Deleuze, Serres, and the Desires of Prepositions

What I propose here is a travelog, the flow and emergence of an idea. I want to ride the Chattooga River of my blog posts over the past year, and along the way, I want to map the desires of prepositions and determine what the desires of these little words have to do with the ways we conduct higher education. The Chattooga starts as a small stream in the mountains of North Carolina, but it quickly becomes a raging, uncontrollable river as it snakes and twists its way between Georgia and South Carolina. Along this boundary between the two states, the Chattooga has some of the most challenging and dangerous rapids in the United States, but soon in flows into the Tugaloo River and becomes more calm. By the time the Tugaloo flows into the Savannah River, the Chattooga has become a placid and respectable. This narrative structure may work for me, or it may not. Let's see.

Like the Chattooga, my ride begins in the headwaters, on a mountain, with a trickle, a spring that bubbles up from somewhere deep. This particular stream broke the rocks one year ago at the Southern Humanities Conference at the end of January, 2014, and with the MOOC Rhizomatic Learning: The Community Is the Curriculum (Rhizo14), that ran through February and into early March, when I contributed to a collaborative autoethnography (CAE) about Rhizo14 started by Sarah Honeychurch and Maha Bali. MOOCs were on my mind, and I did not yet know that I had not finished either SHC or Rhizo14, but had just begun the flow of ideas that they spun me into.

My thinking started innocently enough, as I wrote a couple of posts about who was in Rhizo14 and who wasn't. Boundaries are a tricky issue online, and the Rhizo14 group was questioning who belonged in, who belonged out, and how we could tell the difference. I thought I brought some clarity to the idea of boundaries, and my thoughts were tight and tidy.

As is often the case, however, the quiet trickle of a meditative mountain stream leads to a precipitous fall. Falls are beautiful unless you are in them, and then they can be scary. In April, I suffered a great fall, a sudden realization that I did not understand the nature of connectivist-style MOOCs, those massive open online courses that I had been engaging since 2010 and was trying to describe in the Rhizo14 autoethnography. I was walking one balmy, South Florida evening, thinking about Rhizo14, when all my thoughts fell suddenly away. The ground collapsed beneath me, and I had the unshakeable conviction that I had no idea what I was doing or talking about. This seems overly dramatic, I know, but that's how it felt as I described in my April 23 post A Rhizomatic Snow Crash. I had to find a new way to think, because my current thinking was not getting it done.

I started with noise, a concept I had gleaned from Michel Serres' book Genesis (1995). After all, genesis is a fine place to start, in the beginning with the swarm, with the chaos, with the undifferentiated whole. I was determined to go way back, to start again, for as Serres says, "Background noise is the first object of metaphysics, the noise of the crowd is the first object of anthropology. The background noise made by the crowd is the first object of history. Before lan­guage, before even the word, the noise." I can report truthfully that my head was very noisy.

My first realization was that there is no position outside the noise, no objective stance away that says the noise is over there apart from me, and I can assess it and judge it from over here apart from over there. If you've ever run a wild river such as the Chattooga, then you understand noise. On the Chattooga, you are always inside the noise, part of the noise. The noise flows through and around you. There is no transcending the noise of the river, nor is the noise transcendent. The noise is always immanent. Actually, transcendent as something beyond and immanent as something inherent mean nothing in the noise. The noise simply is, and you are simply in it, differentiated more or less at different times, but never distanced. Your own noise is included in the noise but not inclusive of it.

And this was my second realization: if I am to define what cMOOCs are, then I must define from the inside out, not from the customary outside in. This is a tip I had picked up from Edgar Morin's book On Complexity (2008), but my ride over the falls made it obvious to me and helped me understand it, from the inside. There are things you can learn in the swirl, tug, and fall of the river that you just can't learn standing on the banks.

Early in May, in a post entitle Experience and the Ludic in Rhizomatic Education, I hit the ludic rapids that often emerge just below the falls. The rapids introduced the concept of play, very active play, and not merely play as the fun behavior of children, though it certainly includes that, but play as mapping and performance as Deleuze and Guattari discuss in their chapter "Rhizome" in A Thousand Plateaus (1988) and play as the basis of much of culture as Huizinga insists in his book Homo Ludens (1970). Play, or performance, is all about mapping new pathways in contact with the real, as Deleuze and Guattari put it. And it all starts from inside the great noise. When you are riding the Chattooga, you are in the noise and in contact with the real, and you realize that play is both exhilarating and deadly serious. You can drown here.

I was happy for the play. I might not actually get anywhere, but it could be a fun trip. And as I was riding the rapids, I was connecting to other Rhizo14 alumni, specifically Maha Bali of Egypt, Shyam Sharma of Nepal, Simon Ensor of France, Clarissa Bazerra of Brazil, and Frances Bell of England in posts such as Sliding Out through Rhizo14. My play space was enlarging. My raft was getting bigger, and it was filled with interesting playmates. The noise was a rich and fecund field out of which voices arose, faded, and emerged again, yelling excitedly as the raft twisted, rocked, and threatened to flip.

At the end of May, I realized that my wild river of ideas had begun in a trickle of tears even before Rhizo14 in my January presentation to the Southern Humanities Conference in Richmond, VA. I wrote a post Emergence and Crying in Public about crying as I presented an emotional paper and tender thoughts flowed through me and down my face. It seems the springs of the Chattooga really do originate deep in the heart of the mountain in waters flowing all the way from the last ice age and before. As it happened, Linnéa Franits of Utica College was on that same panel with me, and she shared with me her own account of crying in public in her article "Mothers as Storytellers" in the Lewiecki-Wilson and Cellio book Disability and Mothering: Liminal Spaces of Embodied Knowledge (2011), a collection of—get this—autoethnographies. Okay … so flows start way back long before you are aware of them, and when you grab a flow, other flows start converging. Flows want to connect. It's how flowing rivers and flowing ideas work. Trajectories of different flows synchronize and respond to each other. Most curious.

I desired to keep riding this flow to learn where it might go, but I had not used the term desire yet. That was to come.

In early June and still in the rapids, Ronald L shared with me Nicholas C. Burbules' article The Limits of Dialogue as a Critical Pedagogy (2000), which explores and challenges "the claims made on behalf of dialogue as an inherently liberatory pedagogy". In my post, Turbulence and Dialog in Rhizo14, I said:

Dialogue is an open-ended engagement in that zone between order and chaos, and while we want the dialogue to end in order (a meaningful consensus), chaos is always at hand and possible. Dialogue, then, is dynamically poised between promise and terror, meaning and nonsense, consensus and strife, resolution and dissolution. Dialogue is turbulent, and while consensus is possible, it is not always probable. And it is not necessarily desirable.

If you want to understand that dialogic tension that drives most of reality, ride the Chattooga River. You are dynamically poised between promise and terror, sense and nonsense, resolution and dissolution. That's exactly where I was in my thinking. Eyes wide and holding on. And my raft was getting bigger, accommodating more mates. And notice the title of my June post: Turbulence in Rhizo14. As I look back on it, I can't help but think that I was already writing this post, but perhaps that is just an illusion of narrative.

In July, I joined CLMOOC, mostly because of my Rhizo14 colleague Kevin Hodgson. In response to one of the CLMOOC prompts and a chance mention, I critiqued Pierre Dillenbourg’s introductory chapter "What do you mean by ‘collaborative learning’?" in his 1999 book Collaborative-learning to see if he could provide me with an analytical approach to MOOCs. I devoted three long posts trying to make his methods work for me, but I couldn't do it, and my raft was stuck on a rock for much of the month of July. This is a dangerous place to be in rapidly moving current, as you risk capsizing trying to re-enter the stream.

Fortunately, I made it back into the stream by the end of the month with the post Who's Writing the Rhizo14 Ethnography. I re-read the Rhizo14 CAE and saw that not much new had happened with it. Others seemed to be as stuck in the rocks as I was.

A couple of days later in an August post entitled Educational Research: At the Heart of Things, I connected the Rhizo14 CAE with complexity studies after reading an article by Brent Davis and Dennis Sumara entitled Complexity as a theory of education (2008). This proved to be a major stream feeding into my own, and as usually happens when streams join together, they swell into a wider, deeper, and more stable river. The rapids were receding, and I was starting to make progress toward the desires of prepositions. Complexity studies carry the flows of many disciplines, and although it is by no means a well-defined discipline, it brings many useful concepts such as emergence. This would be most helpful.

Then, in the first week of September, half a year after Rhizo14, I announced in a post called Prepositions as the Rhizomatic Heart of Writing that I would approach the Rhizo14 CAE through a study of its prepositions. That I should use prepositions seems so obvious to me now, but at the time, it was not. I really had no idea how to proceed, but I had an intuition based on Serres' "argument for considering prepositions, rather than the conventionally emphasized verbs and substantives, as the linguistic keys to understanding human interactions." To my mind, "prepositions are the connective, connecting tissue that connects this to that in a pattern that works and makes sense." If I could follow the prepositions in the CAE, then I was certain that they would tell me something I might not otherwise learn.

