hackAhack in light: #clmooc

My friend Maha Bali writes so well, and she is prolific. I've thought about trying to keep up with her, but I can't, so …

Still, she just wrote a wonderful post I ____ therefore I am human that challenges me to think about what it means to be human. She hacks Descartes' famous dictum I think; therefore, I am, shifting away from thinking to feeling, framing her thoughts within the current fighting between Israel and Palestine. She ends up with:

I feel therefore I empathize
I empathize therefore I am human

I think I see her point. Descartes grounded his scientific philosophy in an intellectual reductionism that tends to separate everything, breaking down wholes into the tiniest constituent parts and the most basic of interactions, with the assumption that he could put it back together with a more complete understanding. Well, try that with a frog sometimes. Take the frog apart, identify its constituent parts and the basic processes among those parts, and then put it back together. You don't get a frog. You get Frankenfrog—a monstrous, mechanistic mess with no life in it and little value to you or the frog.

Now try that with a people: Palestinians, European Jews, American Indians … you pick. There are plenty of examples. Try it with a person: your spouse, your children, your students. Take them apart, name their parts and processes, and then try to put them back together. You get Frankenkids and Frankenclasses. When you pull life apart, you lose something really important, and the knowledge or whatever else you gain may not be worth what you lost. Often enough, it isn't.

Now, I am not suggesting that a reductionist scientific point of view has no value. It does. As Edgar Morin has stated, much of the advances in modern culture can be directly attributed to the patient, inexorable workings of reductionistic science. But it isn't enough, and by itself, that kind of thought blinds us as much as it enlightens. We need something more.

We need a complex science that incorporates feelings along with intellect. Intellect alone will kill us. Intellect counterpoised with feeling just might save us. I don't suggest that the one resolves into the other; rather, they maintain a delicate, creative tension that informs the other without ever subsuming or canceling the other. They keep in dialogue, never completely agreeing, never disengaging, knowing that both are richer for the other, that one without the other is madness.

We need a science that values connections as much as it values separation. I connect with Maha Bali. We both connect with the communities of Rhizo14 and CLMOOC. I think it's those connections that make us human. Without those living connections, we are merely Frankenpeople.

So I want to hack Maha's hack. I want to make a hackAhack:

I connect to others; therefore, I am human. I could have used the word engage instead of connect. I've been using engage and engagement more in my writing lately, but I'll stick with connect and connection in this post as it may be the more inclusive term. Engagement seems to suggest a more intentional and deliberate connection; whereas, many of our connections are not intentional, deliberate, or even conscious. When I breathe air with you, I usually don't think about it, but it's a connection that I ignore at my peril.

I'm human, then, because I think and feel, and I think and feel because I connect to others. Without my communities, I really wouldn't have much thought or feeling. I wouldn't be human.

Connectivity and Open Systems, #cck12

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#change11 The Practical Rhizome: Connectivity

As I mentioned in my immediately previous post, one of the big challenges to emerge in response to Dave Cormier's presentation of rhizomatic learning has been the question of utility or practicality. What does the rhizome do for us teachers and students? I have focused on the rhizome as a metaphor, thus minimizing the practical applications of this kind of thinking, but I fear that I may have sold the concept short. I may have implied that rhizomatic thinking has no practical application. So I want to rethink the question in the most concrete, practical terms that I can.

Here's the situation: In January, I will return to the classroom after thirty years of mostly administrative work. I will teach writing classes in a more-or-less traditional setting at South University in West Palm Beach, FL, USA. What the hell will I do? This is a real question. Let's see if rhizomatic learning has any concrete answers.

The first characteristic of the rhizome that Deleuze and Guattari mention is connection: "any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be" (7). Because I accept the rhizome metaphor, I know that my students will, in fact, show up to class with an infinite array of other connections, many of which are WAY more important to them than their connections to me, to the course content, or to their classmates. South University is a professional school that uses the quarter system, so I have only 10 weeks to cultivate connections among 25 adults who want to become nurses, physicians assistants, paralegals, information tech specialists, and so forth. Many of the students, if not most of them, may see a writing course as a necessary hurdle at best or a total waste of time at worst.  My first task, then, is to find ways to cultivate connections to the class: the teacher (me), the content (writing), and their fellow students. I need to build quickly a discourse community in which the students can engage in meaningful discussion.

But rhizomatic learning suggests that the class needs to connect beyond the classroom. In other words, all those other connections are important, too. Therefore, the class must cultivate connections to what they already know. Finally, the class must cultivate connections to what is known beyond the class. Learning to write requires a large and vibrant community, much like those communities of learning that Dave Cormier describes in his post Community as Curriculum - Vol 2. This idea of community expands the class far beyond the usual definition of a teacher expounding some content to a cohort of students. In rhizomatic learning, this vibrant, dynamic community—this supportive ecosystem—is more important than the individual teacher and specific content. As Cormier says in his post, "We are committing ourselves to people, not to specific bits of knowledge or information and hoping that our commitment to those people will keep what we know relevant, and keep us above water."

