Image via Wikipedia

Have courage on this journey and bear with me. It may take a while, many links and your own tangents to get to the “point” of this post!

Through my daily journey on the internet I have found The David Report which “covers the intersection of design, culture and business life with a creative and humanistic approach. We write about the latest and most interesting news, ideas and concepts concerning art, design, architecture, music, travel and fashion with a holistic and culturally connected mindset.”  This website is very interesting in its self and is an example of the kind of multi-topic, synthesis, opinion, collaborative website that children could make (at any level).

 I checked out The David Report’s blog which led me to notice their Del.ici.ous sidebar (I have one on my own blog, I wonder if you can do the same on Edublogs?). An interesting article caught my eye Innovation” is Dead : “Transformation” as The Key Concept for 2009 (from BusinessWeek). I thought our Principal would love this, so I emailed that off to him (although if he had a Del.ici.ous account which was shared in the school community, he could sign up to mine and click on the link that I could have saved to Del.ici.ous rather than email).

 This article made some interesting comments about the possible differences between innovation and “transformation”, (Don’t forget to read the comments, they’re half the fun. Also, how do they make their tag-cloud move? That’s cool. If children love the exploding bubbles on bubbl.us then they’d defintely appeciate a moving tag-cloud) and that innovation has been flogged to death and has been overtaken by this mythical idea of transformation.

Image by ocean.flynn via Flickr

The author Bruce Nussbaum comments “”Transformation” accepts the notion that we are in a post-consumer society, defined by two groups of economic players: manufacturers and consumers. “Transformation” deals with a new Creativity Society, in which we are all both producers and consumers of value. Look around and you can see Gen Y in particular creating practically from birth, mashing music, designing Facebook or MySpace pages, doing videos and podcasts—creating value.”  In an education setting this is about the learner being an active participant (or is it THE active participant); but wait, it gets better…

 Something popped up in the comments from Patrick McGowan. He referenced some interesting blokes called “Deleuze and Guattari“ who apparently “had it right in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’:”, in which they state, “the tribe must become nomadic, rhizomatic to survive/thrive. Which, if I understand it correctly, means that there is no longer just one expert, but a multitude of voices contributing to the knowledge base”.

So by now I’m feeling a little bit Burning Chrome and decide to blog about this to help me “make sense” of all this information! My next step was to check out this rather Amazonian-jungle sounding “rhizome” theory which led me to Wikipedia (not a lot of citations) which led me to another interesting bloke called Dave Cormier. Dave Cormier wrote an article called “Rhizomatic Education:Community as Curriculum” which was published on “Innovate: The Journal of Online Education”.

By now I’m getting pretty excited, but not any closer to my magical moment of understanding. The author makes the comment that although social-contstructivist and connectivist theories “are centered on the process of negotiation as a learning process”, but this isn’t “enough” for online learning.

Image by nswlearnscope via Flickr

 He states “A rhizomatic plant has no center and no defined boundary; rather, it is made up of a number of semi-independent nodes, each of which is capable of growing and spreading on its own, bounded only by the limits of its habitat (Cormier 2008). In the rhizomatic view, knowledge can only be negotiated, and the contextual, collaborative learning experience shared by constructivist and connectivist pedagogies is a social as well as a personal knowledge-creation process with mutable goals and constantly negotiated premises. The rhizome metaphor, which represents a critical leap in coping with the loss of a canon against which to compare, judge, and value knowledge, may be particularly apt as a model for disciplines on the bleeding edge where the canon is fluid and knowledge is a moving target.”

If this is the emerging experience of children as learners and active participants in our society then pardon me, but what the hell am I DOING in the “classroom”??? I am currently contemplating the idea that learning has “mutable goals” and “constantly

Image by Mmmonica via Flickr

negotiated premises”.

I believe that in a lot of education setting there is a lot of TALK and not alot of CHANGE because we as *teachers* are still coming into the learning experiences as boss, to be “in control” (in a learning/knowledge sense) and still have traditional ideas about “outcomes” and “possible learning experiences”. I asked “my” children what they were passionate about learning in the holidays and several of them said “MSN” as their number one learning goal!

We might have to say that we don’t know what those learning experiences actually are, what they look like or even what learning experiences are acutally going on most of the time without out us even understanding them as learning experiences!

Ok, I’m in contemplation about these ideas and will most definitely be coming back to this discussion. I’d be glad if anyone else would like to join me! Hopefully, this post will “encourage migrations into new conceptual territories resulting from unpredictable juxtapositions”. (Love it!) Right after I’ve finished reading the post-modern treatise ” A Thousand Plateaus”…ooh! And set-up an experimental Ning so we can create one for our 5/6 community, very cool!

Apologies for the lack of pictures and moving parts. I promise the next post will be A.shorter, B. easier to read and C.multimedia. Peace out.