Rhizomatic Thought, #etmooc

I came across a video and a couple of quotes today that illuminated and expanded for me some ideas I've been discussing in #etmooc about rhizomatic learning.

Brian Rose shared the NASA video Fiery Looping Rain on the Sun:



This kind of inspirational video leads to comments (270+ when I looked last, 4:00 pm EDT, Fri, Feb 22). For instance, Jeremy Ellwood quoted Neil Degrasse Tyson's view about feeling small in the light of such enormous power:

I look up at the night sky, and I know that, yes, we are part of this Universe, we are in this Universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts is that the Universe is in us. When I reflect on that fact, I look up—many people feel small, because they’re small and the Universe is big, but I feel big, because my atoms came from those stars.

Then Brian Rose quoted Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, who spoke about looking back at the Earth from the Moon:

"You develop an instant global conciousness, people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.”

These comments make explicit why I like the rhizome: it allows me to think over and beyond networks based on simple connectivity. The rhizome is networks+, connectivity on steroids.

More accurately, the rhizome is connectivity across multi-scale networks, across what Basarab Nicolescu calls different levels of reality. This connectivity—not just within a network but across sub-networks and super-networks—is important for my rhizomatic thinking as it helps me grasp and visualize the extent of rhizomatic structures, or assemblages to use Deleuze and Guattari's term (I suspect they wanted to avoid the more rigid, mechanistic overtones of the term structures). D&G speak of asignifying ruptures within a rhizome, in which our naming, labeling, and definition of a thing suffers a rupture, a line of flight, that unnames the thing as it moves from one scale of network to another scale, from one level of reality to another. Asignifying ruptures, deterritorialization, reterritorialization, and the logic of the included middle all seem abstract and obtuse concepts until you hear an Edgar Mitchell say it so plainly: "From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty." When you view the political arguments which seem so important here on Earth from a different level of reality, from the Moon, then you see that that the contradictions fade away, and the arguments become completely asignified, meaningless, void, not even a play-ground squabble. These concepts, then, help me understand one of the heuristics available to rhizomatic thinking: that whatever we are learning must be viewed from more than one level of reality, from more than one scale of the network. When we view things in this complex, rhizomatic manner, then contradictions often fade in lines of flight into the included middle.

Then, the comment by Neil Degrasse Tyson captures a second heuristic of rhizomatic thinking, what Edgar Morin calls the holographic principle. The patterns of the Universe echo in my cellular structures. We are composed of star dust, and we are the dust of the stars. I am not speaking poetically here, nor am I alluding to Joni Mitchell (though Woodstock remains one of my favorite songs, especially the version by Mathew's Southern Comfort). I am being literal. The patterns of energy and information exchange that work in the stars also work in me. The information in my DNA and cells come from the stars and feed back into it. I fancifully think that if the entire Universe were to blink out, leaving only me floating alone, then any reasonably intelligent, technologically adept species from another universe that found me could use the data in my cellular structures to pretty much recreate a universe that works more or less like this one (okay, that last part isn't literal, but it might be the start of a good science fiction story). This echoing of information throughout a network and across network scales echoes the fifth principle of the rhizome: decalcomania. As connectivism says, learning has much to do with embodying and recognizing patterns. Yes, "the Universe is big, but I feel big, because my atoms came from those stars."

Boundaries and the Holographic Principle

I've been thinking of boundaries as included middles, or zones of engagement, which transcend the separation of entities into discrete units required by the classical logic of the excluded middle—A is A, A is not non-A, and there is no entity T which is both A and non-A. The logic of the included middle demonstrates that T exists, and quantum physics and complexity theory say that T not only exists but is a fundamental feature of Reality. If you want to know how things work, then you must wrap your head around T, the included middle.

In my previous posts, I suggested that to my mind, Edgar Morin has provided us with several characteristics of boundaries as zones of engagement, or included middles, rather than lines of separation. The first two are the dialogic principle and circular causality. The third characteristic that I explore in terms of Frost's Mending Wall is the holographic principle, which Morin defines in The Reform of Thought (in Nicolescu's Transdisciplinarity: Theory and Practice, 2008):

In a system, in a complex world, not only is a part found in the whole (for example, we human beings are in the cosmos), but the whole is found in the part. Not only is the individual in the society but the society is within us since birth; it inculcated us with language, culture, its prohibitions, its norms. (26, 27)

I was fortunate to recently read a new book by Neal Shubin called The Universe Within: Discovering the Common History of Rocks, Planets, and People (2013), in which Mr. Shubin, a University of Chicago paleontologist and evolutionary biologist, demonstrates repeatedly how the patterns of the Universe—its energy, matter, and information—from the Big Bang to now are echoed within each of us, as well as within rocks, plants, and planets. The patterns for the human ear, for instance, were worked out some 350 million years ago in a fish called Panderichthys. The energy, material, and informational patterns of the Universe are echoed within each entity. As the fractal images of Mandelbrot have so beautifully shown us, self-similar patterns repeat and echo at each level of Reailty.