This was the approach to complexity that I needed, and with this decision, my river run settled into its longer, slower phase as the water calmed. At last, I thought I knew what I was doing, and I could get on with the business of doing rather than just surviving. Now I merely had to learn how to follow prepositions and note where they might lead.

In a post called bluntly enough Coding Prepositions in the Rhizo14 Autoethnography, I started by coding prepositions in the CAE, taking about as simple an approach as is imaginable: I used the Google spreadsheet from Maha Bali to list all the prepositions in the CAE, listed the dictionary definitions as the categories for each definition, and matched a definition/category to each preposition. This wasn't such a bad way to begin as, one, it was somewhat similar to the coding my Rhizo14 colleagues were doing, and two, it forced me into some fairly close reading of the CAE, but the category approach had a couple of problems that became obvious almost immediately.

First, I was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of data. I had 652 instances of the preposition of in a 23,717 word document. A spreadsheet was simply inadequate for handling this kind of big data. I needed a better tool.

Then, my category choices were very problematic. At times, a given instance of a preposition might fit several categories. I thought about just assigning several categories, but that felt messy, and I didn't want to do it. At other times, some prepositions didn't seem to fit any of the dictionary definitions that I had gotten from my MacBook's online dictionary. I thought about using a better dictionary with more definitions—say, the Oxford English Dictionary, but I was quickly souring on the idea of discrete categories. It seemed wrong, and I was a bit lost and somewhat afraid that my river was about to spread out into a trackless swamp.

By mid-September, my thinking had taken two fortunate turns which appear in the post A Tale of Two Sentences: Rhizo14 Auto-ethnography. First, I decided to analyze two sentences rather than all of them. While I often attack reductionism as the preferred, blessed approach to all issues, I still recognize that it has its utility: it allowed me to focus on a manageable sub-scale (two sentences) with the promise of extrapolating my findings to the larger scale of the CAE. Then, I decided to use Voyant Tools, a suite of text analysis tools by Stéfan Sinclair and Geoffrey Rockwell. I would have to learn to use the tools as I was trying to apply them to the CAE, but it was clear that the spreadsheet was hopeless. These two shifts led to my first real sense of what prepositions do in conversation:

This captures for me a basic function of prepositions: to start in the center and to extend outward in space, time, and relational structures. This is defining from the inside out. This is defining in terms of relationships rather than in terms of identifiable qualities of the thing itself. This approach to prepositions in particular and to sentence structure in general implies that meaning is not an identifiable quality of a word but is an emergent property of how words relate to other words.

I can see now, though I still couldn't see in mid-September, that I was flowing into the desires of prepositions. For me now, the journey seems inevitable at this point, but I still had some paddling to do.

During the entire trip from the mountain stream, over the falls, through the rapids, and into the deep river, I was reading and talking to my Rhizo14 cohort. Some of the reading and conversations I have mentioned, much of it I haven't. Most all of it had to do with complexity, with some articles about prepositions thrown in. This reading was, of course, dredging the river for me, making it deeper. A deep river loses its turbulences, but it gains something in tides and currents—slower forces, but just as strong—in the long run, stronger.

In the second week of October, I wrote A Background for Studying Prepositions in Rhizo14 Auto-Ethnography, seemingly a bit late in the trip for a background, but I think I sensed that I was on the verge of some new ideas for me, and I needed to sort through some things, or maybe just take a deep breath before paddling on. I say for me because I really don't think many people have truly original ideas—maybe just a handful per society per century, but this doesn't matter really, and I take it as no diminution of my own discoveries here. For me, they were new, and that's really good news. Anyone can have new ideas, even children. In fact, I suspect that children have more new ideas than anyone, and that's why they learn so much so fast. Of course, we educators knock that shit out of their heads with our rote, regimented curricula, but most children do start off quite well.

I returned to meditating on Serres and Latour and made a big decision: I would try to define from the inside out. I would try to avoid applying a given theory and problem to Rhizo14 CAE and instead let the theory and problem arise from it. Rather than applying connectivism, say, to the CAE, I would try to meditate on the arcs of the prepositions and let patterns emerge as they might. Most importantly, I would not dismiss those arcs that made no pattern that I could see. I would have faith that the pattern is there somewhere and that Rhizo14 is intelligible. Forgetting your theoretical training is, of course, impossible to do, but as Derrida says, perhaps tongue in cheek, if we do only the possible, we don't do much. I make no claim to having actually accomplished it, but it set me on the path to righteousness and got me much further down the river. It allowed some new stuff to emerge.

Later in October, I met with Simon Ensor, Frances Bell, and Terry Elliot online, and the issue of Gamergate caught my attention, so I wrote a post Left/Write and the Desires of Prepositions that re-awakened my interest in Iain McGilchrist's ideas about the different world views of the left and right brain, and for the first time I wrote about the "desires of prepositions". I realized that, although both left and right brain connect to the world for different reasons—the left to manipulate and possess, the right to relate—they both desperately want to connect, regardless of their different reasons. The desire for connection comes first. And one of those little light bulbs turned on to reveal prepositions doing the same thing. Prepositions find their entire purpose in connecting. Well, yeah. It was such an obvious thing, that I'm a bit embarrassed that I hadn't seen it sooner, but there it is late in October.

On October 30, Maha Bali and I started writing a Google Doc called Writing the Unreadable Untext. We had such fun that we invited some of our Rhizo14 buddies to join in the mayhem, and we all discovered our swarm voice over the next several days. The swarm voice was all about connecting, swarming about each other, bringing in this and that. The Unreadable Untext is a map, "an experimentation in contact with the real", and not a tracing or an analysis. It is a performance, not a competent tracing with elucidations from point A to point B, pulling out of the noise of the swarm a logic that is clearly there, but that the swarm ignores and flows around. As we wrote the Untext, we were susceptible to constant modification, reworked. Our aim was performance, not competence. It was all very Deleuzional.

Not until the middle of November in a post called Rise of the iSwarm: A First Global Look at the Rhizo14 Auto-ethnography did I connect the swarm idea with prepositions. Prepositions create swarms. I didn't know that, but there it was. I could see it in the numbers and patterns I generated with the Voyant tools. I slipped into a strong current, confident that this was going somewhere.

By mid-December, I had mapped one of the less frequently occurring prepositions into (33 occurrences), and the resulting image was so very pleasing to me. It settled into my heart and head like an old, dear friend that I had just met for the first time.

Prepositions are really all about connecting things into a swarm. How satisfying.

Of course, this is only a static snapshot of the swarm, and I do not yet have the tools that will create a more dynamic image or movie, but imagine looking at a swarm of locusts out on the plains. Now imagine that you can identify 33 of those locusts and that you can track them through their own small-scale swarm and through the large-scale swarm. That's what I have in mind, and I'm convinced that I can do it, though I haven't yet. In fact, I believe Voyant Tools can handle this if I just learn how to rig it.

Early in January, I tackled the problem of polysemy in prepositions. It seems that most everyone has recognized that prepositions can mean any number of things, but not many seem to know what to make of that. Meaning as a characteristic of a word itself and independent of a context seems an unshakeable tenet of faith. But the abstract of a 2008 presentation by Dagmara Dowbor entitled "The case of over revisited: Results from a corpus-linguistic analysis and further proposals" provided me with a more complex understanding of meaning as something that is always context-dependent. At least in the case of prepositions, meaning is not context-independent. I tied this in my mind to some earlier articles I had read by Paul Cilliers that discussed how meaning in general is always context-dependent, and I realized just how unsatisfactory the dictionary's list of often disconnected meanings for a single preposition really is. Prepositions don't really mean much until they are in a sentence coupling this to that. It is the coupling that meaning emerges from. (Ending an English sentence with a preposition is a major faux pas, but I'm convinced that it's because it brings too much attention to a little word that most grammarians want to bury in the middle of the sentence. This may not be factual, but it seems true.)

A few days later, I reworked this insight, trying to connect it to Deleuze and Guattari's concept of desire by showing that the meaning of a preposition is immanent rather than transcendent. I don't know that this use of immanent and transcendent will stand examination, but what I meant is that the meaning of a preposition is inherent in the coupling marked by the preposition. It is not dependent on some appeal to something beyond the coupling. I don't know that this was the correct way to connect prepositions to Deleuze and Guattari's concept of desire, but it's what I had at hand, and I explored it. A better connection can likely be made through D&G's concept of mapping, but that's for later.

