Moocaholic

Posted on 4th April 2014 by NomadWarMachine

My name is Sarah and I am a MOOCaholic

Only joking, well sort of.

This post has been brewing for a while and it’s been sparked off again by some discussions in our #rhizo14 Facebook group.  I posted a link to one of Martin Weller’s blog posts and the comment that one of his graphs:

shows that if you get to 12+ weeks it’s probably just some bloke in a shack in Arkansas left

This amused me greatly, as we’re just going in to week 12 of this crazy roller coaster experience, and we’re still carrying on.  Anyway, it’s got a few of us thinking about why we sign up for MOOCs and why we drop out from some and there’ll probably be some messy* writing about it at some point.

So – why do I sign up for MOOCs?  Well, initially it was to find out about them and see how they were going to affect HE, and also to sneak a peek at the various platforms that were being used.  I’d sign up, sniff around and probably not interact at all.  And then suddenly, bang!  I got hooked.  I know who to blame.  It’s that Dave and the gang.  I’m loving being part of such an exuberant community, never knowing what we’ll be talking about next but knowing it will engage me.

So that’s why I do MOOCs. I do them because I love finding out new things and meeting new people, and MOOCS are a great way of doing that.  It’s more about the Twitter hashtags and Facebook/G+ conversations for me than the courses themselves, but I’ve finished one other MOOC (FutureEd) since starting #rhizo14 so it is the content as well, to some extent.

Talk to you soon. 🙂

* “messy” is not a derogatory term in #rhizo14

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On Creativity

Posted on 29th March 2014 by NomadWarMachine

This week in #rhizo14 we’re meant to be thinking about creativity.  Some people are running with this and going and doing lots of lovely creative things, like this image on this, others are engaging with #ds106. I’ve been really busy catching up after a week off work, so I’ve limited myself to posting a few links to the Facebook group such as this one (love number 9) and this by Poincare.

I’d started thinking about creativity a few months ago, and gave a talk to our Research and Scholarship group called Collaboration in the Arts and Humanities:
[slideshare id=32889269&doc=collaborationintheartsandhumanities-140329132012-phpapp01]

In case you can’t be bothered to read it all, or it doesn’t make sense without the words I spoke, I talked about originality, creativity and plagiarism and suggested that there was a tension between the need to assess arts and humanities students and award them individual marks for assignments; and the fact that (imo) many of our social and academic practices are inherently collaborative – as Ken Bruffee writes:

pueblo

I’m sure that Deleuze somewhere makes a similar point, but I have no idea where it might be … anyway, you get the point, I hope.   Originality and creativity are not particularly easy to assess in a formal academic environment.

A related point to what I am trying to say is that we are not cartesian ghosts in machines, we are what Heidegger calls Dasein (this is a brilliant wee video, btw, and I highly recommend it):

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZznldvBP-G8&w=560&h=315]

We are beings in the world – we are thrown into our embodied existence and we are naturally social beings (and I really should be hyphenating all of this).

This is all fairly rough and messy, and I have no idea how I will ever write it up into something that will satisfy formal academic standards, but I am starting to make connections between philosophers who have inspired me, at least.

Sapere Aude, as they say 😉

Posted in #rhizo14, Academia, D&G, Philosophy, Wedding, Writing | Tagged , , , , , | 10 Comments

On Lurking

Posted on 19th March 2014 by NomadWarMachine

juve lurkThis week we’re talking about lurking: what it is and what we think about it. I’ve been doing a fair bit of lurking myself, as I’m recovering from a wee exploratory op at the weekend and finding that I’m too sore to sit at my desk and type, so I’ve been spending more time than usual passively watching conversations and not always participating.

There’s been  a lot of conversation in our Facebook group this week about what lurking is, and an undercurrent of feeling (I think) about whether this is an appropriate word to use.  This is something I wonder about from time to time, without really coming to any conclusions about what I think. In her book E-Moderating: The Key to Teaching and Learning Online Gilly Salmon writes about “browsers, lurkers or vicarious learners” (p.42), and (a couple of pages before this) suggests that “browsing” might be a better word.  It might.  However, what “browser” misses, for me, is the sense that lurkers are hovering, waiting, watching – they are actively involved in some sense.