The most cursory exploration of the term holographic principle demonstrates that it has a rather specific meaning in quantum physics, which I do not have the skill or knowledge to discuss, but again, I think that Frost's poem Mending Wall can give the non-scientific among us a way to approach the idea and work with it usefully.

First, the poem paints for us the relationship between two men, the narrator and his neighbor, based in large part on the dialogic tension between their two points of view about walls: "something there is that doesn't love a wall", on the one hand, and "good fences make good neighbors", on the other. This dialogic tension, or pattern, echoes the patterns between electrons and nuclei or planets and stars. The dialogic relationship at each level is, of course, not identical, but I think it is self-similar. This pattern of an interactive tension between antagonistic entities is the stuff of life, certainly of human relationships (This tension does not necessarily suggest violence. Love has its own tensions, but that's another post.). It is this tension between Life and Death, Order and Chaos that allows for the development of the Reality. Like his predecessor William Blake, Frost is able to "see a world in a grain of sand" (Auguries of Innocence), or in a wall.

This echoing of patterns within and without and across different levels of reality suggests to me another way to think about Deleuze and Guattari's concept of decalcomania, which tries to capture the propagation of patterns throughout a system, or a rhizome. Something there is within each of us that recognizes patterns in the other and that echoes those patterns, that responds to the patterns of the Universe. If you yawn, I will yawn—it can be that ordinary. Note that the narrator responds to and echoes the patterns of his neighbor, for despite his dislike of walls, he is the one who calls to his neighbor to arrange their mending game. He responds to the pattern of the game and plays his part as well as the neighbor does.

Moreover, the narrator echoes the New England stubbornness of his neighbor. In the poem, we see the relationship between the two men only from the narrator's point of view. He views his neighbor as a primitive "old-stone savage armed" who "will not go behind his father's saying, / And he likes having thought of it so well / He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors." Clearly the narrator believes his neighbor to be stubbornly unenlightened, but can't we easily imagine the neighbor viewing the narrator in about the same light—or darkness: a fellow who keeps repeating the same old saw, "something there is that doesn't love a wall." The neighbor might be wondering—as the narrator does—why his neighbor can't see beyond his own narrow prejudices. The two men echo each other, and therein lies their game. Each holds within himself the pattern of the other. Together, they contain the patterns of the Universe, turning the wall between them into a zone of engagement, an included middle. I think.

Writing to Learn Connectivism

Stephen Downes was kind enough to comment on my last post, and that's a good thing. His comment brought a fair number of visitors to my blog, giving that post as many hits as any other I've written.

But alas, it seems that I was not very clear in what I was trying to say. Stephen complains that:

Keith Hamon ties himself in knots trying to reconcile essentialism and connectivism. And I don't think he helps himself adding DNA to the mix. "Richard Cartwright has defined essentialism as 'the view that, for any specific kind of entity, there is a set of … attributes all of which are necessary to its identity and function.'" But there are many things for which essentialism is false. As Wittgenstein famously argues, consider the definition of 'game'. There's nothing essential to being a game. For every property you can think of - competition, rules, points - there are exceptions. Or consider membership in a family. People in a family resemble each other, but there is no one trait that their [sic] all share. What makes them a family is that they are connected, not that they share some essential trait. In many ways, connection replaces essentialism, and does not need to account for it.

Quite likely I did tie myself in knots in that post, though from my point of view, I was untangling a knot. I was trying to untangle an issue in my head, and now that I've done it, it is really quite straightforward, so let me now write the post I should have published.

I've been trying to define Connectivism without resorting to the essentialism and reductionism typical of most definitions, relying instead on complex, multi-scale networking to frame my definition (I was, in fact, replacing essentialism with connectivism). I had been using some language from Edgar Morin's book On Complexity, including the concept of DNA. Gradually, I realized that DNA as a concept could be too easily shaded with Essentialist overtones, and that would be problematic for my argument. So I wanted to see if I could show how Morin's concept of DNA does not necessarily imply Essentialism. I decided that DNA avoids essentialism in two ways:

1. it is a start point for an entity, not an end point, and
2. it is specific to one entity, not many.

That's a rather short post and likely would not have caught Stephen Downes' eye; however, I didn't have my conclusion when I started writing the post. I was just pulling at the tangle of thought until I had it unraveled, at least in my own mind.

The more interesting question now, though, is how did Stephen and I miscommunicate? It would be trite  to say merely that I didn't write well, or that Stephen didn't read well, or perhaps a bit of both. Is there a Connectivist explanation for this kind of communication where the meaning in the author's head does not seem to match closely enough the meaning in the reader's head? There should be. So let's sketch some outlines that might suggest how and why this communication fell out as it did.

