A weekend of making for #CLMOOC

#CLMOOC doesn’t “really” start till tomorrow but some of us were eager to get going so I guess we started early. We started by remixing some Webmaker Thimble memes, and then Greg (@jgmac106) upped the game by sharing a riff on the Star Wars scrolling theme. Kevin (@dogtrax) remixed it, and then I remixed his.

Then Terry (@telliokuwp) asked if anyone wanted to collaborate on a poem to share our thoughts about Mother Emanuel and I found some words. We’re now in the middle of recording that, and Terry is doing a wonderful job of editing it together.

Love hanging around with such creative folk – it’s infectious.

Posted in #CLMOOC, Learning, MOOC, Poetry, Rhizomes | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

Adding an RSS feed

Submit your blog to the hub, they said. So I tried.  I didn’t read it properly, coz this blog is a WordPress blog, but it’s self hosted, so the instructions for adding a WP blog are probably not for me. So this morning I realised I’d need to remember how to find the RSS feed, and that though I’d done it for #rhizo15 to add my blog to Laura’s Inoreader, I’d forgotten how to do it.  I’m bound to need to do this again, so I’m sharing it with myself here so that future me can find it. Well, assuming that future me remembers that past me did this for her…

Yet again, looking at this through a rhizoANT lens, the technology is a major player in my world. Today it jumped up and reminded me not to take it for granted – it demanded that I concentrate on IT and IT ALONE. I am sure that, as #CLMOOC progresses, I am going to have a lot more experiences like this.  As a colleague once said, using most tech is not as easy as buying an item from Amazon.  Erm, quite – and we can reflect on why that might be!

Posted in #CLMOOC, ANT, Learning, MOOC, Social Media, Technology | Tagged , , , | 7 Comments

Beginning #clmooc

Apparently #CLMOOC starts today – I am excite!

I’ve made a quick poster using Mozilla Thimble. Dunno how to embed it in this blog though 🙁

keep calm rhizome

 

Posted in #CLMOOC, #rhizo15, Learning, MOOC, Rhizomes | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

embed test

Just testing how Google Calendar embeds here. This one is for #tomereaders

Posted in #tomereaders, MOOC, Reading, Rhizomes | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Storify for #tomereaders chat

Yesterday we had our first #tomereaders Twitter chat about Chapter 2 of Bowen’s Teaching Naked, which is about “social proximity and the virtual classroom”. Autumm and I found a lot of similarities between what Bowen is saying and our #rhizo15 experiences – is that just because of where our focus is?  Maybe. We all talked a fair bit about Facebook as well – I imagine @dogtrax will have something to say about that.

After the chat I used Storify to curate some of the conversations for folk (like @dogtrax) who could not join in synchronously:

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Pay it Forward

I’m in a lucky place. I’ve ended up with a relatively well paid job and a husband who earns more than me. We’re not rich, but we can buy what we want on our weekly supermarket shop and still have money left over.

It wasn’t always like this. Before we married both of us have had times when we have really struggled financially. Lots, actually. Folk helped each of us then and never asked us to pay them back. We really, really appreciate those folk. Once upon a time one of them told me not to pay it back, but to pay it forward.

So that is my aim. I’ll help financially if I can. Happy to help – that’s what friends are for. But I don’t need it back. My challenge, if you accept it, is to pay it forward. With love.

Posted in Love, Philosophy, Rhizomes | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Teaching Naked (1)

I’m reading Teaching Naked at the moment for a book group, Twitter chat, who knows what-rhizo thing with Autumm and some others. I like it. Here’s Bowen’s assessment of the supposed revolution caused by the internet age:

The point here is not that online learning is better, but just that it is here (9)

Exactly. For the most part it is the same old content repackaged in a fancy new wrapper.

Content, huh? #rhizo15 pals will know what I think of that,  so it’s good to see Bowen saying that:

It is at best a paradox, at worst appalling, that although we say we want to develop critical thinking skills, we structure most of higher education around delivery of content (20)

Right – yeah?  Technology can offer “an abundance of content”, as Bowen says (24), but it can do so much more than that if used well.

Technology also offers myriad new learning environments, multiple points of entry to every concept … (24)

Hey, rhizo15 – are you getting this? Sounds a bit rhizomatic, huh?

