tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23491738856517076392024-03-18T03:27:57.000-04:00Communications & SocietyA blog to support Keith Hamon's rhizomatic explorations of complexity.keith.hamonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08404376705918243534noreply@blogger.comBlogger224125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2349173885651707639.post-43279723802941819612015-10-02T10:12:00.000-04:002015-10-02T10:17:26.552-04:00Rhizo15 as HyperobjectOne of the great things about blogging within a community of scholars is that you can't run out of ideas. My community keeps giving me new things to write—not always in the direction that I intend to go, but always in good, productive directions.
For example, my last post was in response to a comment and post from Maha Bali. This current post is in response to a comment from Frances Bell, a keith.hamonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08404376705918243534noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2349173885651707639.post-77332956119924895092015-09-29T17:01:00.002-04:002015-09-29T17:01:53.661-04:00Object Oriented Ontology and the Withdrawn BeingAs a way of understanding actor-network theory (ANT), I'm reading into object oriented ontology (OOO), starting with Levi Bryant's The Democracy of Objects, which I think will help me explain why ANT tends to place both human and non-human objects on an equal ontological basis. I started this reading with my last post after a three month hiatus, but I don't think I wrote so well. In a comment to keith.hamonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08404376705918243534noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2349173885651707639.post-87439777248382473042015-09-22T22:12:00.002-04:002015-09-23T15:50:56.157-04:00Rhizo, ANT, and Object Oriented OntologyIn my research with the Rhizo swarm, I have read enough actor-network theory to know that ANT practitioners give nonhuman actors equal status to human actors, flattening the field of reality and removing humans from their position of privilege. But I wasn't sure why ANT did that and on what basis it rendered reality flat. I think I understand better as I read more about object oriented ontology, keith.hamonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08404376705918243534noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2349173885651707639.post-41315474110390331972015-06-03T15:32:00.001-04:002015-06-03T15:32:13.382-04:00rhizoANT: Following the Actors & Parasites in HyperobjectsI want to start with a little movie that I made using a Google Chrome extension called Draftback. The movie is a playback of a group of Rhizo14 people writing The Untext last October, 2014. Unfortunately, Draftback does not capture formatting, images, or marginalia, but it does provide a point of view on the emergence of The Untext that I have not been able to generate any other way.
I left keith.hamonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08404376705918243534noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2349173885651707639.post-25186191163667575342015-05-25T11:39:00.000-04:002015-05-25T11:39:04.383-04:00How Does rhizoANT Work?In my previous post, I summarized Farzana Dudhwala's article What is Actor-Network Theory?, but I didn't really explore what it might mean for the rhizo14 collaborative autoethnography (CAE). I want to do that here.
I start with Dudhwala's first observation that for ANT, the social is a network of relations and "does not exist as an objective reality prior to the research having even begun" (3).keith.hamonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08404376705918243534noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2349173885651707639.post-89996105688179950922015-05-18T13:57:00.000-04:002015-05-18T13:57:23.970-04:00ANT via Dudhwala: #rhizo15In her article What is Actor-Network Theory?, Farzana Dudhwala explores actor-network theory (ANT) in positive and negative ways: saying both what ANT does and, by contrast with traditional sociologists, what it does not do. She says that ANT practitioners differ from classical sociologists first in their concept of the social. For Durkheim and Comte, society was a thing with both positive and keith.hamonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08404376705918243534noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2349173885651707639.post-60362649121129409932015-05-14T17:26:00.000-04:002015-05-14T17:26:09.139-04:00Ethics for MOOCs: Power in Rhizo-MOOCsMaha Bali just published a post Power that Remains When We Leave the Classroom that talks about the results of pulling the teacher and, thus, the teacher's power from the classroom. She notes that this does not leave an absence of power and a group of equals. To my mind, this still leaves power that is now up for grabs whether or not the students have a "sense of community and trust". The group keith.hamonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08404376705918243534noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2349173885651707639.post-32527915415157996602015-05-13T17:09:00.001-04:002015-05-13T17:09:42.542-04:00#rhizo15: An Invasive Species?In this week's #rhizo15 question, Dave Cormier asks if rhizomatic learning is an invasive species.