First, keep in mind that this post is itself exploration rather than an explanation. I may be able to explain whatever emerges—if anything—more clearly later, but I can't now. Just now, I'm playing, pushing around some ideas that just might work, but no guarantees.

I'll start with what I was doing—my writing—mainly because I can speak with some authority about that. I've been writing for decades, and I've paid attention to how I write. I'll have to be far more general and speculative about Stephen's reading, as I don't know his particular reading habits.

I was writing the previous post in a writing to learn mode. This is one of two large modes of writing that I introduce to my students:

1. writing to learn, and
2. writing to communicate.

Perhaps you think that any writing loosed on the public, such as blog posts, should be writing to communicate, but I don't think this is the case. So what's the difference between the two? Writing to learn is mostly for ourselves while writing to communicate is mostly for others. It's a shift along a sliding scale rather than a shift in kind, however, but it is an important shift. When we are writing to learn, we are using writing as a tool for rendering explicit to ourselves what we know. When we are writing to communicate, we are using writing as a tool for engaging others.

In a connectivist sense, then, when I wrote my post I was using written language to externalize the patterns of thought in my mind. I was creating a text as an external artifact onto which I could arrange and play with my thoughts. The text, the post, became an other somewhat removed from me, with which I could converse. I would write a phrase or sentence, and then stop to read it, looking for a match between the patterns I felt, sensed, or thought in my mind and the patterns I read on the screen. Sometimes the sentence spoke back to me, or stained me, in a way that felt right, and I would keep the sentence, but more often than not, the sentence did not stain me in quite the right sense, and so I would change it. I would erase it and try again. Or sometimes, I would just leave it and move on to try again.

The post became, then, another node in the network of interactions that formed my thoughts about essentialism and DNA and connectivism, but it is a node with some peculiar affordances (thanks again, Bon) that renders thinking more productive in certain ways. First, it became an explicit thing, outside my head. This is of inestimable value. While a few people can structure and manage quite well the thoughts in their heads, most people, including me, lack that ability. My thoughts are too often jumbled—and when they are crystal clear, I seldom know why—and I can go over and over the same idea in my head without ever moving it forward, but as soon as I put it on screen or paper, then it seems to stabilize. It becomes an explicit, external object that I can work with. I can assess it's value, shape, and meaning, and decide whether or not it meets my needs. I too often find that hard to do in my head alone.

Then, the post became another node in the pattern of meaning that I was trying to create through my thinking and writing. As such, the post fed back into my head the thoughts that I had written, and those written thoughts began to interact with the mental thoughts, each affecting the other. I thought something, I wrote something, that fed back into my thoughts, and that fed back into my writing, over and over. It is a reiterative process that constantly maps back and forth, in and out, as the thoughts in my head feed into the thoughts on the screen which in turn feed back into the thoughts in my head. Each loop modifies the the internal and external thoughts, tweaking the patterns until I feel (it really is a feeling for me) an elegance and coherence between the text and the thoughts. The great rock guitarist Duane Allman used to speak of "hitting the note," of how he would play all night looking for that one note that pulled the whole performance together. That really is the feeling I'm looking for, and sometimes I have to write, or play, a long time before I find the pattern, or note, that pulls it together for me. It is the process that Deleuze and Guattari describe as cartography and decalcomania: a reiterative mapping between mind and reality, trying to shape the patterns in each in ways that are useful for ones life. I had to write a long time in that post to find out what I was trying to say. I had to play a long time to "hit the note."

This is writing to learn. And I think it is the part of writing that my students are most challenged by and least convinced of its value. It's also the part of writing this is too often least useful for readers, though its value for writers is inestimable.

This feedback loop, this mapping to use D&G's terms, is an integral part of Connectivism and Rhizomatic learning, I think. I know it is an important part of writing. It describes how we gaze upon the text and it gazes back at us. It describes how we push the text and it pushes back. Our thoughts feed into the text, and the text feeds back into our thoughts, and the loop continues round and round until we feel at peace somehow with the place that the text occupies in our thoughts. We come to terms with the text, our own creation, and we accept it as a fair node of the network that is our knowledge.

This does not mean, however, that the text is yet suitable for a reader. Quite likely it isn't. I'll talk more about writing to communicate next.

Intentionality in the Rhizome, #cck12

Yesterday, I tried to explain why I think that Connectivism may be guilty of focusing too much on the network and not enough on the individuals in the network. I suggested that Edgar Morin may have the correct stance: it isn't either the network or the individual; rather, it's each that must be accounted for in the examination of the other.

