Personal Blogs

Consider your reaction to the video.

• Were you convinced by rhizomatic learning as an approach?

I came across the metaphor in H800 and was enthralled. Here was a natural phenomenon whose order and organization were apparently chaotic and worked counter-intuitively, the very opposite of the metaphors preferred by rationalists.

However, unlike the connectivist idea, it did not work by associationist and behavioural contingency nor by the mathematics involved in the differential weighting of links between nodes. It was complex BUT it was conceivable as more than the accidental framework for the recognition of patterns with only an epiphenomenal ontology. It was chaotic BUT capable of creative generation and growth in unexpected directions (out from its nodes) that had sense in the larger scheme of time. They grew and allowed growth: provided they were alive.

Connectionism (and connectivism) were never more than an abstract model, conceivable (if at all) in complex but under-performing computer models of brain activation. As a committed cognitivist, I was delighted. Nodes were living sources of change and revision but not in themselves unmeaningful.

Courmier’s use of the metaphor imbues it with meaning: an intentional stance, after Dennett, he presents it as an organism with intrinsic motivation, being in itself cognitive:

They grow and spread via experimentation. So they’ll try out this way… and trying to figure out whether it can find a place to grow …’

The ‘intentional metaphors’ may be just convenient expressions like the extension of cognitive relations into the language of Daniel Dennett, but Stephen Downes, a dogmatic connectivist, tells us – in reading we are given – that we should in pure Churchland fashion, be suspicious of those, even in Daniel Dennett.

Courmier’s thinking plant intends to live and intends to grow and it is this which makes it a good metaphor of learning, just as full of distrust of foundational beliefs as connectivism but committed that the uncertainties this throws up are not grounds for believing that mental events and objects have no phenomenal existence.

The main point is not to get a model that explains the constant process of change (as connectivism does) but one that sees in aa way of imagining that our task in teaching and learning is not to change people and there it ends but to ensure the change in them enables them to be part of the ‘changeability’ necessary for living in times of rapid change.

• Could you imagine implementing rhizomatic learning?

Not personally. As a metaphor, it allows us to conceptualise the value of steps in the dark based on evidence we know to be uncertain at some level, however good. It allows room for learning as an idea of continual transformation. However, to try and reproduce a ‘rhizome’ as the structure even of a virtual learning place is to miss the point. A rhizome’s structure is always emergent, never then a ‘blueprint’ for design. Indeed as a metaphor it only keeps reminding us that the design of learning is provisional and hedged with uncertainty, prey to events that are not yet evidenced enough to be in the ‘evidence-base’. DS106 is not structured like a rhizome, it grows only when you respond to its object with intention to learn and grow and apply.

• How might rhizomatic learning differ from current approaches?

In many ways, I cannot see it as offering ‘a’ radical alternative. Instead, it gives credence to the use of multiple design methodologies in pedagogy. It only stops you from changing these methodologies into hardened certainties, from which no one must stray. It tells you that the shape of authority is and never will be ‘top-down’ only and maybe does not need to be top-down at all. It allows us to see the ‘teacher’ not as a ‘necessary presence’ (for whatever function) but as an instantiation of functions in learning itself: like, for instance modelling, feedback generation, design and reflection-in-action. When we see that, we can’t see one teacher (or indeed any other role in a learning system) as ‘sole’ authority

• What issues would arise in implementing rhizomatic learning?

As Courmier, makes plain, ‘dealing with uncertainty’. Once we embrace this idea, we may remember that any learning that is sustained is learning that negotiates ‘uncertainty’, even finding that ‘uncertainty’ in itself and moving on from it.

So there it is FOR NOW!

Steve