This brought me finally to the post The Desires of Prepositions written just 10 days ago, when I finally made a stab at defining what I meant by the desires of prepositions. As I understand Deleuze and Guattari, they see desires as the complex flows of drives through reality, the flows that couple different things to produce new things. The opening paragraph of Anti-Oedipus (1977) says best what desire is:

It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the id. Everywhere it is machines—real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections. An organ-machine is plugged into an energy-source-machine: the one produces a flow that the other interrupts. The breast is a machine that produces milk, and the mouth a machine coupled to it. The mouth of the anorexic wavers between several functions: its possessor is uncertain as to whether it is an eating-machine, an anal machine, a talking-machine, or a breathing machine (asthma attacks). Hence we are all handymen: each with his little machines. (8)

Prepositions, then, are desiring machines. They are the couplings that connect words together into a flow of information that flows into us, through us, and out of us, coupling ideas to ideas, ideas to us, and us to others. We desire to know, to connect, to couple with ideas and people and this wonderful world, and that coupling produces all the new things that the Universe appears to be so fond of.

It occurs to me now—just two days before I deliver this talk to the SHC and publish it on my blog—that I could have traced the prepositions in my blog posts as I am tracing them in the CAE, and that way, my presentation could have embodied my presentation. I like that, but old habits die hard, and this narrative occurred to me first.

So what did I learn about the ways that we teach and learn in higher education? Perhaps the biggest lesson is that desire for connection flows through all of us. I hear regular complaints that college students are apathetic and don't want to learn. This isn't true.  Everyone wants to connect to new things and to learn, as is obvious to anyone who has ever visited a kindergarten class. Kids will wallow with anyone, with anything, or with any idea to produce something new. Anyone who can create a castle out of a cardboard box has no problems with creativity. For the most part, kids are all about connecting. (This, of course, has dire implications during cold and flu season as kids spread diseases easily, but the easy spread of germs just illustrates the ease of connectivity among kids).

My second insight is that we educators mostly mishandle the desires to connect and learn, the flows, that our students already have. While all students want to learn new things, they may not immediately want to learn our things. Because we have only a short time to cover our material, to trace the flow of our information, we disregard the flows of energy and information that the student is already in. We ignore their trajectories. It's worse than ignoring, we are willfully ignorant of their trajectories, assuming that the only value in our class is the trajectory of our own information. We make too little attempt to coordinate and connect student trajectories to our trajectories. Regardless of our subject matter, all of us have a few students who show up ready to jump into the flow of our information, but too many students don't show up ready, and we make too little attempt, especially given the constraints of traditional classroom structures, to identify their trajectories and fit them to our trajectories.

Or better yet, to fit our trajectory to their trajectories. Why not? I teach college writing in a professional school with not a single English major. Most of my students think of Composition I and II as required hoops to jump through, at best, or damned obstructions to their professional goals, at worst. If I can't show them how good written communications complements their professional trajectories, then I have lost them. I have to start with them where they are and try to flow with them and help them flow with me.

We also mishandle student desires to learn by truncating our own desires to learn. Too many teachers quit learning in their classrooms. They choke off and turn back upon itself the natural desire to connect to ideas and to people. They see the flow in the classroom as one way—from themselves to the student—and they don't see themselves joining that flow. This kind of flow is devoid of all desire, and why should we expect our students to want travel such a dry, rocky stream? It is passionless, with no excitement.

Then, what have I learned from tracking prepositions? First, I have come to appreciate how complex and multidimensional writing is. Prepositions couple the flow of one idea to another to create new ideas. Like a flock of birds or a swarm of bees, prepositions orchestrate the flow of ideas in a text. This has always been so, but static print concealed this dynamic flow of ideas through text. Modern technology has made this flow of desire more apparent. The Untext written by the Rhizo14 cohort was a visceral demonstration of the iSwarm voice and the swarm of ideas that flow through a text as a swarm of writers desire to connect to each other and to new ideas. Just today, I participated in a #MOOCMOOC Twitter chat. The swarm of ideas and the emergent iSwarm voice was obvious, graphically displayed for all to see. We have traditionally thought of English text as linear, but it is linear in the way DNA is linear. It is an expression of a genetic flow, and it's the unpacking and expression of that flow that creates meaning. We need new reading and writing skills and strategies to handle flowing text.

I've also learned that prepositions are both makers and markers of coupling. They join and those joints are trackable. This gives me a new strategy for engaging texts, a strategy that I intend to employ much in the coming months. I do not yet know if others have used this strategy, but I hope so. I'd like to see how they track prepositions, or some other part of speech, to unpack a text.

The Desires of Prepositions

I've been using the phrase desires of prepositions without explaining what I mean. Partly I did this because I've had to work my head around the idea. It started with an intuition and some amusement over the juxtaposition of two terms that are usually not used together in the same conversation, much less the same sentence or phrase. (Aside: I just googled "desires of prepositions" with the quotes, and Google returned only 8 hits. Seven of them were mine, and only 1 from another source, a 09/21/2009 post entitled HERO�NO HONOR, EH? Weenie Yellow Polka� by Judge Bean on conspiracycafe.net. At least I have company.) Though I'm confident that I will continue to enlarge the idea in my own head and writing, I think I'm clear enough now to clarify what I mean by desires of prepositions and to connect it to the conversation about Rhizo14.

I think that my last several posts explain how I'm using the term preposition and how I picked up on the importance of prepositions from comments Michel Serres made to Bruno Latour in their book Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time (1995). My online dictionary defines a preposition as:

a word governing, and usually preceding, a noun or pronoun and expressing a relation to another word or element in the clause, as in “the man on the platform,” “she arrived after dinner,” “what did you do it for?”

(By the way, I'm pleased to see an online dictionary ending a sentence with a preposition. Gratifying that.)

Prepositions, then, govern and connect mostly substantives to other elements within a sentence. As I've said elsewhere, prepositions are the stage directors of sentences, positioning the actors, pacing the action, and in general, structuring and making sense of the scene/sentence. Prepositions make clear to the reader (audience) the trajectories of the elements in a sentence (the actors and actions on the stage). I like this stage metaphor (though a movie screen would work as well, I think), for it animates sentences which we seem to think static, frozen in a line of text on a printed page. And this is what prepositions do within the sentence: they couple this with that, putting everything into motion. Actually, other sentence elements such as conjunctions, punctuation marks, spacing, the position and proximity of syntax also couple things and mark those relationships for the reader/audience, but for now, I'm limiting my discussion to prepositions. I'll discuss all connective grammatical elements later.

For me, the big idea is that prepositions form and flavor the connections within a sentence. They are a big part of the structure that informs a sentence and makes it mean something, and they both create that structure and mark that structure for us to hear/see/read. Prepositions do much of the hard work of forming patterns and marking those patterns. I believe that pattern making, pattern marking, and pattern recognition is the heart of making meaning, of creating and using knowledge, and thus, of education. Prepositions choreograph the movement of actors and actions on the stage. Without them we have little pattern and little meaning, just a collection of actors sitting in a heap or wandering aimlessly on stage. Consider the first sentence that I used from Maha's contribution to the collaborative autoethnography (CAE):

Funny enough, even though I have been thinking about this since #rhizo14 started and writing about it throughout on my blog, fb, twitter, I am having a lot of difficulty writing here.

If we remove the connections created by the prepositions, then we reduce the sentence to a near empty stage:

Funny enough, even though I have been thinking and writing, I am having a lot writing here.

If we remove all the connector elements, including punctuation and spacing, we are left with almost nothing:

Iamhavingalot

Even reduced to the basic subject/verb/direct object as in this string of letters, we can see that some hint of connectivity remains as the verb connects the subject and direct object and all three elements appear in standard English order. However, without structuring elements such as prepositions, language is near meaningless. While we usually focus on the substantives and verbals to determine the meaning of a sentence, it is the little words—the prepositions, conjunctions, punctuation, spaces, syntax, and so forth—that do much of the heavy work of meaning creation.

I am not diminishing the importance of substantives and verbals here; rather, I am elevating the importance of the little words, specifically the prepositions. We have a cultural habit of focusing on the big words, the substantives and verbals, the actors and actions. This habit extends to language experts who more often than not define the little words in terms of their relationships to the big words. For instance, in Maha's sentence, the word throughout would most likely be called an adverb because it is modifying the verb writing even though the word is often used as a preposition. The little words are defined by the big words they modify rather than by what they do: connect things, couple. To my mind, throughout is coupling just as about and on are, and all three should be defined in their own right and not in terms of their relationship to the big words.

What do connector words do? They map the flow of a sentence out into a meaningful structure. In the sentence above, Maha has something, but she spins that notion out, enriches it, starting her sentence by noting her amused chagrin at her situation, then setting up a contrast with her previous ability to think and write about Rhizo14 in her online spaces, which provides much setting for her scene and several props, and finally rounds out her thoughts by adding that she's having difficulty with writing in the CAE. To my mind's eye, the sentence unpacks itself, in large part through the prepositions, much as a dandelion stretches out into the air.  Maha's sentence takes a handful of dust, debris, and concepts, and sets them spinning about themselves in a little constellation that creates meaning—not out of nothing, but meaning that did not exist before Maha mapped her concepts in this particular dance.