This is not some philosophical compromise or a happy medium in which opposing viewpoints each get a little something to save face; rather, it's a radically different way of viewing reality. I'll explain by starting with an objection to something that Frances Bell said in reply to my comments about intentionality being another point of entry into the rhizome: "I agree that intentionality emerges from more than just an individual ‘forming intentions’ and to some extent may be seen as a local network effect." To be fair, this is basically an introductory statement to her real point about connectivism overplaying the network effect, so I do not suggest that it adequately expresses Bell's point of view, but I can say that it represents the common view about human cognition, including intentionality. For most people, intentionality is a function of the individual brain or mind, even if it involves some local neural networks. If we want to understand any given intention, then we need only look to the individual who has, or creates, or forms, or expresses that intention.

I disagree with this point of view. I insist that if we look only to the individual, then we simply cannot understand the intention. Why? Because as Olaf Sporns says in his book Networks of the Brain, cognition is a function of networks. Olaf devotes much of his book to the neural networks that are the most obvious scale of the networks that support cognitive activity such as intentionality, but he quite clearly opens the discussion to the networks functioning at higher and lower scales. Networks depend upon other networks and form the basis for yet more networks. Limiting a study to one scale can be a useful fiction that allows for great focus and parsimony, but it is not reality—it's a fiction. And I say that in the very best sense of the term and with the utmost respect for fiction. I happen to believe that good fiction is the best we humans can do.

But … I start to wander.

Back to intentionality as a function of the individual. We simply cannot reduce intention (or any other cognitive function, such as learning) to the given individual said to be forming the intention or doing the learning. We can understand any given intention only as the complex interaction of an open system (the individual) with its eco-system. As an open system, any individual is defined in great part by the flow of energy, matter, organization, and information between itself and its eco-system. While the brain of the individual forms a necessary substrate for intentionality, it is not sufficient for intentionality. Rather, intentionality requires the dynamic interaction—what Morin calls stabilized dynamics (On Complexity, 11)—between the individual and his physical, social, emotional environment. Morin goes on to say that "the intelligibility of the system has to be found, not only in the system itself, but also in its relations with the environment, and that this relationship is not a simple dependence: it is constitutive of the system. Reality is therefore as much in the connection (relationship) as in the distinction between the open system and its environment" (11). Thus, if we want to understand anyone's intentions, then we must understand not only their individual reasoning but also the dynamics between them and the world. It's an impossible task to understand even one single intention completely, a human condition for which I am most grateful. We will never have an end to learning. Never. There are simply too many connections to follow, and each intention is the nexus of innumerable arcs, trajectories, flows, and asignifying ruptures.

But, God, can we create some magnificent fictions, full of real insight, beauty, and helpful hints about reality. If Deleuze and Guattari are correct, then we use cartography and decalcomania to accomplish these fictions.

So to sum it all up: yeah, it's all in the connections. Probably even more so than Siemens and Downes know or can imagine. Those connections, of course, include non-human, even non-living, entities.

But the Oscars are on, and my wife wants me to watch them with her, so let's talk tomorrow about how cartography and decalcomania aid the individual in managing the flow of organization and information between the individual and her world.

#change11 The Nothing Rhizome Pt 2

Yesterday, I started addressing a question from Sui Fai John Mak about why I would call the rhizome nothing, and I found myself wandering through the first three of the six characteristics of the rhizome that Deleuze and Guattari list in their book A Thousand Plateaus (1987):

1. Connectivity (an obvious connection to Connectivism)
2. Heterogeneity
3. Multiplicity

Today, I want to continue the conversation by working through the final three characteristics:

1. Asignifying ruptures
2. Cartography
3. Decalcomania

I suppose that asignifying ruptures most clearly capture Deleuze and Guattari's push back against power, especially the power we humans exercise through signifying, through naming things. They say that asignifying ruptures work "against the oversignifying breaks separating structures or cutting across a single structure" (9). We humans are excellent at breaking up reality into manageable pieces by analyzing and segmenting and naming and numbering and quantifying, and these are all useful mental processes that help us build airplanes, buildings, institutions, societies, and so on, but they are also fictions and power structures from which the rhizome flees through deterreritorialization and reterreritorialization. Or as Robert Frost says much more plainly: something there is that doesn't love a wall. Any slice of reality contains within it both the classifications we humans create to manage that reality and the lines of flight that undermine those classifications. As D&G say: "Every rhizome contains lines of segmentarity according to which it is stratified, territorialized, organized, signified, attributed, etc., as well as lines of deterritorialization down which it constantly flees. There is a rupture in the rhizome whenever segmentary lines explode into a line of flight, but the line of flight is part of the rhizome" (9). APPLICATION: Traditional education exerts much energy in classifying, stratifying, organizing, and naming students, teachers, subjects, disciplines, classes, tests, theories, etc. John is an A student, Mary is a C student, and Bubba is an F student. Manuel is a rising senior, and Jinchaun is a freshman. George is a Professor, and Dave is an Assistant Professor, and Stephen is a Dean. I teach essay writing: descriptive, persuasive, argumentative (sometimes the same as persuasive, sometimes listed separately. I don't know why), comparison (or comparison/contrast), expository, formal, informal, research, literary, cause/effect, and more. You can google essay forms or essay types and find oodles of classifications, all more or less arbitrary and, as near as I can tell from 30 years experience in teaching writing, all more or less useless. I've never found an essay that I really liked—say, something by Annie Dillard—that fit any of these groups very well. Rhizomatic education, then, recognizes that reality leaks out in lines of flight from our attempts to peg it, to name it, to pin it, wriggling on the wall, and tries to accomodate those lines of flight. The Change 11 MOOC just suffered a couple of asignifying ruptures with Nancy White's social artists and Dave Cormier's rhizomes and nomads, but unlike a traditional class, we MOOCers work with those lines of flight, riding along with them, ignoring them, or refuting them, as we are so inclined, but not knocked over by them. Indeed, we set up the MOOC to encourage just such ruptures. Rhizomatic learning does not deny the virtues of our analytical mind, but it recognizes that reality ain't really like that and can squirt out of our categories at the weirdest times.