No.keith.hamonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08404376705918243534noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2349173885651707639.post-29493414682084578562015-05-01T13:37:00.001-04:002015-05-01T13:37:27.001-04:00Content in #rhizo15It's Week 3 in #rhizo15, and Dave Cormier has asked us to consider content and its role in education. He says:
I’ve always been a little confused by the word ‘content.’ There is
something lonely and unconnected about the word somehow, when i hear it
used with reference to what happens in learning. I imagine a lone
student, huddled away in a dorm room, reading sanitized facts in the
hopes of keith.hamonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08404376705918243534noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2349173885651707639.post-62224655048991564272015-04-30T17:18:00.000-04:002015-04-30T17:18:12.684-04:00Ethics for MOOCs: ImaginationI want to finish my series about rhizo-ethics before Dave Cormier posts another #rhizo15 challenge. We'll see.
Woermann and Cilliers' discussion of complex ethics in their article The ethics of complexity and the complexity of ethics (2012) insists that ethics in complex spaces requires a self-critical rationality and that this rationality is supported by four principles: provisionality, keith.hamonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08404376705918243534noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2349173885651707639.post-16920850101829870002015-04-25T10:51:00.000-04:002015-04-25T10:51:29.212-04:00Do We Count in #rhizo15?I will eventually return to finish my series of posts on ethics in MOOCs, or swarm ethics, or rhizo-ethics, but Dave Cormier has issued a second challenge for #rhizo15, and I want to respond.
His challenge:
Get out there and count! What can we measure that isn’t learning? Think about all the other facets of the human experience… can we do better? What about all the fancy tools we’ve seen… can keith.hamonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08404376705918243534noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2349173885651707639.post-9382688799850374312015-04-19T20:49:00.001-04:002015-04-19T20:49:51.178-04:00Learning Subjectives for #rhizo15Dave Cormier has a fine way of challenging people to think outside their boxes, or outside any boxes. In the first week of Rhizo15, he has challenged us to think about our learning subjectives for the course. Of course, he's playing on the penchant of education for learning objectives, and I could glibly say that I'll let him know when I find them. In any rhizomatic course, objectives are often keith.hamonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08404376705918243534noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2349173885651707639.post-37944957971262785372015-04-15T12:40:00.000-04:002015-04-16T11:03:57.657-04:00Ethics for MOOCs: The Two, Four, Ten or so Commandments of #rhizo15I've been doing a series of posts about ethics in complex spaces such as MOOCs, and I was planning to do this particular post near the end, but then #rhizo15 started, and I read some things that made me think that this was the correct time to speak. Kairos can be insistent, but it is also short-lived.
Much of what I've been saying about complex ethics has been rather abstract. Really, keith.hamonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08404376705918243534noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2349173885651707639.post-34062597817045894012015-04-11T23:19:00.000-04:002015-04-11T23:19:51.491-04:00Ethics for MOOCs: IronyI'm still exploring Woermann and Ciller's discussion of complex ethics in their article The ethics of complexity and the complexity of ethics (2012). I have found it to be such a rich line of thought, and now Rhizo15 is starting. Actually, I think this is a fine time to write this particular post.
Woermann and Cillier's view of ethics relies on a self-critical rationality that accepts the keith.hamonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08404376705918243534noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2349173885651707639.post-48871677599768591112015-04-03T22:33:00.000-04:002015-04-03T22:33:53.673-04:00Ethics for MOOCs: Humble TransgressionsThis post was extended by a Rhizo14 article and presentation, but that was fine as I learned some new stuff. But back to complexity ethics.