I take the concept of mapping from Deleuze and Guattari's discussion of the rhizome in A Thousand Plateaus (1988), where they distinguish it from tracing, and this mapping segues nicely into desire, another concept from Deleuze and Guattari, especially in their book Anti-Oedipus (1977). Think about the forces that push and pull the dandelion as it stretches into its own space within its own ecosystem, or the forces that push and pull Maha's words into its own shape within its own conversational space. The dandelion desires to connect to the earth, water, sunlight, other plants, and all of those things desire to connect to the dandelion. Following the lead of Deleuze and Guattari, that is what I mean by desire: the forces that push and pull everything to connect and create new structures, new meaning. I'll try to unpack this, mostly for me.

Desire is commonly understood in human terms as a drive for something that we do not have. In other words, it is defined by lack, by something that is apart from us, or transcendent, not something that is part of us, or immanent. Deleuze and Guattari reverse this understanding. In their book Deleuze and Geophilosophy (2004), Mark Bonta and John Protevi note that desire is "not subjective hankering after what you do not have"; rather, desire "is the material process of connection, registration and enjoyment of flows of matter and energy coursing through bodies in networks of production in all registers, be they geologic, organic, or social" (76). I would add that these flows include organization and information in addition to matter and energy, as Edgar Morin points out in his analysis of complexity in his book On Complexity.

According to Bonta and Protevi, Deleuzian desire takes two main forms:

1. paranoid (fascist), which "forms whole subjects who cling to their identities in a social production network that must not change and that reinforces the rigid (tribal or imperial) coding and channeling of flows" (76), and 
2. schizophrenic (revolutionary), which "rides the [uncoded flows of] energies released by capitalism and takes them far beyond the pathetic reterritorializations on family and private property maintained by psychoanalysis and the capitalist State" (76).

I think that McGilchrist's book The Master and the Emissary gives us another, more flexible way to characterize connections with his left-brain/right-brain analysis. We connect either to manipulate (left-brain) or to relate (right-brain); though these are extreme ends of a sliding scale. Few connections are totally left-brain or right-brain, but it helps us to clarify the distinctions between them if we push them to extremes which seldom occur. I think I will post something about this later, but not now.

The problem with desire, for Deleuze and Guattari, is that priests (religious, psychoanalytic, economic, and state) manage desire by defining it in transcendent terms: lack (you desire only what you don't have), pleasure (you desire only what makes you feel good), and jouissance (you really only want transcendent pure pleasure, which you can never have or have only in Heaven). Desire, then, is traditionally defined in terms of lack by those who want to control it. Deleuze and Guattari define desire in terms of immanent drives that flow through us, connecting us to others and to larger socio-political structures. And this is a key property of desire: they are not our own; rather, they flow through us. Deleuze and Guattari say that our desires are already part and parcel of the socio-political systems that we are part of. I insist that desires are part and parcel of all reality. They are the flows of energy, matter, organization, and information that flesh us out, unpack our DNA, and seek to connect us to other unpacking entities and their flows of energy, matter, organization, and information.

Of course, I am extending desire beyond the socio-political to include pretty much everything. For me, desire is that tendency or affinity of things to connect to other things, to couple, and to create new things. Quarks desire quarks and create atoms. Atoms desire atoms and create molecules. People desire people and create societies. This is far different from how desire is usually used. Under the influence of Freud and Marx, we have pretty much defined desire in terms of sex and money, and the physical sciences have abandoned the term as too anthropomorphic. Deleuze and Guattari limited their discussion of desire to the human realms of society and politics, largely in response to Freud and Marx and to the socio-political upheavals of the 1960s, I think. Desire works nicely in this context, and I may come to regret trying to extend desire beyond the merely human, but I'm willing to fail. The idea attracts me, so I'll do it, but I recognize that when I speak of atoms desiring atoms, most people will prefer talking about the probabilistic tendencies of atoms to bond with certain other atoms that they randomly encounter. No problem. My concept of desire includes those couplings as well; though, I don't care much for leaving it all to random chance. To my mind, if there were only two quarks in all the universe, they would desire and find each other, coupling to create one lonely particle. That may be the saddest, shortest story I've ever told, but I believe it.

These couplings are important, given that everything in the universe exists because of them. The couplings produce everything, and this production is important to Deleuze and Guattari who posit desiring machines as the point of coupling and production, or to my mind, the point of creation. The key to keep in mind is that they are not speaking metaphorically. Nor am I. D&G start Anti-Oedipus:

It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the id. Everywhere it is machines—real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections. An organ-machine is plugged into an energy-source-machine: the one produces a flow that the other interrupts. The breast is a machine that produces milk, and the mouth a machine coupled to it. The mouth of the anorexic wavers between several functions: its possessor is uncertain as to whether it is an eating-machine, an anal machine, a talking-machine, or a breathing machine (asthma attacks). Hence we are all handymen: each with his little machines. (8)

Prepositions, then, are desiring machines. This is not a metaphor. As I've already said, prepositions really don't mean much by themselves. They attain meaning in the connection, in the coupling that they perform. This is when their meaning emerges. Prepositions mark the point at which the flow of desire passes from this to that, here to there, connecting and coupling, leading to the production of something new. Something given flows in (all those linguistic, informational and organizational as well as energy and material flows) and something transformed flows out. This is how the rhizome grows, moves, deterritorializes and reterritorializes, and prepositions provide us with an explicit marker of the flow of desire through our conversations. It is a production machine, which means that it both makes the connection and marks the connection.

Consider again Maha's sentence above:

Funny enough, even though I have been thinking about this since #rhizo14 started and writing about it throughout on my blog, fb, twitter, I am having a lot of difficulty writing here.

The prepositions couple Rhizo14 to her thinking and writing, which are both coupled to her blog, Facebook, and Twitter and coupled to the duration of Rhizo14, and finally she herself is coupled to difficulty. This is a great amount of coupling in so short a sentence, and it opens up a rich stage on which Maha plays out her story. The prepositions take the nouns and verbs of Maha's thought and orchestrate a beautiful scene within a clear setting with spatial, virtual, and temporal dimensions that combines and redirects different trajectories into transformed trajectories that can feed into the trajectories of whoever reads her sentence. Of course, the trajectories of my sentences here can then flow back (feedback) into Maha's sentences. Likewise, Maha's entire sentence is a desiring machine that couples with the other sentences in her paragraph, which couples with the other paragraphs, which couples with the other autoethnographies, and so on. Flow feeds on flow, desire on desire, and this coupling produces … well, everything. This is the rhizome unfolding, and I would be silly to think that I, or even the iSwarm, control all these flows. We nudge and twist our thoughts within a field of thoughts, but they are alive and resist our nudging, twisting in sometimes unexpected ways. Like just now. I really did not plan to write that last sentence. Or the next one. Or this one. On and on. I touch the flow here and there and it responds, but I don't really control it. Nor it me. We dance.

In his introduction to Anti-Oedipus, Mark Seem highlights a central question and insight of the book: "What is the function of desire, Anti-Oedipus asks, if not one of making connections?" (xxii). Prepositions make connections, and thus make and mark the flow of desire, and this is their function.

This gives me a very helpful way of thinking about Rhizo14. What desires, what flows of drives and affinities, led people to connect to each other last February, 2014? What desiring machines enabled these couplings? What flows kept people in Rhizo14? What flows turned people away from Rhizo14? Did other, more demanding desiring machines couple them with other, more engaging flows? How?

And then I have to ask how well do the autoethnographies map to what actually happened? If I follow the couplings in the AEs, will I learn something about the couplings in Rhizo14? Do people really know what drives aided or failed them in coupling to Rhizo14? I know, for instance, that I am largely unaware of the epic wars waged by my immune system along the waterways and landscapes of my own body. What other drives am I missing? Deleuze and Guattari insist that most of our drives and desires operate quite aside from our consciousness, pushing and pulling us in directions that we only mark and rationalize after the fact.

Okay, so this is what I mean by the desires of prepositions. It makes sense to me, but help me push it around. Test it.

A Background for Studying Prepositions in Rhizo14 Auto-Ethnography

I picked up the idea to work with prepositions in the Rhizo14 auto-ethnography from the book
Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time (1995) by Michel Serres with Bruno Latour. A discussion of how this idea emerged in the conversation between Serres and Latour will clarify, I think, why the prepositions appeal to me so much.

First, some context: the book is a record of conversations in which Latour questions Serres to learn more about his methods, with the hope of clarifying Serres' often confusing writing. I had the notion that Latour was hoping to clarify for himself his own fascination with Serres and thereby clarify Serres for others. Latour begins with Serres' early years at school and pushes through to his latest works. If you want to tackle Serres' work, then you should read Latour on Serres. I find it most enlightening.