These first four characteristics, I think, explain why lots of people are so confused when they first join a MOOC: a MOOC is an explicitly and intentionally rhizomatic structure:

1. Connection: any MOOCer can connect to any other or to anyone else not in the MOOC. We don't simply connect to the teachers: Professors Cormier, Downes, and Siemens. We connect more to each other, and for me that has been Jeffrey, Glen, Bonnie, Sui Fai John, Jenny, and others, none of whom are willing or able to tell me what I should be learning or if I have learned it. This is great unless you are thoroughly conditioned to having someone tell you what the learning is all about. Well, rest yourself. You can decide what to learn and what to ignore. Trust yourself.
2. Heterogeneity: We MOOCers are not the same. We are not homogenized. While we all share an interest in higher education and how it might be changing, that common interest is too vague to provide much guidance in where we are supposed to be going and how we are supposed to get there. We came in on different paths, and we are almost certainly passing through this MOOC on different paths. Cool—unless, of course, you are worried about falling behind. Well, rest yourself. You can't fall behind, as you are likely the only one of 2,000 scholars going your way.
3. Multiplicity: We MOOCers are each the convergence of different life trajectories that we bring to the mix of all the other life trajectories in the MOOC. We focus on a few of those trajectories to gain some sense of what we are trying to do here, but the open structure of the MOOC allows all those trajectories to emerge in the mix. It can be overwhelming if we try to cover it all. Well, rest yourself. You can't cover it all.
4. Asignifying ruptures: We MOOCers know that the conversation can take some abrupt, even startling, turns and flights into ideas and concepts that we never anticipated, or even knew about. This can be exciting and challenging or terrifying and frustrating, as not everyone likes snowboarding over a ledge without knowing where the trail's going, or if there even is a trail. Well, rest yourself. You don't have to follow every trail—in fact, you can't—and next week, we'll be back on a trail that works for you.

MOOCs just don't have any of the traditional structures and signposts that people expect when they sign-up for a course. A MOOC isn't a course—it isn't a thing as we usually define things. Rather, a MOOC is an assemblage, a multiplicity. We are legion, and that can be tough to deal with.

But after thoroughly confusing our sense of reality, Deleuze and Guattari give us a couple of strategies for dealing with rhizomes such as a MOOC, and it is just here that I want to note a slight disagreement with, or rather an amendment to, something that Dave Cormier said to George Siemens in his Change 11 presentation. When they were discussing the rhizome as a metaphor and George was pushing for clarification on how rhizomatic learning handled knowledge, Dave said that rhizomatic learning did not address epistemology, or something to that effect—sorry, I'm too lazy to find it in the recording just now. While rhizomatic learning certainly has no systematic epistemology, I still think it has something to say about ways of knowing.

The first strategy for knowing in a rhizomatic structure is cartography, or mapping. Mapping is a process of constantly monitoring and testing reality, assessing the feedback, and adjusting the map. Mapping assumes that reality is shifting; therefore, knowledge must shift, if it is to remain useful for engaging reality. Most of us don't like shifting knowledge—we want the correct answer, the eternal answer. We want what Deleuze and Guattari call tracings, or "an overcoding structure or supporting axis, something that comes ready-made" (12). The Truth. Mappings are different. 