Can I be more specific? I think so. The first class could employ exercises that encourage people to introduce themselves to each other, through writing perhaps, and explore their shared and varied interests in writing. I might have students text someone outside of class to tell them what they are doing, or better, to ask the outsider how they use writing in their job. This strategy helps the class tap into the unbelievable energy in texting as a form of writing, and helps these beginning writers understand that they are already writers, if not writers of academic prose. It introduces the whole concept of research, asking questions about reality. These exercises help me to begin developing a sense of what the students know about writing and don't know and what they can do and can't do and how writing might connect to their personal and professional lives. These exercises start placing the community at the center of their writing, with real audiences and real issues. A rhizomatic community is a major reason why young people text so much: they are connecting to people who matter to them about issues that matter to them. It's partly why I write so much in this blog: I'm connecting to people who matter to me about issues that matter to us. All the good writing that I know about emerges out of this kind of rhizomatic, discourse community.

I will not lecture about pre-writing strategies. I will not pretend that I am the sole audience, or even the important, audience for their writing. And I will do all these things in my classes because I accept the rhizomatic principle of connection.

Could I do these things without any knowledge of the rhizome? Of course. If this was the only insight of rhizomatic learning, it would hardly be worth reading Deleuze and Guattari. Fortunately, there is more, but that's for later.

Connectivity Two

Well, the very first characteristic of a rhizome stopped me, and I had to start reading again. In what sense did Deleuze and Guattari mean that "any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be" (Thousand Plateaus, 7)? I have a hint of an answer, and I'm working on some other answers, but keep in mind that I am not suggesting that what I say here is what DnG meant when they wrote the above comment. I don't know what they meant, and in some ways, their meaning is irrelevant to me. All I want to talk about—perhaps all I can talk about—is how I interpret what they say. Here's one way:

I think initially I was stymied by my assumption that DnG were saying any point of a rhizome can be directly and simultaneously connected to any other point without any intervening or intermediary points. My mechanistic view of physical reality balked at this, or in DnG's terms, I was trapped in arborescent thinking. In aborescent, or hierarchical, structures, each node occupies a fixed point in the overall structure and connects directly only to those nodes immediately above and below it. Its relation to all other nodes in the structure are mediated, and thus controlled, by the nodes through which it must pass in order to connect and communicate to those remote nodes. Moreover, two points cannot occupy the same space. Arborescent thinking has a very strict economy: one point, one space. A point can occupy only one space, and no two points can occupy the same space—a place for everything, and everything in its place. Any point is responsible for the points below it and responsible to the point above it.

Arborescent thinking, then, creates a rigidly delineated arrangement of any thing, physical or mental. Rhizome thinking is different, though it can incorporate arborescent thinking (Arborescent thinking does not include rhizomes, however). In a rhizome way of thinking, no given point is fixed in any given place. Rather, a point is a nexus of potential places, properties, trajectories, and speeds, a swelter of probabilities that emerge and shift as the point interacts with the field of other points. Moreover, all those points are exerting some influence, some connection, however small, on every other point in the field, all at the same time. And the field is ultimately very large: the entire Universe. Everything is, in fact, connected to every other thing.

Everything, then, is a shimmering potential of probability that emerges into our consciousness for an instant and then arcs on to some other expression. Nothing is static, nothing stays in its place. No place for anything, and nothing in its place.

Well, maybe.

This connection of any one point to all other points is easy to see in digital information, where any piece of data can easily be connected to any other piece of data. For instance, at Amazon readers are constantly applying new tags to books. Indeed, any book in Amazon can have as many tags, identifiers, as people wish to give it. Thus, Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus need no longer be filed in a hierarchical taxonomy under French philosophy, but can be filed as well under modern psychology, poststructuralism, friends of Michael Foucault, stuttering, and weed management. DnG can be connected to most any idea that any reader, however deranged or sane, can imagine.

These connections are hypertext, and they are magical. I'll let Michael Wesch's marvelous video say it for me again:

The Rhizome: Connectivity

In Internet: Towards a Holistic Ontology, Chuen-Ferng Koh says that Deleuze and Guattari identify six characteristics of rhizomes and that these six characteristics should rightly be considered simultaneously so that "they can proliferate in the reader's mind" as a whole. Clearly, one should avoid the tendency to bifurcation in making these intrinsic characteristics of the rhizome distinct from one another and from the rhizome. I admit that I am not clever enough to do that yet. Anyway, the six characteristics in a list are (lifted from the web site Capitalism and Schizophrenia):

1. Connectivity – the capacity to aggregate by making connections at any point on and within itself.
2. Heterogeneity – the capacity to connect anything with anything other, the linking of unlike elements
3. Multiplicity – consisting of multiple singularities synthesized into a “whole” by relations of exteriority
4. Asignifying rupture – not becoming any less of a rhizome when being severely ruptured, the ability to allow a system to function and even flourish despite local “breakdowns”, thanks to deterritorialising and reterritorialising processes
5. Cartography – described by the method of mapping for orientation from any point of entry within a "whole", rather than by the method of tracing that re-presents an a priori path, base structure or genetic axis
6. Decalcomania – forming through continuous negotiation with its context, constantly adapting by experimentation, thus performing a non-symmetrical active resistance against rigid organization and restriction.

One of the first features of a rhizome that we find quite odd is that all nodes in the rhizome are in fact connected to all other nodes. As Koh puts it: "in a rhizomatic system each point can and must have connections to all others, unconstrained by any bifurcating order." Unlike hierarchical systems which assign a rank and file to each node, thus constraining relationships among them, rhizome structures do not constrain the relationships among any nodes. All nodes are related to all other nodes.

How is this possible?