Rhizome: 7 word story

Posted on 25th March 2016 by NomadWarMachine

Today’s daily create is to:

Explain something technical in 24 seconds and summarize in 7 words as a video.

I wanted to try something new, so I Googled for animated text and found FlashVortex and quickly made these to – ahem – illustrate a point I keep banging on about:

Which are great, but not limited to 24 seconds. So I downloaded Screencast-o-matic (couldn’t get it to download to run in my browser, so downloaded the full version and extracted it onto my PC), played the animation and recorded it for 24 seconds. I then uploaded it to Youtube, realised the advertising was obscuring the text, recorded it again and re-uploaded it (dang, it’s 25 secs, pfff). That was fun 🙂

Posted in D&G, DailyCreate, DS106, Rhizomes | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

#CERE16 chat

Posted on 19th March 2016 by NomadWarMachine

tweey-bird
tweey-bird flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license

This Tuesday 22nd March, at 5-6pm GMT, Steve Draper‘s Concepts and Empirical Research in Education (CERE) course is going to be holding a Tweetchat with the hashtag #CERE16, and I’ll be facilitating. The question that we’ll be responding to is this:

What is the most interesting/controversial/idiotic thing that you’ve read/heard about during this course?

If you’d like to join us (and I really, really hope that you will), please feel free to adapt this question. The list of CERE topics is here – you’ll find good topics such as social constructivism and learning as acquisition for example. For anybody who does not have a Twitter account, details of how to sign up are here. (Best to do this beforehand.) I’ll be tweeting, as usual as @NomadWarMachine

Flickr pic by me shared under a CC-BY-SA-NC licence

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Never Throw Tapioca Down a Mine Shaft

Posted on 18th March 2016 by NomadWarMachine

Today’s Daily Create asks us to:

Create or write something to explain the origins of this aphorism: “Never throw tapioca down a mine shaft.”

I don’t think it’s a well known aphorism, at least not in English, so I don’t know the actual origins of the saying, but hey ho.

When I was a kid our school lunches were pretty dire, but there was one we really, really dreaded – tapioca pudding – or frogspawn as we called it. The thought of this still makes me shudder. Despite this, I love frogs – here’s a pic from my office wall:

frogspawn

As I was surfing for inspiration I came across the phrase “frog in a well” – another new one for me. Apparently this means to be narrow minded. So I’m going to suggest, with no evidence whatsoever, that you shouldn’t throw tapioca (frogspawn) down a mineshaft (well) because you’ll end up with narrow minded frogs (workers). To be sung to the tune of “You cannae shove yer grannie aff the bus” 😉


Flickr photo by me shared under a CC-BY-SA-NC licence

 

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Burying my demons

Posted on 16th March 2016 by NomadWarMachine

Today’s DS106 Daily Create is to create a tombstone. It’s hard to know what to choose – so many worthy candidates – but we’ve had a rough few days of it in the office so the first one I chose was this:

BBB

which I made quickly with Tombstone Builder Then I made this:

my_tombstone (1)

To “celebrate” our government. Happy days 🙁

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Faces around me

Posted on 15th March 2016 by NomadWarMachine

I’ve never done the #DS106 Daily Create before, but today it caught my eye:

Have you ever looked around … really “looked” around … and suddenly noticed faces everywhere?

Ok, so it was talking about seeing faces that were not real faces, but I looked around my work and home offices and realised that I have an awful lot of faces around. Here’s some.

faces

 

Posted in DailyCreate, DS106, Photos, Rhizomes | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

The rhizome is NOT a metaphor

Posted on 13th March 2016 by NomadWarMachine

Red stamp saying "Can do better. Not a metaphor

Deleuze & Guattari’s concept of the rhizome in A Thousand Plateaus is not a metaphor. Let me repeat that. IT IS  NOT A METAPHOR. NOT. A. METAPHOR.

Despite acknowledging this in their recent paper The rhizome: A problematic metaphor for teaching and learning in a MOOC, the authors nevertheless use the word a staggering 72 times in 14 pages – including in the title. If you’d like to see comments by me and others on that article, you can do so as follows:

  • First download the pdf from this link
  • Add the Hypothes.is extension to Chrome
  • Go to extension settings and accept annotate on local files.
  • Drag downloaded pdf to your Chrome address bar
  • Then make a first annotation on pdf
  • Refresh the page and you should see all our previous annotations
  • What is very cool is to be able to annotate with video/images/
  • More info on annotating pdfs here

(Instructions adapted from Simon’s post to Facebook.) This might sound footly to do, but Hypothes.is is a really cool tool for annotating web pages and once set up it is really easy to use.

Anyway, I digress. So what is the rhizome – well, it’s a CONCEPT. To call it a metaphor, as this site puts it: “is to reduce to a mental operation with no real consequences in the world”. Quite. And, again from the same site:

Guattari is Not Making Metaphors. He and his friend Deleuze state and restate this. It is a machine, a connecter a way of organizing and disorganizing and reorder the assemblages. [sic]

Pink t shirt with motto "The rhizome is NOT a metaphor" on itSo: a rhizome is not a metaphor. It’s a real thing. Nothing figurative about it. Of course, you can use it metaphorically, and talk about knowledge branching out, but D&G are not doing that. D&G’s concept of the rhizome is not a metaphor. Look – it says so on the T-shirt.