There’s a lot of discussion about whether lurking is socially acceptable.  Maybe this stems from thinking about behaviour in face to face learning, and maybe that’s a mistake.  If I daydream in class and rely on my classmates to help me to a good result, that does seem like cheating, but lurking happens outwith the context of formal education with high stakes assessment.  If you lurk on the side of rhizo14 then that is your right – our discussions are happening in open (ish) forums and I know before I type that my words may be read by many who will remain invisible.  That is my choice, and it is one I can make freely.

As some of us have said, to an extent we are all lurkers, anyway.  Sometimes we have other priorities, and are too busy to post; sometimes others know more than we do, and we sit and watch the conversation; sometimes we are too shy, or do not have the words to join in.  I usually begin by lurking in any new forum to get a sense of the tone before I begin to post, and I suspect many others are like me in this.

One thing I have not addressed.  Scott asked why we needed lurkers.  I don’t know how to begin to address that question.

The picture is of our cat, Juve.  Last year I spent a few days in bed.  Juve lurked.

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Demob happy

Posted on 13th March 2014 by NomadWarMachine

So it’s week 9 of #rhizo14, but I have still not got around to saying anything about week 8 so here goes.  The topic, set by Simon, was Demobbing Soldiers.  Of course, being demobbed was meant to be a happy experience, but it can also be an unsettling one – how do we help our learners to continue to learn once we have left the room?  How do we ourselves keep up the momentum to continue our rhizomatic journey?  Somehow I don’t think it’s going to be a problem any more.  I’m still talking to the funniest, most talented, full of beans folk that I’ve ever met and I feel like Alice in Through the Looking Glass:

Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!

Allons-y 😉

Posted in #rhizo14 | 1 Comment

The Lunatics are taking over the Asylum

Posted on 1st March 2014 by NomadWarMachine

Week 6 came to an end.  The roller coaster that was #rhizo14 had ended.  We sat, twiddling our thumbs, not quite knowing what to do.  Some got their coats and drifted away, others of us sat warming our hands over the embers of the fire, unwilling and unable to put the fire out completely.

Simon started it:

Dave chipped in:

So off we went.  I threw up a couple of lines of text and a couple of links and we continued tweeting, posting in the Facebook groups, business as usual.  Well, not quite as usual – some voices that I had become accustomed to are silent now, some new ones have piped up, but the rhizome is still alive.  Very much alive, as Sandra noticed in her latest blog post.  So, as she says:

If that leaves you a bit breathless and hungry – join the #rhizo14 FB Group – you will be welcome. Spread the rhizome. Be the fungus!

We promise it will be a lot of fun:

Kevin is writing a hip hop song, Simon is blogging beautiful words, we’re collating thoughts for an autoethnography. As Scott said: One seal short of a circus, we carry on! Allons y 🙂

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Planned Obsolescence

Posted on 20th February 2014 by NomadWarMachine

There is a  saying, supposedly Buddhist, that “when the student is ready, the teacher will appear”.  This week in #rhizo14 we are looking at the opposite to this  – how should the teacher disappear – how do we empower our learners to begin to think for themselves?  It’s something that I try to do in my tutorials by using the Jigsaw Technique and a neo-Vygotskian approach to learning which means that I begin the year with fairly structured activities for small group work and, as the semester progresses, I gradually provide less and less support.  My proudest moment was when a group told me that they didn’t need me to hang around at the end of a class, they could carry on without me.  And then they did.

A metaphor I often use when I am teaching, especially when I am working with adult learners, is that of a ladder.  I like to think that I started somewhere near the bottom and that, in some way, I have climbed up some way.  Maybe it’s not very rhizomatic, but I find it helps to explain to some folk the thought that “experts” are not more intelligent than “novices”, they have just had longer to learn and become familiar with subject matter.

And, or course, it allows me to quote one of my favourite parts of one of my favourite thinkers:

My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)
He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world
rightly.  Wittgenstein. Tractatus Section 6.54

Need I say more?