Transgressivity is the second of Woermann and Cilliers' four mechanisms that reinforce and promote the critical attitude toward complex systems. To my mind, this heuristic is the most important to open learning spaces, and it is also the heuristic most keith.hamonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08404376705918243534noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2349173885651707639.post-73312400200449189692015-03-11T13:22:00.000-04:002015-03-11T13:22:57.861-04:00Ethics for MOOCs: Provisional BoundariesWoermann and Cilliers posit four mechanisms that reinforce and promote the critical attitude: provisionality, followed by transgressivity, irony, and imagination. To my mind, mechanism is an unfortunate term, as none of the four seem mechanical; rather, I would call them heuristics, having more to do with experimentation in contact with the real, as Deleuze and Guattari say it, than with a keith.hamonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08404376705918243534noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2349173885651707639.post-81671648452850431192015-03-08T14:27:00.000-04:002015-03-09T11:23:59.247-04:00Ethics for MOOCs: Provisional ImperativesI think I should say something about what I mean by the term ethics, especially as distinguished from morals. In fact, I do not distinguish much between ethics and morals; rather, I follow what Bruce Weinstein says about the distinctions between the two: "[J]ust about everyone understands that both ethics and morality have to do with identifying right conduct and good character. To keep everyone keith.hamonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08404376705918243534noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2349173885651707639.post-64375049226902093482015-03-04T17:56:00.000-05:002015-03-04T21:31:42.698-05:00Ethics for MOOCs: Assertive HumilitySo in my last post I introduced the idea that engagement of complex spaces such as in cMOOCs requires ethical choices. We must define the open, shifting space to make sense of it, deciding what is valuable and what is not, what is in, what is out, and how it should be arranged. We must frame and arrange the complex space, including ourselves in it, and our ethics are revealed in this framing and keith.hamonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08404376705918243534noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2349173885651707639.post-78653415689369226442015-03-02T12:40:00.000-05:002015-03-02T12:51:13.267-05:00Ethics for MOOCs: Complex vs. Simple LearningI've just written two things that have left me dissatisfied, and both of them had to do with ethics. The first was a long comment on France Bell's post Cycling between private and public in researching Rhizo14 about the recent article she wrote with Jenny Mackness, Rhizo14: A Rhizomatic Learning cMOOC in Sunlight and in Shade. The second was my last blog post Anarchy as keith.hamonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08404376705918243534noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2349173885651707639.post-12305360738595848042015-02-25T13:45:00.000-05:002015-02-25T13:45:14.515-05:00Anarchy as Freedom ToI found myself perplexed about the use of the word power in Wednesday's (2015.02.11) #moocmooc Twitter chat, especially by the implication that anarchy is defined primarily by resistance to power and, hopefully, freedom from power. I appreciate Nick Kearney(@nickkearney) pointing out that anarchy as a word starts from a rejection of rulers (though my dictionary says that the word comes from keith.hamonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08404376705918243534noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2349173885651707639.post-14504103218333173512015-02-06T14:14:00.000-05:002015-02-06T14:14:47.995-05:00#moocmooc & Critical Pedagogy
I'm following #moocmooc's exploration of critical pedagogy, and this week I read Chapter 4, "The Promise of Critical Pedagogy in the Age of Globalization" in Henry A. Giroux's On Critical Pedagogy (2011). As near as I can tell, Giroux's argument goes something like this:
We are under the threat of a neoliberalism that is
dismantling the safety net of the state,
defining democracykeith.hamonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08404376705918243534noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2349173885651707639.post-10884498985265740342015-01-30T09:32:00.000-05:002015-01-30T09:35:04.506-05:00Deleuze, Serres, and the Desires of PrepositionsWhat I propose here is a travelog, the flow and emergence of an idea. I want to ride the Chattooga River of my blog posts over the past year, and along the way, I want to map the desires of prepositions and determine what the desires of these little words have to do with the ways we conduct higher education. The Chattooga starts as a small stream in the mountains of North Carolina, but it quicklykeith.hamonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08404376705918243534noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2349173885651707639.post-69809288534581007742015-01-22T16:44:00.003-05:002015-01-22T16:45:47.063-05:00Connections, Flows, and Freire in #moocmoocI'm taking a break from prepositions—at least from writing about them—to talk about MOOCMOOC and critical pedagogy. MOOCMOOC assigned reading for this week included Chapter 2 of Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1993). It's been many years since I read Freire, and it's pleasant to see how my latest readings are re-informing my understanding of him now. The most surprising idea keith.hamonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08404376705918243534noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2349173885651707639.post-77724025613748681222015-01-19T12:18:00.000-05:002015-01-19T12:18:32.041-05:00The Desires of PrepositionsI've been using the phrase desires of prepositions without explaining what I mean. Partly I did this because I've had to work my head around the idea. It started with an intuition and some amusement over the juxtaposition of two terms that are usually not used together in the same conversation, much less the same sentence or phrase. (Aside: I just googled "desires of prepositions" with the keith.hamonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08404376705918243534noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2349173885651707639.post-9126472439851007072015-01-08T11:17:00.001-05:002015-01-08T12:11:33.141-05:00Immanent Mappings or Transcendent Tracings?I thought I might be finished talking about prepositions and meaning, but more ideas keep coming that inch me closer to talking about the desires of prepositions.
In my last post, I argued that the meanings of words—perhaps the meanings of all words, but certainly the meanings of prepositions—are context-bound. Prepositions do not have a context-independent meaning. A preposition, of course, keith.hamonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08404376705918243534noreply@blogger.com0