Pay it Forward

Posted on 12th June 2015 by NomadWarMachine

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)

Posted on 10th June 2015 by NomadWarMachine

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

Posted on 9th June 2015 by NomadWarMachine

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

Posted on 3rd June 2015 by NomadWarMachine

Today’s Daily Create from @dogtrax

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

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

Posted in #rhizo15, Capitalism, Learning, MOOC, Rhizomes | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Heterogeneous rhizomes

Posted on 1st June 2015 by NomadWarMachine

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

Recommend a book to a friend

Posted on 1st June 2015 by NomadWarMachine

IMG_20150406_120743[1]This popped up in my inbox today, with the suggestion to recommend a book I have read to an online friend. So that got me thinking about the sort of books I’ve been dipping into recently. To be honest, the types of fiction I read are trashy crime fiction like this, not the sort of thing I’d generally recommend to anyone other than my dad and my brother, who I know both share my lowbrow tastes in fiction.

My favourite book at the moment is this knitting book – I am gradually working through the most gorgeous into socks for myself like this pair that are too beautiful to wear. I already shared this with an online friend, though, and I am not aware of others who’d be interested.

I’ve just started reading a biography of D&G that is interesting. I don’t know if anybody’s interested in that – Simon recommended it to me, actually. And I have Pioneer Girl sitting on my knitting chest. I love this book because it shows a grimmer side of pioneering than the Little House books which I loved as a child.

But the book I would most recommend, if you have not read it, is the wonderful Where The Wild Things Are. That’s the sort of book I feel like reading today.

Will that do, Kevin?

Posted in #rhizo15, Reading, Rhizomes | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Don’t push your metaphors too far

Posted on 30th May 2015 by NomadWarMachine

Among the long list of fallacies we teach in level 1 philosophy is one called weak analogy:

This fallacy consists in assuming that because two things are alike in one or more respects, they are necessarily alike in some other respect. From here

It’s one that students usually spot easily in class when we are playing “spot the fallacy”, but it is still made more often than it should be.

For example: in D&G’s ATP we are given the rhizome as a metaphor for a type of thinking. So it’s a metaphor. That means that there’s a type of thinking that’s a bit like a rhizome, and we can talk about whether that’s useful, and how they resemble each other. But I don’t think that metaphors are things that can be right or wrong, and I really don’t think that you should blame the person who suggested a metaphor when it’s not a perfect fit.

So don’t say that D&G are being bad scientists when the botanical structure does not fit the particular facet of thinking that you are attending to – D&G were never doing science in the first place.

There are, you see, two ways of reading a book; you either see it as a box with something inside and start looking for what it signifies, and then if you’re even more perverse or depraved you set off after signifiers. And you treat the next book like a  box contained in the first or containing it. And you annotate and interpret and question, and write a book about the book, and so on and on. Or there’s the other way: you see the book as a little non-signifying machine, and the only question is ‘Does it work, and how does it work?’ How does it work for you? If it doesn’t work, if nothing comes through, you try another book. This second way of reading’s intensive: something comes through or it doesn’t. There’s nothing to explain, nothing to understand, nothing to interpret. It’s like plugging in to an electric circuit. I know people who’ve read nothing who immediately saw what bodies without organs were, given their own ‘habits,’ their own way of being one. This second way of reading’s quite different from the first, because it relates a book directly to what’s Outside. A book is a little cog in much more complicated external machinery … This intensive way of reading, in contact with what’s outside the book, as a flow meeting other flows, one machine among others, as a series of experiments for each reader in the midst of events that have nothing to do with books,as tearing the book into pieces, getting it to interact with other things,absolutely anything … is reading with love. That’s exactly how you read the book. (Deleuze, 1990/1995, quoted in Elizabeth St Pierre 2004)

So, that’s how I read D&G.

Posted in #rhizo14, #rhizo15, D&G, Learning, Rhizomes | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Thanks for #rhizo15

Posted on 27th May 2015 by NomadWarMachine

So I guess this is the end of the official #rhizo15 thing. Some of us talked about thanking Dave for hosting this crazy party, and some of us thought we should not thank him at all, because that was not what this experience was about …

But I want to thank Dave for bringing us together and facilitating this awesome conversation. Some folk gave me suggestions about what I could include, and I’ve randomly dipped into Facebook and Twitter as well as looking at some blogs to choose some of my favourite images and sayings. So here’s an artefact from me.

Posted in #rhizo15, D&G, Learning, MOOC, Rhizomes | Tagged | 10 Comments

Google Docs and ANT

Posted on 23rd May 2015 by NomadWarMachine

I use Google Docs a lot. It makes it easy for me to find and edit things I am writing no matter which computer I find myself using, and it is also easy to share documents with others and collaborate on multi-author pieces. When it’s all going smoothly I don’t even think about it – I just use Google Docs as a blank page on which to write. But when it goes wrong I curse.