What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real. … It is itself a part of the rhizome. The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation. It can be drawn on a wall, conceived of as a work of art, constructed as a political action or as a meditation. … A map has multiple entryways, as opposed to the tracing, which always comes back "to the same." The map has to do with performance, whereas the tracing always involves an alleged "competence." (12, 13)

 APPLICATION: Traditional learning proceeds by fixed curricula and lesson plans about authoritative knowledge with regular measures to determine how competently a student has traced the lines of the lesson. Knowledge in traditional education is a tracing of what is already known. Rhizomatic learning is a mapping, an engagement with reality, a fixing of points of reference, measurements and tests, assessment of feedback, and then an adjustment of the points of reference or creation of new points, with no hope of ever fixing the points of reference, and with total recognition that the very act of mapping itself is part of the reality under examination. This totally collapses the Cartesian dualism that underlies our modern scientific point of view that posits an object for us subjects to trace, or know. Rhizomatic learning says this is not the way to engage reality. It certainly isn't the way to engage a MOOC. When entering a MOOC we must anchor to some point (almost any will do initially: a person, a blog, a presentation, a bit of reading) from which to establish a vantage point. That anchor and vantage point may work for the entire MOOC, or we may switch, but we need that first anchor. What we cannot do is look for some syllabus through which we can trace a course of learning. It ain't there. We must map the MOOC: fix a vantage point, fix other points from there, check distances from where we are to someplace else we might want to be, look for the steps to get to the new place, and strike out, asking others along the way, confident that our goal will shift. That's how you learn in a MOOC.

The second strategy for knowing in a rhizomatic structure is decalcomania, or pressing patterns. Most of us know decalcomania as the process where children put paint on their hands and press the paint onto paper, leaving blue, purple, yellow, and red handprints. Deleuze and Guattari suggest that patterns emerge in the rhizome through a pressing, not a transfer but more an echo. They are careful to say that it is not mimicry, which is tracing. Rather it is a blossoming of a sympathetic, self-similar, fractal pattern. Almost the same, but not quite. APPLICATION: In traditional learning, knowledge is transferred in little nuggets called facts from the teacher's brain to the student's brain; or in progressive classes, the teacher enables students to create their own little nuggets. In rhizomatic learning, the brain is  an amazingly sensitive organ for echoing the patterns that it recognizes in its environment, for feeding those patterns back into its environment, and then taking in the new patterns. Deleuze and Guattari say:

Thought is not arborescent, and the brain is not a rooted or ramified matter. What are wrongly called "dendrites" do not assure the connection of neurons in a continuous fabric. The discontinuity between cells, the role of the axons, the functioning of the synapses, the existence of synaptic microfissures, the leap each message makes across these fissures, make the brain a multiplicity immersed in its plane of consistency or neuroglia, a whole uncertain, probabilistic system. … Many people have a tree growing in their heads, but the brain itself is much more a grass than a tree. (15)

The grass of the brain is very sensitive to the moving of wind and rain, echoing the pattern of each, but there is no transfer of pattern. The wind does not transfer its pattern to the grass. In a MOOC, we echo the knowledge (a blog, a presentation, a tweet) that we press against. That echo is never exact, never the thing itself transferred from another mind to our mind. Rather, it is a sympathetic reterritorialization, more or less similar, of a pattern that we perceived. Our minds then operate on that newly emerged pattern, that knowledge, reworking it to fit into the knowledge and patterns already in our minds, looking for consistency and resonance however we define those qualities (rationally, emotionally, aesthetically, etc.), and then feed those patterns back into the ecosystem, deterritorialized and reterritorialized, where they are taken up, or not, and reworked, and fed back into the system, over and over and over. This describes the messy process of learning in a MOOC, and for me, it describes it better than does behaviorism and constructivism do, though they have insights as well.

Well, I've gone a long way around to tell Sui Fai John Mak why I think a rhizome is nothing. I hope the answer works for him, but at any rate, I hope he understands now why I like rhizomatic learning. As a metaphor, a way of mapping but NOT precisely tracing, the rhizome helps me understand learning in a MOOC much better than most any other theory or metaphor that I know. And with people such as Dave Cormier and Bonnie Stewart, the metaphor is just getting richer.

Decalcomania and CCK11

In his blog connectiv: On Connectivism and Learning, Jaap distinguishes between training and learning when we train ourselves to play a piece of music. I think he is capturing the distinction I am trying to explore between tracing and mapping, competence and performance, and working and playing. Jaap's training, then, is tracing and working toward competence, and learning is mapping and playing toward performance. Music provides a wonderful metaphor: to play well enough to bring joy and satisfaction (and perhaps a paycheck) to both herself and her audience, a musician must have competence with music and instrument (which requires ten thousand hours of work), but she must also transcend mere competence into performance in order to play the music on her instrument and to expand and express as an artist. Training/tracing and learning/mapping are not opposing activities, but different ends on a sliding scale of activities, and both are connectivist in nature.