The short section about prepositions arises in The Third Conversation: Demonstration and Interpretation. Latour starts this chapter by saying his "questions today will focus on formal proof, on demonstration—on what enables you [Serres] to decide whether an interpretation you offer is right or not" (77) [italics in the original distinguish Latour from Serres]. Serres begins with a very pragmatic, almost utilitarian view of philosophical demonstration and interpretation by insisting that an interpretation should address a specific problem, usually a problematic text, with local tools to clarify the obscurity. If the text becomes more clear, then the interpretation is useful, or good. If not, then the interpretation is not so useful. Serres gives an example by clarifying a sonnet by Verlaine, using the modern concepts of coenesthesia and random noise to illuminate the crazy path of the wasp in the poem. He explains, "I've never proposed an interpretation nor posed a question without there first being a problem (78) … The moment you bring transparency and clarity to a problem, the interpretation is probably a good one; what was inexplicable becomes illuminated" (79).

Latour counters that Serres' interpretation does not mention the numerous other interpretations of Verlaine's sonnet, presumably as a good, faithful scholar should—Serres doesn't even quote the poem. Serres replies,

If one had to recopy everything one had read, books would become alarmingly obese. Even more important, this repetition would make them not very informative (80) … On the other hand, honesty consists of writing only what one thinks and what one believes oneself to have invented. My books come only from me. … New ideas come from the desert, from hermits, from solitary beings (81) … to be without master or disciple, as you describe it, assuredly comes from an ethical decision. (83)

I think this points to the first of the big problems with Serres' writing that Latour uncovers: Serres strips his writing of context, including scholarly context, choosing to work in the desert. To use the futbol metaphor that I've used before: Serres is looking for the space on the field, the empty place where he can have a chance at being creative. This space becomes important both for explaining Serres and for explaining why readers find him so difficult. Serres refuses to supply much of the context for his writing, shifting that burden to the reader. Given that Serres' context is encyclopedic, covering the arts and sciences from ancient times to the modern, this is an awful burden for most readers, who simply give up trying to understand him.

Why does Serres want this open space, unencumbered by citations, references, established theories and systems, and other scholarly structures? It is easy for traditional scholars to suspect that Serres is just being slovenly in his studies and explications, but he says that philosophers should be creative, should be laying the groundwork for the future:

Now, philosophy is an anticipation of future thoughts and practices. If not, it would be reduced to commentary—to a sub-category of history, and not the best one either … Not only must philosophy invent, but it invents the common ground for future inventions. Its function is to invent the conditions of invention [italics in original] (86) … One can work, think, and discover without any strategy at all. Believe me, none of my books is the result of a tactic (87) … A single answer to all questions seems improbable; a single key will not open all locks. Why would you want invention to follow a single track, always collective and dialectical? … There are connections and ruptures; there are the solidary and the solitary and surely others besides, who take flight and alight at crossroads (88) … No doubt the greatest difficulty [in understanding Serres' writing] lies in my wish to be encyclopedic, followed by my desire for synthesis, in the hope of going everywhere, of not missing anything, in order to gradually build a world. (89)

Serres, then, wants to play his ball into open space, free from the already fixed positions and strategies in the crowded part of the field, free to engage whatever presents itself in an open space with whatever resources he finds to hand, or to foot as the case may be. Any soccer player will tell you that creating and playing into space is a difficult concept to learn, and only the most accomplished players master it. The analogy may hold for philosophers, as Serres insists, but following an accomplished player into open, empty space makes for difficult futbol and even more difficult reading, and this is the source of the difficulty in reading Serres, in playing his game.

Don't you think the philosopher is pulled between two poles—that of maximal accumulation of all knowledge and experience and, at the other extreme, the cancellation of all knowledge and experience, starting from zero? … Philosophy is not a body of knowledge nor a discipline among the usual sciences, because it insists on this balance between everything and nothing (90) … Philosophy doesn't consist of marshaling ready-made solutions proffered by a particular method or parading all those problems in a category resolved by this method. Because there is no universal method. Which is the reason … for drawing an appropriate method from the very problem one has undertaken to resolve. Thus, the best solutions are local, singular, specific, adapted, original, regional. This is the source of the disparity you were complaining about, which makes for difficult reading (91) … My demonstrations were always carried out according to the same norms but never using the same terms. In a more or less inductive way and in contrast to unifying theories, I always started with elements that were different, drawn from the text or the problem before me, using means that were both analogous and relational … So, I never arrived at a beginning, an origin, a unique principle of interpretation—all of which are classically seen as making coherence, system, meaning. Instead, I arrived at a cluster of relations, differentiated but organized. … Synthesis in this case, is differentiated from system or even from a methodological unity. A cluster of highly different relations becomes a body. (99)

I apologize for the long quote, but Serres says it better than I can. Because Serres plays into open space, he must invent the game anew, facing a local situation—a configuration of ball, players, field, and trajectories—not quite like any generalized configuration he has ever faced before or even trained for. And in that instance when engaging the open space, the creative player must bring all that she has learned of the game and simultaneously must forget, or transcend, all that she has learned to engage this new game that space has opened to her. It is in this moment that a supremely creative player such as Pele will do the totally new and unpredictable and invent the overhead bicycle kick that will become a part of the standard repertoire of all skilled players after him. Pele, of course, was never trained to perform this kick, but he was prepared for this kick through his training. He was poised, then, between the rigors of his exhaustive training and vast experience and the freedom of forgetting his training and going beyond it. This, I think, is what Serres hopes for philosophy, at least for his philosophy. So what does this have to do with prepositions?

Well, this brings us to the second great difficulty in reading Serres that Latour uncovers: Serres' explications, commentaries, and analyses are dynamic. His writing focuses on unstable, unfixed prepositions rather than on the traditional philosophical focus on substantives and verbals. This gives Serres' writing a dynamic quality that many readers find jumpy, jittery, and confusing. They are accustomed to looking for the substantive (being, nothingness, gender, connectivism, Marxism, etc.) that identifies Serres' thought, that places him within the context that he's trying to avoid. Prepositions don't fix thought; rather, they trace dynamic, shifting arcs and trajectories among concepts, pulling them out of their fixed orbits and flinging them into the asteroid belt. To see how, I want to focus on the final sentence quoted above: A cluster of highly different relations becomes a body. This is where prepositions come into play.

I need to start with an image. For instance, think of futbol as a cluster of relations (players, ball, field) that becomes a body (a game). Think of Rhizo14 as a cluster of relations (mostly scholars) that becomes a body (a MOOC of sorts). Think of this blog post as a cluster of relations (words, sentences, concepts) that becomes a body (a post). In each case, we start with an open space—an empty field, open class, or blank screen—but soon enough, games deterritorialize and reterritorialize into this space: the ball arrives on an arc, a trajectory, a first and then second player, each on different trajectories, the field itself begins to emerge with more relevant and pressing boundaries. Similarly for Rhizo14, scholars arrive from their different trajectories and intersect at different space/times across the Net, finding their own shape and dynamics within various space. Likewise for this post: writers, readers, and words arrive on different trajectories, concepts, actors (substantives) and actions (verbs) appear on different arcs and clusterings, and the post itself begins to emerge with more relevant and pressing boundaries, finding its own shape, both familiar and unique, within the boundaries of the screen. The skillful player, the philosopher, engages the new relationships emerging and creates a new game that is similar enough for all her training to be useful but new enough to demand that she transcend her training.

In this moment of engagement with a new soccer game or a new blog post, we should not ask if the player is a defender, a midfielder, or a striker, if the scholar is a connectivist, a constructivist, or behaviorist, or if the writer is composing narrative, description, argumentation, or explanation. We should not look for a fixed position or a guiding theory. We should not seek to define the moment from the outside with fixed substantive and verbal concepts; rather, we should allow the definition to emerge from the intersection or interweaving of all these different trajectories. In soccer, this interweaving is embodied in passing and running in relation to a moving ball; in writing, it is embodied and expressed in prepositions and other such elements in relation to moving substantives. Serres uses a long analogy drawn from rugby to explain himself, but he might as well be talking about futbol:

Configurations or fixed places are important when the players don't move—just before the game begins, or when certain established positions are called for at various points in the game … They begin to fluctuate as soon as the game begins, and the multiple and fluctuating ways of passing the ball are traced. The ball is played, and the teams place themselves in relation to it, not vice versa. As a quasi object, the ball is the true subject of the game. It is like a tracker of relations in the fluctuating collectivity around it. The same analysis is valid for the individual: the clumsy person plays with the ball and makes it gravitate around himself; the mean player imagines himself to be a subject by imagining the ball to be an object—the sign of a bad philosopher. On the contrary, the skilled player knows that the ball plays with him or plays off him, in such a way that he gravitates around it and fluidly follows the positions it takes, but especially the relations that it spawns. (108)

In writing—this post for instance—prepositions trace the relations, the movement of the ball, and as such, they mean almost nothing prior to the movement and the emerging relation. They have almost no meaning, which means they can assume almost any meaning. As Serres says, "Do you notice that, in relation to other parts of speech, the preposition has almost all meaning and almost none? It simultaneously has the maximum and minimum of meaning, exactly like a variable in classical analysis" (106). To my way of thinking, a preposition brings just enough DNA to unpack into a somewhat new meaning each time it is used to trace the dynamic connection between or among substantives. Like X in math, a preposition has DNA, a history of usage and meaning, but in any particular formula, it can assume a variety of meanings depending on the operations, operands, and relations it is tracing. The DNA, the dictionary definition, is the least meaning, the least one can say of X or a preposition. How the DNA unpacks as it zips among all its dynamic relationships is where most of its meaning emerges.