… in an age where information is abundant, quality and specificity of of information have become increasingly important

So if we use tech to build courses that are less about delivering content and more about helping people to assess the information that is out there … but you guys know this already, right?

Next time: how Bowen thinks apps are a metaphor for how education needs to change.

(note: if you are writing a post called “teaching naked” do not use that phrase to google for an image to accompany that post, eek!)

Posted in #rhizo15, Learning, Reading, Rhizomes, Teaching, Technology | Tagged , , , | 10 Comments

Email for rhizoANT projects

flickr photo by Internet Archive Book Images http://flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/ 14783749432 shared with no copyright restriction (Flickr Commons)

flickr photo by Internet Archive Book Images http://flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/
14783749432 shared with no copyright restriction (Flickr Commons)

As we’re looking at collaborative tools for an upcoming presentation about rhizo14, Rebecca and AK  have both written about their feelings of their experiences with using email. In particular, AK talks about the challenges posed by having multiple email addresses – haha, I know that one only too well. I have 2 hotmail accounts, a couple of yahoo accounts, 2 Gmail that I can remember the details of and my staff email. Oh, and my student account that I rarely remember to check. Most of the time I can manage these according to what I am doing, but during rhizoANT communications it’s a big mess, with some threads going to a Gmail account and some to my staff address – still, I can manage that.

What I can’t cope with is the way that emails about important stuff (who is doing what and when) gets lost in the noise of a conversation. I know that I can be guilty of this sometimes, so I’m not meaning to wave my finger at anybody and tell them off for chatting over email – I just wish there was a way of separating out the channels.  I know that when there are a lot of emails over a short period of time I start to ignore them all – in fact I have now set up rules to divert rhizo stuff to a separate folder, just so I can ignore them easily. Once in a while I try to read them through and see if I’ve missed anything, but if rhizoANT emails arrive in the evenings I often ignore them. And sometimes folk change the subject of a conversation, so it’s really hard to see later where threads evolved from. So I would say that email does not work as a collaborative tool for me – and I feel much better about RhizoANTing about it 😉

I think that this has come to my attention recently because of another collaborative projects that I’m engaged in. As part of a new cohort of Hybrid Pedagogy Editors I’ve been introduced to a new collaborative tool called Slack. Roughly, this allows us to have various chat rooms (channels) for different things  – so we can have a dedicated thread for each project as well as having places for chit chat (for example, we have a channel called “general” as well as one called “random”) – as well as having private messaging and private groups (so we’ve got a group called “music” to share playlists). Using Slack makes it much easier to chat yet remain focussed, and to be able to quickly see what needs to be done. I heart it.

Posted in #rhizo14, #rhizo15, ANT, Editing, MOOC, Rhizomes, Technology, Writing | Tagged , , , , | 6 Comments

Barbie discovers #rhizo15

Today’s Daily Create from @dogtrax

barbie

Here’s mine. You can go to Feminist Hacker Barbie and make your own.

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Heterogeneous rhizomes

By Anneli Salo (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

When folk hear about the concept of a rhizome in D&G they often assume, not unreasonably, that the analogy being made is to the botanical concept of ginger, or potatoes, or Japanese Knotweed. Well, sometimes it is, and it can be useful to think about how some ideas, like some plants, can invade, take over, stifle; or how factions can work underground and erupt out to surprise us. But not all rhizomes are homogeneous.  D&G give 6 characteristics of the rhizome. Here’s the first two:

1 and 2. Principles of connection and heterogeneity: any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be.

By Amada44 (From the Book: William Heath Robinson Inventions) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Heterogenity. Rhizomes can be heterogeneous, which means that they can be made up from diverse elements: animal, vegetable, mineral, and abstract entities can all connect together into a heterogeneous thing. In his Actor Network Theory and Material Semiotics John Law suggests that Actor Network Theory is  “an empirical version” of D&G’s “nomadic philosophy”, and notes that Latour himself observes that talk of “actor-rhizomes” could be an alternative to “actor-networks”.  So instead of ANT, we might have “actant-rhizome ontology”. All of this was a bit of a eureka moment to me when I thought about it: ANT tells us that concepts and objects are also part of our social network; D&G tell us that rhizomes are heterogeneous – similar points are being made in different ways.  To put it another way, they are both types of material semiotics – which is to say that they both map the relations between things and concepts.

So that’s some big words cut down to size 🙂

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