I understand both training and learning as Connectivist through Deleuze and Guattari's concept of decalcomania, one of the six characteristics of rhizomatic structures that they explore in their book A Thousand Plateaus (1988). Decalcomania is the artistic process of transferring an image or pattern from one structure to another, usually by pressing the two structures together. According to ARTTalk, "technical explanations of decalcomania describe the method as geometric shapes--irregular, broken or fractured (rather than smooth and even). The two images created by pressing one area of liquid with a top sheet of paper display a form of 'self-similarity,' appearing similar in scale and magnitude - very nearly exact duplicates. In early production, this meant that the creation of two images was made with each attempt. Infinitely fine detail is immediately apparent yet, when magnified, yields startling accents." The capitalismandschizophrenia.org website defines Deleuze-Guattarian decalcomania as a method of "forming through continuous negotiation with its context, constantly adapting by experimentation, thus performing a non-symmetrical active resistance against rigid organization and restriction."

A class about fractals at Yale University notes that decalcomania can form dendritic fractals, as in the picture below:

To my mind, decalcomania is a process for transferring a pattern from one thing to another, and it describes quite accurately how we create meaning in our minds. In decalcomania, a surface with a potent image or medium is pressed against another surface. After the two surfaces are separated, self-similar images reside on both surfaces. The images can diverge more and more as the two surfaces vary in material, texture, porosity, density, color, and so forth. The images can diverge again given the viscosity and consistency of the intermediary medium being pressed between the two structures, and the images can diverge even more if the pressing is inexact or uneven and smears. Decalcomania, I think, provides a nice metaphor for understanding learning and training: the process of impressing patterns between student and class, person and world, guitarist and guitar, artist and canvas.

But first, let me correct a part of my definition. In decalcomania, pattern is NOT transferred from one thing to another. Transfer is an habitual manner of speaking that obscures a deeper insight. Only in it's most basic and popular form of decals, where an image is removed from a special paper and applied whole and unaltered to a new surface, does decalcomania reduce to mere pattern transfer. Unfortunately, this is the dominant metaphor for traditional learning and all training: a knowledge pattern is transferred whole and unaltered from a source into a new brain which then has that new knowledge pattern. This is fundamentally wrong and leads to all sorts of counter-productive pedagogical strategies and theories.

Rather, decalcomania awakens patterns in both structures. When an artist presses some medium—paint, for instance—between two surfaces—say, cloth and paper—then the act of pressing and releasing the paint creates a pattern on both the cloth and the paper. The two patterns very well may be self-similar, but they are highly unlikely to be exact duplicates. Even in industrial processes which impress images on some surface (on a Coke bottle, for instance), "infinitely fine detail is immediately apparent yet, when magnified, yields startling accents," or variations.

Decalcomania, then, helps me explain my interaction in MOOC CCK11. I have pressed some media between myself and MOOC CCK11—different media: Elluminate sessions, discussions, back channel chats, blog posts, essays, Facebook comments, Youtube videos, etc.—and each pressing has awakened in my mind new patterns or reinforced or changed old patterns. Each pressing has also awakened different patterns in MOOC CCK11. Both I and MOOC CCK11 are different because of the impressions each has made on the other. (Of course, CCK11 is bigger than I am, so the impression I make is smaller on it than the impression it makes on me; however, think of the impressions made by Downes and Siemens to see more clearly how the act of impressing works both ways, changing both the individual and the group.)

This process can be explored more. For instance, I am certain that my learning is slightly different, perhaps radically different, from the learning of others in MOOC CCK11, even when we consider the same media. In strictly physical terms, no two brains are structured alike; therefore, a pressing between my brain and MOOC CCK11 through the medium of a given Elluminate session will create a necessarily different pattern of knowledge amongst my neurons than amongst, say, Stephen Downes' neurons. The surfaces of his brain and of my brain are perhaps similar but still different, even in physical detail and certainly in knowledge detail. I may not even map what I learn in the session in the same area of the brain as he does. I certainly won't map it with the same arrangement of neurons. It takes multiple pressings through different media for the two of us even to begin to approximate consistent knowledge patterns in both our brains and in our interactions. (It's the whole process of getting to know each other.)

This process of decalcomania seems to describe many of the classes I've taken and taught. It also explains to me why the industrial method of education as described by Sir Ken Robinson has become so ineffective. If you haven't seen him speak on this issue, then watch Sir Ken explain why we need a radical shift from the industrial paradigm of education:

More Maps

I am horrified at not having written since the end of January.

Anyway, I was spurred to action when I read a marvelous post today by Dave Cormier. I left a long comment that I want to republish here, slightly edited, though my best advice is that you surf on over to Dave's original post and read it before you read my comments. You'll be glad you did.

Dave's essay talks about the rhizome as a new model for how education might structure itself in the online world. He seems to be addressing what, for me, has been the most problematic aspect of Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of the rhizome: cartography and decalcomania, terms they use to describe new strategies for building useful maps for negotiating our way through the rhizome. The big rhizome, of course, is this universe, reality, and losing their map to reality seems to cause most people problems.

