Reading Writing Responding

In today's day and age it seems strange to be talking about the ownership of ideas. That's not yours, that's mine. Really, can one person hold an idea and what is actually achieved by that? For example, if someone comes up with a similar idea, aren't we benefited by having a conversation with that person or group about how we could make both ideas awesome, rather than deciding which idea is more valid? Although some love the glitz and glory that comes with being the one behind the great idea, to give an idea life sometimes we need to relinquish some of that control, we need to hold it lightly, allow for different perspectives and provide others a meaningful voice in the discussion. A lone nut who keeps an idea to themselves is oddly enough still a lone nut. For in the end, it takes a village and sometimes the most important thing we can do is let it go.

So, it is Week 6 of 'Rhizomatic Learning', the last planned week of the course, and the focus is how do we teach ourselves into uselessness? How do we empower people so they have the PERMISSION to learn without us? What an interesting topic to end Rhizomatic Learning with, the notion of doing your job so that you are no longer required any more. Maybe the word job is the wrong word, but simply so that you are no longer a required commodity. The question then is what remains? I would argue that when all else has gone, we are left with learning. The problem with this is that so much of 'learning' is social, it comes from our connections with other, those clashes of ideas that once settled, develop into new beginnings. The first step then in making ourselves useless is to define who 'we' are. Teachers? Learners? Facilitators? Critical friends? Fire starters? What is often missed in discussions about teaching is the inadvertent, incidental, non-traditional...

Universal Design for Learning by  Giulia Forsythe  (Flickr) In a recent post , I wrote about the idea that a PLN, whether professional or personal learn network, as actually being something that you do, a verb, rather than something done, a noun, I think that the same argument can be applied to the notion of curriculum. Too often when we discuss 'curriculum' it is as something stagnant, something finished, something complete, a document held in the hand. However, treating it in this way misses something, denies the reality that it is something that is constantly developing, growing, adapting, changing and evolving. One of the reasons that we see curriculum as being something stagnant is that often the changes can occur over long periods of time so we do not consider it as something constant. For example, in my time teaching, I have seen three significant curriculum shifts. Firstly the transition from CSFII to VELS. This was significant because it moved subject b...

I was faced with a new challenge the other day. With the choice of the new professional learning communities the group that I was allocated to was given an additional challenge, that we would in fact be leaderless, that we would work collaboratively to develop a focus and go from there. Initially, I was apprehensive, as I had concerns about where technology had been heading - the group was meant to focus on using technology to engage. However, what was interesting was the group did manage to develop a voice of its own, a collective voice, with everyone adding their own question and concern. This got me thinking again about +Dan Donahoo 's keynote at ICTEV13 Conference that a community is not about everyone doing the same thing, rather it is about recognising the place of everyone in the village.  . This led me to reflect upon a bigger problem that has developed in the past few years, the mix and match of different technological devices and platforms. The school I work at has ...

So, it is Week 4 of 'Rhizomatic Learning' and the focus is whether 'books are making us stupid?'. The questions posed are what the medium of print done to learning? What are the implications of this objective distance? How does it impact what we believe is valid in our society both inside learning and outside of it? In a recent post, I posed the question, 'What's so Digital about Literacy Anyway?' One of my concerns was that in all of the reading practises that I have been a part of, digital texts are too often frowned upon, a poor distant relative to the exemplary printed text. The argument usually stated to me is that it just isn't the same to read a text on a screen as it is to feel the texture of the paper, to flick the pages. It just isn't organic. It is not how it is done. I couldn't agree more, it is not how it is done, it is different, but just because it is different, does that make mean that it is better or worse? This bri...

So, it is Week 3 of 'Rhizomatic Learning' and the focus is embracing uncertainty. The questions posed are How do we make embrace uncertainty in learning? How do we keep people encouraged about learning if there is no finite achievable goal? How do we teach when there are no answers, but only more questions? One of the many things that struck out from my first day back at school was the statement that, "a student's perception is their reality". The argument being made was that how you present yourself in the beginning has an effect on the rest of the year. This sort of thinking often leads to people donning a tie, graduate teachers trying to be sterner than they would like and teachers creating overly structured lessons all in the attempt to start the year off on the right foot. The big problem with all of this is that we take such measures in the attempt to control everything around us. We presume that if we wear a tie, if we keep a few students in at lun...