For Serres, all ideas can be considered and connected (think rhizomatically, here, for as Deleuze and Guattari say, "any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be" (A Thousand Plateaus, 7)), and the connections and relations are more important for Serres than are the substantives. This kind of topographical dynamism, then, allows Serres to connect the ritual of human sacrifice to the ancient god Baal to the Challenger disaster, but this greatly confuses (and probably offends) many readers who see no connection between the senseless murder of innocent people to appease a blood-thirsty god on one hand and technological progress and heroic death on the other. In his open spaces, Serres can trace a connection between these two events. Serres speaks of angels and Hermes as the dynamic messengers that map the connections among all the things and concepts of the world. Prepositions, then, are the angels of language that connect and map the connections among our concepts, and these fluctuating, dynamic connections interest Serres more than the concepts themselves.

What does this say about Rhizo14 and the auto-ethnography? It provides me a stance toward Rhizo14 and toward writing the auto-ethnography. I want to begin with a problem, a variable X that needs solving, but I don't want to bring the problem to the auto-ethnography. Rather, I want the problem to arise from the auto-ethnography itself. This means gazing at the auto-ethnography, meditating on it. It's something like staring into a cloud chamber in the Large Hadron Collider: observing the particles that flash and arc, following their trajectories, and noting those that connect with others and those that don't connect at all. Looking for patterns, and noting where I can see patterns (create meaning) and where I cannot see patterns. The no-patterns are problems for me, but I'm confident that answers, the patterns, are contained within the auto-ethnography that will illuminate an issue if I can assemble the elements and map the relations among them. I can see the patterns emerge if I will use the terms, the tools, and the relations at hand within the auto-ethnography itself to conduct a local interpretation which may just lead to a global demonstration, to some knowledge that can be carried beyond Rhizo14.

Also, I want to avoid bringing an agenda or theory to work on the Rhizo14 auto-ethnography. Like Serres, I want to avoid "a divine sun that sheds light on everything, with a beginning that will deploy itself in history … or with a principle—in order to deduce, through logic, a generalized logos that will confer meaning on it and establish the rules of the game for an organized debate" (103). I want to avoid especially connectivism, the educational theory that has most attracted me over the past few years. Sure, I can over-code Rhizo14 with connectivism—or constructivism, behaviorism, actor-network theory, or a dozen other isms, but I want to avoid that. I want to make a lateral move, both prepared by and forgetting what I know. I do this because a prepared theory can blanch a landscape, rendering it totally in the light of the theory. Serres makes a striking comparison between a given theory and an atomic bomb: the light of the exploding bomb illuminates all of the landscape below it, destroying all local detail and turning it into  a featureless plain, under one sun, one explanation, one point of view. Even as agile a theory as connectivism can eliminate some important details in Rhizo14 that may be obscured, rubbed out in the brilliance of its application. Rather, I want to look at what's there, follow the prepositions along the relations that they trace, looking for the elements that pull Rhizo14 together into an assemblage (again, note the connections to Deleuze and Guattari). I want to follow the prepositions until a cluster of highly different relations becomes a body.

Let's begin with the sentences from Maha and Sarah:

• Funny enough, even though I have been thinking about this since #rhizo14 started and writing about it throughout on my blog, fb, twitter, I am having a lot of difficulty writing here.

• I’m in the early stages of a part time PhD in collaborative learning and I got interested in MOOCs from that point of view, as well as because my Uni signed up with FutureLearn last year.

What is here? What trajectories and relations? Both Maha and Sarah are playing into a new and open space. Maha is on a trajectory of thinking and writing about Rhizo14 ever since it started, but she's hitting some turbulence with her writing in late February, 2014, as Rhizo14 is formally ending. Sarah's interest in Rhizo14 traces from the early arc of her PhD program and a joint effort of her university with FutureLearn. Both, then, engage the same ball, Rhizo14, but they are tracing different trajectories: one from a research agenda and one from a graduate program and professional obligations. One is having issues handling the ball just now, the other seems comfortable.

With just two sentences from two Rhizo14 participants, I'm already forming a quite complex cluster of highly different relations that become a body. You can see the angels in red in the two sentences above and how they trace the complex connections within just those two sentences. I hope to follow the prepositions throughout all the Rhizo14 auto-ethnography, using the Voyant tools to trace the totality of paths. As you might imagine, I can go lots of different ways, but I first want to map out the total track of the ball (Rhizo14) through the entire game to see if I can map how each participant clusters about the ball. I have faith that some patterns will emerge and that they will tell me things that I don't know now.

Obviously, I am learning anew, with new tools, and I find this most exciting. About as much fun as I have had in a long time, and I thank especially Maha and Sarah for thinking to do the Rhizo-14 auto-ethnography and making it happen. I know others have helped as well, but I think those two have driven the effort. Good job.

How to Study a cMOOC: Part 3 of a list for #CLMOOC

So I'm closely reading Dillenbourg's 1999 introduction to collaborative learning to see what guidance it may provide for studying cMOOCs such as Rhizo14 and CLMOOC. Dillenbourg's first point about looking at collaborative learning from different scales strikes me as most helpful, but his second point about defining learning at best provides negative examples: what not to do. His third and final point about defining collaboration also seems to be a negative example of how not to approach cMOOCs. Let's see what Dillenbourg has to say.

Dillenbourg looks at collaboration from four points of view, or on four different scales:

1. situation,
2. interactions,
3. mechanisms, and
4. effects.

I like that he keeps his commitment to working with any complex system from a variety of scales. This is a key, I think, to looking at any cMOOC. But he is clearly talking about collaboration and not cooperation, an issue that Jenny Mackness opened for me and that I addressed in my last post. This suggests to me that his approach to collaboration may be another negative example for me.

Collaborative Situations - The first way to explore collaboration, Dillenbourg says, is as a situation in which agents:

1. are more or less at the same level: collaboration as a situation requires a symmetry in which all collaborating agents have similar freedom and ability to act, a similar level of knowledge, and similar status within the group. It seems that asymmetry disrupts collaboration. If you know significantly more than I, then you may try boss me, breaking the collaboration. A collaborative group, then, requires a certain homogeneity, a red flag for rhizomatic, cMOOC enthusiasts.
2. can perform the same actions: again an implied homogeneity among collaborative agents. No one is particularly more skillful than the others, though Dillenbourg does allow for some specialization of skills within the collaborative group. Too much, though, undermines the collaborative ethos, it seems.
3. have a common goal: collaboration requires a shared goal, whereas competition requires conflicting goals (this either/or approach leaves out cooperation altogether, it seems to me). Shared goals can partially assigned at the outset of collaboration, but also depends on the collaborating agents negotiating their shared goal, and in the process becoming aware of their mutual dependence.
4. work together: Dillenbourg finally mentions cooperation, but I don't think it helps much. He notes that some scholars use the terms interchangeably, while some distinguish them: cooperation is when group agents "split the work, solve sub-tasks individually and then assemble the partial results into the final output," and collaboration is when agents "do the work together." I don't think Jenny Mackness or Stephen Downes would favor this definition of cooperation.

Collaborative Interactions - The second way Dillenbourg looks at collaboration is by the nature of a group's interactions:

1. interactivity: collaborative interactions are, well, interactive, which seems intuitively obvious, but Dillenbourg defines the degree of interactivity not by frequency but by the intensity of the interactions, by the degree to which the interactions influence the peers' cognitive processes. This is an interesting approach to interactivity, but as Dillenbourg notes, devilishly difficult to measure.
2. synchronicity: collaborative interactions are synchronous says Dillenbourg. Collaborators expect their peers to "wait for [their] message and … process the message as soon as it is delivered." Asynchronous communication is out for collaboration, but I see no advantage to Dillenbourg's definition here. Linux, for instance, is a collaborative effort that seems to thrive on both synchronous and asynchronous communication. I hope Dillenbourg has dropped this.
3. negotiability: finally, collaborative interactions are negotiated rather than mandated. Negotiation implies for Dillenbourg space among the collaborators for negotiation and misunderstanding, a space for constructing shared meaning regarding the project and its execution.

Collaborative Processes - The third way Dillenbourg explores collaboration is by the mechanisms that enable group interactions and learning. He starts with those mechanisms that are common to individual learning but also occur in group learning: induction, cognitive load, self-explanation, and conflict. He then talks about those mechanisms more closely associated with group learning: internalization, appropriation, and mutual modeling.

Collaborative Effects - The final way Dillenbourg considers collaboration is through its effects on learning, usually as a measurement of individual task performance. He notes two main problems with measuring the effects of collaborative learning:

1. It is difficult to isolate in a collaborative situation, with its many contexts and interactions, the specific causes of any identifiable learning.
2. It is difficult to infer the degree of group learning from measurements of individual learning.

