … The key concept: if one starts with something like a water molecule, it is nothing but two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom, but each molecule has something-else properties that cannot be ascribed to hydrogen alone nor to oxygen alone. The interaction between the three atoms entails a reconfiguration of electron orbitals and generates a trapezoid-shaped entity that is more electrically positive on one facet and more negative on the opposite facet. Compared with hydrogen and oxygen atoms, a water molecule has unprecedented attributes, because the joining of these atoms has distorted the shapes of each and produced a composite shape with its own intrinsic properties.

If this is the case, then we are all emergent properties among other emergent properties, and just as the meaning of a water molecule is an emergent property of the joining of the trajectory of one hydrogen atom with the trajectories of two oxygen atoms, then the meaning of a text is an emergent property of the trajectories of at least a writer, reader, subject, and text—and probably many more trajectories. Thus, when I stood to speak before a gathering of my peers in Richmond, VA, Saturday, February 01, 2014, at about 9:15 in the morning, the meaning that emerged was quite different—though in a self-similar, fractal kind of way—from the meanings that had emerged in other contexts.

I was surprised and initially embarrassed, though I don't know why. I know that meaning is emergent and dynamic; still, I was surprised. And now I know that I can cry, and why, in an academic presentation. Thanks, Linnéa.