Posted in #rhizo14, Academia, Learning, Wittgenstein | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

Transitory communities

Posted on 14th February 2014 by NomadWarMachine

London Underground being used as an Air Raid Shelter Image by US Govt [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

London Underground being used as an Air Raid Shelter Image by US Govt [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Yesterday I blogged about my journey back through the North West of England during the storm that hit the country the Wednesday.  Then last night I took part in the unhangout for week 5 of #rhizo14, and began by saying that I had not had a lot of time to think about this week’s topic Community as Curriculum because of having been away unexpectedly. But I had been thinking about communities and networks, at least I had read Bonnie Stewart’s piece about networks and I’d been thinking about what makes a network and what makes a community, without really coming to any conclusions.

 

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a6/390029_' City_of_Stoke-on-Trent'_at_Birmingham_New_Street.JPG

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a6/390029_’
City_of_Stoke-on-Trent’_at_Birmingham_New_Street.JPG

So Wednesday was awful – stuck on train not knowing how long we’d be there or how we’d get home.  I was tired, having woken up at 4.15 am to catch my train, and I was worried about getting stuck overnight without a change of clothes, or being stranded on a station platform overnight, and other passengers had similar worries. But here’s something. Usually on a train I will sit silently, head in a book, and the other passengers will do likewise.  This time within minutes we were all chattering with each other.  As I realised during the unhangout last night, having a common factor – all being stuck on the same train – made us bond very quickly and form a community.  I don’t know any of their names, and I will probably never see any of them again, but I felt incredibly relaxed and at home with all of them.  We weren’t a network, I don’t think we were a group, but as Dave said last night, if we weren’t  a community he didn’t know what we were.  It reminded me of the community spirit during the Blitz, folk pulling together and cheering each other up: packing up our worries in our old kit bags, so to speak.

LagerfeuerSo what lessons can we learn from this?  Well, in order to form a community there needs to be a common bond: a shared goal, or maybe a shared value.  In our case it was being stuck together on a train, in a classroom it might be thinking the teacher is a big meanie, or all having to pass a test, or work collaboratively on a project.  Communities can be transitory: they can form quickly and disband just as swiftly.  But before the community can be the curriculum, the community needs to be a community.  Dave’s enabled this very well in #rhizo14, imo – as he said, he’s lit the the fire and we have all gathered around it, drifting off to chat in groups in Facebook, Twitter, G+ – whichever suits us best.  How do we enable this in our classrooms?

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Reading, writing and forgetting

Posted on 6th February 2014 by NomadWarMachine

“Blessed are the forgetful: for they get the better even of their blunders.”  Nietzsche, somewhere

I often like to begin my writing with a quotation from a philosopher, and this one is particularly apt for this week’s #rhizo14 topic

 Is Books Making Us Stupid?

because I do not know where it came from, or if it really is from Nietzsche.  Usually I would assiduously track it down before using it, but this week I am not going to bother.  Google is making me stupid.

I’m tempted, by the way, just to say “no, of course books don’t make us stupid.  We make ourselves stupid, books are inanimate objects”, but I suppose I might say a bit more.

I do love Plato’s Phaedrus, and the fact that I haven’t read it for many years doesn’t stop me from referring to it regularly and telling students what I think that Plato was talking about, amusingly this week’s topic has prodded me into reading some of it: 

Writing, Phaedrus, has this strange quality, and is very like painting; for the creatures of painting stand like living beings, but if one asks them a question, they preserve a solemn silence. And so it is with written words; you might think they spoke as if they had intelligence, but if you question them, wishing to know about their sayings, they always say only one and the same thing.  Plato  Phaedrus 275d

Yeah, that fits with the general theme of this course – it’s not that we should burn all of our books, rather that we should not assume that they have all the answers. They are a starting point, they’re not gospel truth:

My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)

He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly. Wittgenstein Tractatus 6.54

Posted in #rhizo14, Philosophy, Reading, Wittgenstein, Writing | Tagged , , , , , | 9 Comments

Types of knowledge

Posted on 5th February 2014 by NomadWarMachine

If the true is what is grounded, then the ground is not true, nor yet false. Wittgenstein, On Certainty Section 205

There’s two rival epistemological theories which we teach to our first years: foundationalism and coherentism.  I wonder if these might be helpful in considering D&G’s rhizomatic and arborescent thinking.