So what does this have to say about how the Rhizo14 auto-ethnography group, for instance, should go about looking at Rhizo14?

On the positive side, researchers will benefit from a multi-scale, multi-perspective approach to exploring any complex, multi-scale, self-organizing system such as a cMOOC. This is not to suggest that any single researcher or research effort must attempt to cover all scales and aspects of a cMOOC, but it does suggest that a research effort will benefit if it creates ample space for multiple approaches to the same system.

I am also interested in Dillenbourg's characterization of interactivity not as a quantity but as a quality. He doesn't measure the number of engagements so much as the degree to which an engagement affects a colleague's cognitive processes. This reminds me of Deleuze and Guattari's decalcomania, one of the six features of the rhizome and perhaps the feature least mentioned and discussed by others. Perhaps it is the least understood, or least impressive, but I think that is unfortunate. Decalcomania appears to me to be the process by which memes (a term coined by Richard Dawkins about the same time Deleuze and Guattari were writing A Thousand Plateaus, so perhaps unknown to them) spread through a system. It is a kind of staining. One is stained through an engagement with another and an exchange of energy, matter, information, organization, or all four. Dillenbourg rightly notes that this view of interactivity is difficult to measure and quantify, but everyone in a cMOOC experiences it: an idea emerges somewhere in the network and passes along tweets, posts, and discussions to many others in the network and outside it. Some stain, some don't. The more who stain, the more pervasive and powerful the meme and the more likely it is to spread more. There is a network power law at work here and definitely network propagation (decalcomania) which cMOOC investigators should keep in mind.

Then, Dillenbourg's take on the negotiability of collaborative interactions may hold as well for cooperative networks, but I have to think much more about this. Something wants me to frame the notion of negotiated social contracts in a different way, but I'm not ready to do it now, so I'll just pass.

Finally, Dillenbourg's thoughts about collaborative processes, the mechanisms that enable collaborative learning, seem equally relevant to cooperation as to collaboration. I don't think Dillenbourg was attempting to be exhaustive in the processes he discusses, and I see no reason why induction, cognitive load, self-explanation, conflict, internalization, appropriation, and mutual modeling would not play well in cooperative learning. Though it is possible that other mechanisms that I cannot think of just now play better in cooperative learning than in collaborative learning.

On the negative side, Dillenbourg's 1999 delineation of collaboration and cooperation seems, to me, to miss the concepts emerging in current conversations about cMOOCs. Jenny Mackness pointed to Stephen Downes' careful explanation about the differences between the two, and Dillenbourg's use of cooperation in this article does not match so well. Downes' distinction hinges on the differences between groups and networks and the role of the individual in each. In collaborative groups, individuals are subsumed under the group, becoming a part of the group, while in cooperative networks the individual is not subsumed by the collection of agents; rather, the network is an emergent property of the collection of individuals and their interactions. Dillenbourg's use of cooperation as mostly a difference in distributing the workload of the group misses most of the richness of Downes' use and affords very little help in understanding cMOOCs.

On the other hand, Dillenbourg's use of the term collaboration seems reasonably consistent with Downes' use, so I assume that they are mostly talking about the same kind of system. Thus, I take away from Dillenbourg's article some approaches not to use with cMOOCs. For instance, collaborative groups for Dillenbourg and Downes imply a certain homogeneity in the collection of individuals: similar capabilities, actions, goals, and affordances, especially similar languages and technologies. cMOOCs, on the other hand, are open to heterogeneity, and any effort to explore and map a cMOOC must account for this heterogeneity, this openness to divergent actions, aims, abilities, and affordances. For instance, lurkers have negative roles in a collaborative group and are often eliminated, but they can play a very productive role in a cooperative network, or rhizomatic community.

Dillenbourg's assertion that collaborative groups rely on synchronous communication doesn't match my understanding of what happens online in either collaborative groups or cooperative networks. I take the Linux project to be a monstrously successful collaboration, and I'm confident that group uses both synchronous and asynchronous communications to collaborate. I know that cooperative networks such as cMOOCs use both, so I see no need to limit either collaboration or cooperation to one or the other types of communication. I do see, however, a need to study how and why agents will chose one over the other and what each affords the agents in a system.

Finally, Dillenbourg's handling of collaborative effects seems hampered by its focus on local causality. Both online and f2f collaborative and cooperative systems can be explored and explained as much, perhaps more, by circular and global causalities as by local causalities. Self-organizing systems can seldom be explained by the local pushes of the one-to-one interactions among its constituent agents. Rather, one must include the global pull of the larger, emerging system as it seeks a comfortable function and form within its ecosystem. Likewise, the learning that emerges within a complex system must include circular causalities which account for the continuous flow and feedback of information, energy, and organization among the individual agents and between the emerging system and its ecosystem. To grasp a cMOOC, our field of reality must be enlarged. For instance, the Rhizo14 auto-ethnography cannot simply ask if an instructional technique employed by Dave Cormier led to a specific learning in any of the Rhizo14 participants, as we might do in a traditional classroom. Rather, the group should expand its field to explore how Rhizo14 emerged and self-organized, shaping and ordering itself around various conversational spaces such as Facebook, Twitter, P2PU, blogs, and G+. What global causes pulled Rhizo14 into this particular organization? The group should explore how one conversation fed into another conversation, reshaping both conversations in a mutually causal feedback loop. What circular causes looped Rhizo14 into poetic expressions? Did DS106 and CLMOOC feed into Rhizo14? Has Rhizo14 fed back into those systems? These are the kinds of questions that must frame any discussion of a complex, multi-scale system, I think.

Investigating MOOCs, Part 2 of a #CLMOOC List

This is the second in a series of posts about Pierre Dillenbourg’s 1999 article What do you mean by ‘collaborative learning’?, which introduces his book Collaborative-learning: Cognitive and Computational Approaches. I became interested in Dillenbourg when a Rhizo14 Facebook conversation favorably referenced him and this article. I wanted to see if his approach to studying learning provides guidance for those of us who are exploring rhizomatic learning, and I was delighted when Dillenbourg opened his article with a discussion of scales within learning groups, as I consider cMOOCs a function of complex, multi-scale networks (actually, I consider most everything a function of complex, multi-scale networks). Any investigation of a cMOOC must be aware of the scale or scales from which it is considering the cMOOC and must accept that its focus on any particular scale likely obscures or distorts equally relevant and valid processes, qualities, and affects/effects at work on other scales and that its own scale likely interacts in significant ways with those other processes, qualities, and affects/effects. Dillenbourg’s article, then, provided me with at least one positive approach to studying cMOOCs.

However, in her comment to my first post, Jenny Mackness points out that Dillenbourg is talking about collaborative learning and from her point of view most cMOOCs are all about cooperative learning. Jenny writes:

Cooperation in the sense of open sharing was more what the original cMOOCs were about. And indeed Stephen Downes at the time (2008) made a point of drawing attention to the difference between collaboration (groups) and cooperation (networks) and warned against the dangers of groups and group-think. … For me - MOOCs are still about cooperation. I don't participate in a mOOC for collaboration. For me collaboration might (and often has) been the result of my cooperative experience within a cMOOC.

She is exactly right. cMOOCs are mostly about cooperative learning, in the sense that cooperation tends to emerge in the cMOOCs I engage and that cooperation keeps me engaged; thus, we should rightly question if Dillenbourg’s article about collaborative learning is relevant. I think his observation about scales is relevant, though his subsequent observations may not be. Still, they are worth reviewing as they may provide a useful contrast to other approaches to online rhizomatic learning. I have to keep in mind that this particular article is from 1999, 5 years before the emergence of Web 2.0 and almost 10 years before the first MOOC. At the time, Dillenbourg likely had no frame of reference for online, cooperative, self-organizing learning groups numbering in the thousands from across the world. So I want to look at the second and third elements of Dillenbourg’s collaborative learning, keeping in mind that he almost certainly did not anticipate cMOOCs.

The variety of meanings for ‘learning’: Dillenbourg says that collaborative learning is usually defined as either a pedagogical method or a psychological process. He defines collaborative learning as neither, or rather as a bit of both:

the words ‘collaborative learning’ describe a situation [italics in original] in which particular forms of interaction among people are expected to occur, which would trigger learning mechanisms, but there is no guarantee that the expected interactions will actually occur.

The key to collaborative learning, Dillenbourg continues, “is to develop ways to increase the probability that some types of interaction occur”, and he suggest four ways to encourage interaction:

1. to set up initial conditions: controlling for group size, group members, group arrangement, groupware used, suitable tasks, and so on.
2. to over-specify the ‘collaboration’ contract with a scenario based on roles: forcing students to play different roles in some activity such as a discussion.
3. to scaffold productive interactions by encompassing interaction rules in the medium: supplying structured responses (“I propose to …”) for students to complete or a set number of blog posts and comments.
4. to monitor and regulate the interactions: performing minimal pedagogical intervention to redirect student work in a productive direction or to encourage students left out of the interaction. 