There has been a lot of debate in Week Two of Rhizomatic Learning revolving around 'enforcing independence'. Although some of the debate has been about the choice of words and other such technicalities, a lot of the discussion has emanated from the contradictory nature of forcing something that focuses on freedom and choice. I myself have already posted about the matter, in which I suggested that the only way that this could be possible is within a situation where the learning is their own servant and master. After some great feedback from those in the course, it was pointed out to me that education is full of impossible ideals that we never quite meet. Something I myself have posted about elsewhere. What our focus should really be is about using such prompts as the mantra that guides us, rather than the hard and fast rule that drives us. So instead I have changed tack. Here then are a list of thoughts and ideas that may not achieve 'enforced independence', but defini...

So, it is Week 2 of 'Rhizomatic Learning' and the focus is enforcing independence. The questions posed are how do we create a learning environment where people must be responsible? How do we assure ourselves that learners  will self-assess and self-remediate? Whenever we talk about student-centred learning this discussion usually revolves around creating authentic situations through which students can take responsibility of their actions. However, what is not often spoken about is how to enforce this learning. It is usually assumed that if you provide the right situation to grow - fertilized garden bed with plenty of sun and water - then growth is guaranteed. What is significant about words like 'enforce', 'must' and 'assure' is that the choice to not participate, to refuse, is taken out of the equation. The very term 'enforce independence' seems antithetical, contradictory. Now I am not sure how to 'enforce' such independenc...

I recently started my first MOOC focusing on Rhizomatic Learning and the topic for Week 1 was 'Cheating as Learning'. After seeing Michael Petroni's film adaptation of Markus Zuzak's The Book Thief today and it got me wondering, is seeing the film before reading the book cheating? Does the book come first or are they both completely different? It is usually argued that the book has primacy. Why else would the film be described as an 'adaptation'? The very term suggests that the book has some sort of pride of place, that it is the thing that is changed for a new medium. However, what is often denied is the place of the adapted text to be a text-in-itself. For example, can you watch the film Tomb Raider without having played the game? Can you listen to Cedric Gervais' remix of Lana Del Rey's "Summertime Sadness", without listening to the original album version? What is the place of the adapted when considering adaptations? After...

When we think back through our learning, there are always those aha moments, those situations, that have a lasting impact. Such moments come in many shapes and sizes, maybe an odd passage in a book or a random video seen online. So often though they have an impact that is far beyond their intended purpose. A recent moment that has had such an effect on me was +Alec Couros ' simple suggestion made during an interview with the +Ed Tech Crew  that everything can be a resource online. By approaching resources in this way, our understanding moves away from being an actual object, lets say a textbook, to a resource as being a way of seeing something. In this sense, a resource stops being a noun, something named, ordered and categorised, and instead becomes a verb, a way of approaching something, interpreting it, questioning it. In much the same way, PLNs can be thought of in much the same way.  So often we limit ourselves by seeing PLN's as something made - conta...

This is my response to the task for Week One of the Rhizomatic Learning Course on P2PU focusing on the topic of ' cheating on learning '... There is a call from a certain group at the moment in Australian education about better recognising Western traditions in Australia's history and society. A certain bias that is being brought to bare by the new Liberal Government. See for example Tony Taylor's article  in The Age. One of the things that this got me thinking about is the forgotten history, the voices denied air, subordinated, all in the attempt to create a stable tradition. In Kevin Donnelly's case, this Anglo tradition is based on place of Christianity in our culture. Yet when you dig deep it could be argued that it was not 'Christianity' that laid the foundations of much of this great nations, rather it was those who had to resort to doing whatever it was they needed to do to survive, whether it be stealing a loaf of bread or pinching a pocket watc...