Foundationalism

Image by Mattgirling (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons
Image by Mattgirling (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

The basic idea of foundationalism is that there is one fundamental truth, or set of truths, which underpin all other truths and which needs no further justification.  Descartes was a classical foundationalist: he argued that his cogito (I think, therefore I am) was a fundamental, indubitable, self-evident truth upon which all other knowledge could be built.  Descartes’ foundationalism reminds me of an upside down Eiffel tower – there’s an awful lot resting on one tiny truth.  Euclidean geometry would be another example of a foundationalist set of principles.  These are also, I think, examples of arborescent types of thinking: the cogito or Euclid’s axioms are the roots of the system and all other knowledge grows up and out from those (and is justified by being reduced to these first principles).

Coherentism

net
“net” flickr photo by julie burghershared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC) license

The basic idea of coherentism is that there is no one fundamental truth or set of truths which justify other truths. Instead of the hierarchy of knowledge of the foundationalists, coherentism suggests that knowledge consists of a web of beliefs, each of which is justified if it is consistent with other beliefs in the web.  No one belief is epistemologically prior to other beliefs.  Quine was a coherentist who rejected Descartes’ (and others’) “first” philosophy and argued that a sufficiently large circular chain of grounds could justify a belief.  This, I think, compares to rhizomatic thinking.

If you think that truth needs to be justified according to a foundationalist model then you are left, as Wittgenstein says above, with first principles (like Euclidean axioms) that cannot themselves be justified.  Or, like Descartes, forlornly stuck with his evil demon only able to repeat over and over “cogito, ergo sum”.

However, if you assume a coherentist model of justification, then a belief is justified if it does not contradict other beliefs in the web.

Image by Rémi Kaupp (Self-photographed) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC BY-SA 2.5-2.0-1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5-2.0-1.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Image by Rémi Kaupp (Self-photographed) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Neurath’s metaphor was popularized by W. V. O. Quine (Word and Object 1960, pp. 3-4); “Neurath has likened science to a boat which, if we are to rebuild it, we must rebuild plank by plank while staying afloat in it. The philosopher and the scientist are in the same boat. Our boat stays afloat because at each alteration we keep the bulk of it intact as a going concern.”

Of course, being a coherent set of propositions is not a guarantee of truth – the writers of Doctor Who try to ensure that they have a consistent set of facts but, sadly, the Doctor is not real.

Posted in #rhizo14, D&G, Philosophy, Rhizomes, Wittgenstein | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

I have the questions for all of your answers

Posted on 2nd February 2014 by NomadWarMachine

Years ago (gosh, at least ten years, how shocking to realise), I ended up moderating a public Philosophy forum.  It’s long gone now but I am still friends with many of my fellow moderators including the wonderful Andrew Jeffrey, who really has not done much with his Academia.edu profile!  Everybody who used the forum had a user name (typically not our ‘real’ names), and we were able to add a tagline which would be appended to all of our posts.  My handle was Diotima and my tagline was “We are not thinking frogs”,1 which is from Nietzsche’s Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft (not meaning to be pretentious, but the best English translation of  this as The Gay Science just doesn’t do it for me); Andy’s handle was Didymus and his tagline was “I have the questions for all of your answers”, which I believe is an original thought, not a quotation.

Anyway, when Dave Cormier asked me in the unhangout last Thursday how we could teach uncertainty I was reminded of Andy’s tagline and I cheatingly stole it (well, I acknowledged that it had come from a friend, so thanks, Andy!).  For me that is an interesting type of uncertainty – I don’t think that I’m a post-anything type of philosopher but I never know what I’ll be inspired to think about next, or end up doing as a job, and it’s that sort of uncertainty that can be unsettling but is also exciting.  I also think, given the uncertainty of life in general, that this is an important life skill to teach our students.  There’s a lot of emphasis put on employability and graduate attributes at the University of Glasgow, and I don’t think we’re unusual in this.  However, one comment that has stayed with me over the years is one made by Katie Grant.  As she pointed out the real skills that she had learnt were not the ones that made her employable, but the ones that helped her to cope during her periods of unemployment.  So true.

1. I love frogs. I  grew up in the Peak District in a village called Froggatt, and it began there.

Posted in #rhizo14, Academia, D&G, Learning, Philosophy, Plato, Rhizomes, Teaching, University | Tagged , , , , | 7 Comments