As I understand him, then, the situation is a pedagogical method, and the learning mechanisms are the psychological processes triggered, or not, by the pedagogical methods. To my mind, Dillenbourg is not defining learning. I know his main topic is collaborative learning, but his sub-title is the variety of meanings for ‘learning’. I expect a definition of learning, but all I see is that learning, whether alone or in a group, is a psychological mechanism of some kind sparked by some given situation that encourages interaction among people. To be fair, Dillenbourg does note that we learn not because we are alone or in groups, but because we “perform some activities which trigger specific learning mechanisms” such as induction, deduction, compilation, explanation, disagreement, mutual regulation, and so forth. Still, he says very little about what this learning is. This does not encourage me. I’m discouraged even more when he characterizes interactions as social contracts between student peers or between students and teachers. I sense that I will have to work hard to realize some benefit from Dillenbourg’s thoughts here. I am almost certain that I will have to push beyond the way he unpacks these ideas.

The way Dillenbourg characterizes learning in this article suggests to me staged collaboration in a closed class rather than open cooperation in the sense of a cMOOC or even open collaboration in the sense of Wikipedia, an xMOOC, or the Rhizo14 auto-ethnography. He says that “basically, collaborative learning takes the form of instructions to subjects (e.g. “You have to work together”), a physical setting (e.g. “Team mates work on the same table”) and other institutional constraints [italics in original] (e.g. “Each group member will receive the mark given the group project”).” I don’t know that this definition holds today even for collaborative learning in a classroom, but I’m certain it does not hold for online cooperative learning. This concept of collaborative learning is based on the traditional notion of a prepared course which marches a cohort of students (or subjects) through a fixed course syllabus toward some specified knowledge or skill and delivered, managed, and assessed by an authoritative teacher under the auspices of a sanctioning institution. The instructions to subjects (students) come from the teacher as an authoritative representative of the sponsoring institution. The physical setting, even when aided and mediated by computational devices, assumes a proximate cohort bounded by space and time. The institutional constraints embed the entire process in an institutional framework. This is all so brick-and-mortar.

This is NOT a criticism. Rather, it is 1999. And in the short 15 years since, cMOOCs have pushed education beyond what our brightest minds were able to conceive and frame. Cooperative, online learning is basically the opposite of the collaborative learning that Dillenbourg describes.

First, cooperative, online learning does not take the form of instructions to subjects. As the recent Rhizo14 and DS106 have demonstrated, open cMOOCs can function quite nicely without an authority figure giving instructions to his subjects. (Yes, I'm playing with the regal overtones of the term subject here, which I don't think Dillenbourg implies, but it makes my point. My apologies if I offend.) Open, online learning is certainly full of suggestions, often too many to process, but these suggestions must be framed quite differently from the instructions in a traditional educational system.

Then, cooperative, online learning does not have a physical setting, or rather is not limited to a physical setting, a prescribed space and time. It is not even limited to an online setting. Space and time become very fluid concepts in open, online learning systems. Participants engage as they can with the tools at hand, when they can, where they can, with whomever they can. This relaxation of a specific and specified space and time is quite disorienting to many when they first engage an open, online space. This fluidity disrupts the normal relationships among people, who become confused about who is in and who is out (I think the whole freaking world is in, but that's just me), perplexed about how to relate, when to assert, when to hold back. The familiar social contracts seem to melt, and attempts to reform them seem to flounder. Not only do the familiar relationships among people fade, but the relationships to content become disjointed. Am I learning? If so, what? (As Bob Dylan once said, "There's something going on here, but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?").

Finally, cooperative, online learning has almost no institutional constraints: no grades, no certificates, no ceremony, no sanctioned value. If you want value out of a cMOOC, then you have to create it for yourself with others. No one tells you the answer.

What are the implications here for research into cMOOCs? Mostly, we have to rethink everything. First, we must rethink the relationships among the participants. The old social contract assumed stable, discrete entities who formed stable relationships made explicit by contracts. Any violation in the terms of the contract dissolves the relationship. In the cMOOCs I like, leaders and groups wax and wane, emerge and fade. I constantly shift from lurker to speaker to leader to follower to in the group to out of the group, as do others. Relationships are very fluid. Are we learning together, or are you researching me? Sometimes it's hard to tell, so how do I relate, and do explicit rules make much sense? Finally, we must rethink how we determine the value gained from a course with no answer and no one purpose. How do I know when I'm finished? Am I still in Rhizo14? Have I really started CLMOOC?

It's hard to say, but that's what we are proposing to study.

Sliding Out through Rhizo14

I'm sliding outwards, across the boundaries and just in time.

One of the most important results of Rhizo14 for me has been my connection to educational thinkers outside of North America and Western Europe, the West. In a series of articles for Hybrid Pedagogy, Maha Bali (Egypt) and Shyam Sharma (originally Nepal, now in New York, USA) tackle the issue of working with and speaking to the privileged West from a non-Western context. I had an epiphany when I read that Westerners and non-Westerners "do not talk the same language." I think Maha and Shyam are correct. We don't. Even the way I just wrote that—Westerners and non-Westerners—privileges the West, makes the West the touchstone, renders everything else as Other. I don't do it on purpose, but I do it none-the-less.

I'm not interested in beating up on myself here, or on the West, and that is certainly not what Maha and Shyam were doing. Rather, I feel an obligation to recognize our situation and to be sensitive to ways to work with this peculiar boundary that exists between us. I don't say eliminate the boundary because I have much more respect for boundaries than that. While it is true that hard boundaries can separate us, soft boundaries are also the affordances that join us. We cannot do without boundaries, but we can rethink and restructure our boundaries.

Then, Clarissa Bezerra (Brazil) has been sharing on her blog writings from Brazilian and Spanish scholars unknown to me and likely unknown to most US educationists. Clarissa has kindly translated a section from Maria Cândida Moraes' book Eco-Systemic Thought: Education, Learning, and Citizenship in the 21ST Century (Moraes, Maria Cândida. Pensamento Eco-Sistêmico: Educação, aprendizagem e cidanania no século XXI. 2 ed. -Petrópolis, RJ: Vozes, 2008), and it resonated with me immediately. I detect some heavy influences in Moraes' book from another of my favorite writers, Edgar Morin, who, I understand, is much more well-known in Latin America than in the English speaking world. I'm confident that Moraes has read On Complexity.

Moraes begins by grounding education and knowledge "adjacent to the roots of quantum, biological, and complex thought." This is where Siemens begins with his discussion of connectivism, and it's where I position my thinking about education, rhetoric, and rhizomatic learning: within complexity. As I've said in my blog before, I see connectivism, cMOOCs, rhizomatic learning, and a wealth of other educational efforts as expressions of culture's general expansion beyond the simple/complicated domains of classical scientific and cultural thought to include the complex/chaotic domains. I am interested in thought within the complex domain, and I sense that this is where Moraes is playing as well.

Moraes quickly focuses on the complex in education, pointing out that education in the complex domain is quite different than the "reproductive, authoritarian, and autocratic" approach of the simple domain with its strict adherence to linear, factory line processes: one path to one product, one way to one answer. The emergence of complexity thought to include the complex and chaotic domains, many paths to many answers, without doing away with or undermining the simple and complicated domains, has profound implications for our views of knowledge and education. Moraes says quite succinctly:

Today, it is no longer possible for us educators to ignore the epistemological implications of the scientific knowledge involving the concepts of self-organization, complexity, chaos, undeterminism, and non-linear dynamics which determine living systems. We notice that these macroconcepts or new themes, when allied with cognitive science (Varela et al., 1997), set forth a more challenging vision of the morphogenesis of knowledge, a non-linear vision of the dynamics of reality, which, more than ever, unveils the intricacies between cognition and life (Maturana & Varela, 1995). For these authors, living systems are cognitive systems, and life is a process of cognition. The interactions which take place within living organisms are aways cognitive interactions that are built upon the very flow of life. It is in this flow of life that, upon actions and reactions, we shape our world and are shaped by it. From this structural imbricacy, subject and world emerge together. And what is the meaning of that for education?

Education, then, can no longer be the cool, objective acquisition of inert knowledge; rather, it is the complex emergence of the knowing self within a knowing universe. Yes, the exchange of information, along with the exchange of matter, energy, and organization, is at the heart of how the universe works. We know, and we are known. We know as we are known. They are not separate things, but a dialog between ourselves and the universe. This is a radically different epistemology that we in education have yet to grapple with. Fortunately, we have access to a marvelous voice from Brazil that can help—though I must note that Jorge Luis Borges was trying to introduce us to complexity thinking way back in 1941 in his story The Garden of Forking Paths. It has taken me too long to comprehend. I have had to learn the first things last.

I look forward to more translations from Clarissa Bezerra, and I am indebted. Rhizo14, a garden of forking paths, is a wonderful place to study.