It’s also really misleading to think of the rhizome as a botanical concept. Sure, irises and ginger are rhizomes, but understanding D&G’s concept (not metaphor!) like this misses out the heterogenerity that is one of the six principles of the rhizome (see p82 here for a visual of all six).

Wasp in purple orchidThe image that captures the rhizome best for me is the orchid and the wasp. The wasp territorialises with the orchid and forms a rhizome with it, then deterritorialises and flies away. Two (real) things connect together then disconnect. Nothing metaphorical about that.

Edit: it’s been pointed out to me that this example might be misleading as it is a symbiotic relationship. I’ll need to find an even more heterogenous one.

Those of you who enjoy reading D&G might also be interested in considering the rhizome as metamorphosis. This from D&G (1986) Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature 

Discussion of metamorphosis by D&G“Could do Better” Image by @Sensor

Tshirt image by me shared with a CC-BY-SA-NC licence

Orchid and Wasp flickr photo by BinaryApe  shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license

Posted in #rhizo14, #rhizo15, #Rhizo16, D&G, Rhizomes | Tagged , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

What’s so good about Digi-CLMooc-Rhizo-ing?

Posted on 7th March 2016 by NomadWarMachine

I’ve been asked to give a short presentation to some Psychology of Education undergrads and talk to them about how great my interactions with you folk have been over the last couple of years. I’m finding it hard to put into words what I just think of as messing around on the internet, so I thought I’d ask all of you.

If you were asked to say a few words about what makes these cMOOCish things so fun, addictive, challenging etc., what would you say?

Posted in #CLMOOC, #DigiWriMo, #rhizo14, #rhizo15, #Rhizo16, Online learning, Peer interaction, Rhizomes | Tagged , | 14 Comments

Reading recommendations

Posted on 4th March 2016 by NomadWarMachine

Person reading a book with a book in each hand and a pile next to themToday Vicki and I are trying out a slow Twitter chat with questions themed around online and blended learning. A couple of questions later on today are about reading recommendations, and I thought I’d collect a few here.

First blogs. I read Steve Wheeler’s Learning with ‘e’s regularly (I’m also reading his book of the same name, which I recommend). I also love Terry Elliot‘s writings, particularly this. Simon Ensor confuses, provokes and stimulates my thoughts with his blog posts as does Ron Samul here. Then of course there’s Hybrid Pedagogy and Audrey Watters. And, of course, Mr rhizo himself, Dave Cormier.  Last, but by no means least is Kevin, who inspires my digital creations. I follow him pretty much everywhere. including his blog here.

I have a lot of books I want to read at the moment. I’m slow reading Participatory Culture in a Networked Era: A Conversation on Youth, Learning, Commerce, and Politics by Jenkins, Ito and boyd at the moment – cannot recommend it highly enough. I’ve also dipped in and out of Multimedia Learning by Richard Mayer and Reading the Visual: An Introduction to Teaching Multimodal Literacy by Frank Serafini – both excellent resources when thinking about online learning design.

I’m particularly interested in online communities, networks, collectives – what they are and what we call them – and A New Culture of Learning by Thomas and Seely Brown is a book that has helped shape my thinking, as has Agoraphobia and the modern learner by Dron and Anderson – I also note with glee the free download of their new book Teaching Crowds: Learning and Social Media.

Then, of course, there’s pedagogy. I’m half way through Mind in Society by Vygotsky and picked up Introducing Marxism: A Graphic Guide to get to grips with parts of Vygotsky. I’ve also got a pile of books about constructivism to plough through at some point.

Well, that’s my suggestions – what would you recommend?

flickr photo by Pimthida  shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license

Posted in Learning, Online learning, Reading | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Spring is on the way

Posted on 28th February 2016 by NomadWarMachine

It’s been a beautiful weekend. After so many weeks of rain, snow, sleet and drizzle it’s been sunny, though cold. As well as all the crocuses in the front lawn, today I noticed the first flowers peeping through in the back garden. Happy days.IMG_0270

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IMG_20160228_152243371 IMG_20160228_152253881 IMG_20160228_152257515 IMG_20160228_152306065

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All photos by me shared under a CC-BY-SA-NC licence

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#onetree

Posted on 26th February 2016 by NomadWarMachine

This week Kim’s photo challenge is about trees. Despite D&G’s dislike of trees:

We’re tired of trees. We should stop believing in trees, roots, and radicles. They’ve made us suffer too much. All of arborescent culture is founded on them, from biology to linguistics. Nothing is beautiful or loving or political aside from underground stems and aerial root, adventitious growths and rhizomes. ATP p15

I’m very fond of trees – especially the fruit trees that we planted 3 years ago. Here’s one of the apple trees earlier today:

Tiny apple tree

As you can see, it’s not much more than a twig at the moment, although it is starting to show signs of coming back to life after the winter:

Apple blossom buds

I’m looking forward to seeing it blossom over the next few months.

All photos by me shared on a CC-BY-NC-SA licence

Posted in D&G, Garden | Tagged , , | 1 Comment