As I wrote here a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been looking a little bit into ANT (Actor Network Theory) for an upcoming conference presentation that some of us are involved in. I’ve been mainly looking at a paper by John Law that I find easy to read and understand. Note, as he says, that ANT is not one theory, rather it is:

a disparate family of material-semiotic tools, sensibilities, and methods of analysis that treat everything in the social and natural worlds as a continuously generated effect of the webs of relations within which they are located. Law, 2008 (Draft here)*

So I’d suggest that if you don’t get on with Law then you try another writer. However, the main points for me are that:

  • Objects are part of social networks. As Law says: “It is obvious to most engineers that systems are made not simply of technical bits and pieces but also include people” (ibid). This means that they can form causal relationships with us – what they do, or are, can have an effect on what we do, or feel.
  • Most of the time we ignore (we “black box”) a lot of our environment because we cannot concentrate on everything: “an actor is always a network of elements that it does not fully recognize or know: simplification or “black boxing” is a necessary part of agency”.
  • Often it’s not till things go wrong that we notice how important they are to what we are doing (my point in my earlier post).

So how does this apply to my experiences with Google Docs? Well, sometimes it all goes wrong, and then I am all to painfully reminded on how much I count on the technology to be seamless, and reliable, and accessible – in ANT terms, I stop “black boxing” it.  Some examples:

  1. I was writing a conference abstract last year. I left it open on my home PC, did considerable edits on my work PC, and managed to lose them all by saving the earlier copy on my home PC without syncing (not sure what went wrong, but I think that’s what I did). This was, needless to say, only hours before the deadline. PANIC!!
  2. Typically, when we write as a swarm, we make many, many comments on our work in progress – in fact the comments are often more important than the text. This is great when I am using a PC with a browser, as it displays them alongside the text and I can click onto a comment to see which part of the text it links to. However, in the evenings I move to a sofa and my Google Nexus tablet or Moto G (i.e. Google) smart phone. Now, when I try to use Google Docs it presents comments as numbered footnotes at the bottom of the page. This makes it functionally unusable for me, so I do not use Google Docs in the evenings. As my swarm in transnational, this means that I often miss synchronous editing. Maybe there is a way of changing the interface that I have not found, but if there is then it’s not for a lack of trying. [Edit: it turns out that the android app is better than I remember it being, so if a doc is already in my G Drive I can use it.]

So – there you have it. ANT tells us that objects are part of social networks, though we generally ignore this fact as it is not necessary for us to function. My experiences with Google Docs suggest that ANT is right when it says that.

* I annotated a pdf (from my Google Drive) of the published (2008) copy of Law’s paper using a tool called Hypothes.is. The annotations can be found here. I used Greg’s instructions to do this.

Posted in #rhizo14, #rhizo15, ANT, Learning, Rhizomes, Writing | Tagged , , , | 8 Comments

Collaborative Sestina for Rhizomatic Learning

Posted on 21st May 2015 by NomadWarMachine

(Sarah)
Rhizomatic learning is very subjective.
It’s up to you, not up to Dave, what gets to count.
The important thing is not to worry, but be content
to mess around, mix it up – play
around. Be warned – rhizomatic learning can be invasive
and you might find it affects your regular practice

(Maha)
So you wanna know about theory versus practice?
What counts as practice? Isn’t that subjective?
Theory can be invasive
but which kind of theory counts?
rhizo-practice is the fun we have when we play
Focusing on connection not content

(Nick)
I wanted to learn but I wasn’t content
with the dull monotone of the usual practice,
I felt that I needed new spaces to play
and explore my own paths, though they might be subjective.
So I found for a metaphor, a fresher account,
a resilient notion that’s clearly invasive.

(Autumm)
Who determines what is considered invasive?
And could this be more than plants? Animals? Could this be content?
Earworms, forking ideas, blogs turn to radio. Count
how many times it breaks and heads off. Practice
connecting someone else’s thinking to your subjective
And don’t forget how important it is to play

(Tania)
The pulse of the rhizome we feel as we play.
To us it’s energizing, to others invasive.
Unleashed we reach into unexplored spaces always subjective
And what is created and must surely be content
is reshaped constantly as is our practice.
To whom the ideas belong does not even count.

(Wendy – Bill jumped your claim)
(Bill)
Two. Four. Six. Five. Three. Count
Not the hours. Instead, play.
Perfect will not practice
Make. Explore. Invade. I’ve
Switched freedom for content,
My subject, the subjective.

(Lisa)
Questions (beyond counting) are more invasive
than answers. We learn through playing with content
and share a practice that is inherently subjective.

Posted in #rhizo15, Learning, Poetry, Rhizomes | Tagged , | 1 Comment