For thousands of years, we have built knowledge in hierarchical structures: from the general to the particular (deduction), or in reverse, from the particular to the general (induction). Deleuze and Guattari are recommending a new way to structure knowledge (along with all the other institutions and structures based on that knowledge), a rhizomatic way. This can be most disorienting and confusing.

I find that many people are somewhat more comfortable with the rhizomatic ideas of connectivity, heterogeneity, multiplicity, and asignifying ruptures, but they become nervous when they lose the familiar sign-posts from an established canon of knowledge, their hierarchical maps, or tracings, in Deleuzianal terms (sorry, I couldn’t resist). You hear them asking, “If I can’t tell which way is north, definitively, then how can I construct a map to tell where I am, where I’m going, and where I’ve been?” Or in the terms of educators, “How can I measure the learning?” Most of us are very reluctant to give up our tried and true fictions.

For me, the key question is quite practical: how do we map the rhizome? How do a group of people gather, form a working entity,scan and mine the rhizome (any rhizome: literature, math, physics, even business), and build a useful body of knowledge? As Chuen-Ferng Koh says in Internet: Towards a Holistic Ontology: “Rhizomatic links … are formed through mapping—or active construction based on flexible and functional experimentation, requiring and capitalizing on feedback. The map is not … a blueprint whose workability has to be taken on faith; the map is never fixed, but a changing flux of adaptation and negotiation.” This flexible and functional experimentation has not been a hallmark of our Western education system, at least not below advanced graduate school or in isolated pockets. Most of us don’t know how to engage reality through this constant experimentation with its feedback loops. We expect reality to stay put.

To my mind, the practical techniques are being developed by those thousands of people working their personal learning networks, both f2f and online. And in those learning communities they are building not only the curriculum but also the methodologies, and it looks very rhizomatic to me.

Mapping the Rhizome

As with the first two characteristics of the rhizome, connectivity and heterogeneity, Deleuze and Guattari group the last two together: cartography and decalcomania. I think they do this because both characteristics have to do with our attempts to create a structure for, or a network of pathways through, the rhizome. Perhaps a better way of saying this is that these two characteristics speak to the practical problem of orienting ourselves within a rhizomatic structure and negotiating avenues for navigating through the rhizome from wherever we happen to find ourselves.

The capitalismandschizophrenia.org website defines Deleuze-Guattarian cartography as "the method of mapping for orientation from any point of entry within a 'whole', rather than by the method of tracing that re-presents an a priori path, base structure or genetic axis." Decalcomania is a method of "forming through continuous negotiation with its context, constantly adapting by experimentation, thus performing a non-symmetrical active resistance against rigid organization and restriction." Hierarchical thinking traces a pattern onto reality, overpowering points to fit the tracing and discarding or attacking those points that do not fit the pattern; whereas, rhizomatic thinking allows the structure and pattern of reality to emerge through our interaction with and testing of reality, accepting all points as part of the pattern. Hierarchical thinking is painting by the numbers, by the pattern imposed on the page; whereas rhizomatic thinking is painting by pressing paint between two pieces of paper to see what pattern emerges from the interaction of the textures, shape, and porosity of the papers, the viscosity and colors of the paint, the pressure, firmness, and steadiness of the artists' hands or the blocks pressing the paper.

Anyone who is part of an organization large enough to merit an organizational chart (a hierarchical tracing) is aware day-to-day of the functional differences between hierarchical tracings and rhizomatic mappings. To request IT support in the Purchasing Department, for instance, one could send a request up the Purchasing Department line to be approved by the department head and then over to the head of IT who would then push the request down to the IT Support group for response. Or one could pick up the phone and call ones friend in IT support and ask them to check your computer the next time they are in the building. The first course of action follows a hierarchical tracing, a pathway imposed on a collection of people by the logic of the organization's managers, while the second follows a rhizomatic mapping, a pathway that emerges from the asignifying rupture of friendship, a relational category that appears nowhere on anybody's organizational chart.

As Chuen-Ferng Koh says in Internet: Towards a Holistic Ontology: "Rhizomatic links … are formed through mapping—or active construction based on flexible and functional experimentation, requiring and capitalizing on feedback. The map is not an image from which reality is to be traced … or a blueprint whose workability has to be taken on faith; the map is never fixed, but a changing flux of adaptation and negotiation. It is intimately and mutually tied to all the other principles of the rhizome." The strategy of mapping as opposed to tracing makes explicit the connection of heterogenous points, the multiplicity of a point as a line or arc or intersection with various speeds and trajectories, and the asignifying rupture of any point from this line or arc to another line or arc in another rhizomatic structure.

How do we map a class rather than trace it? By following the flows and lines of the class participants beyond the boundaries of the classroom, or the flows and lines of the conversation beyond the boundaries of the course content. By inviting the class participants to create the syllabus, perhaps at the end of the class as a description of what each did in class rather than at the beginning as a prescription for what they will do.

How does the introduction of a social network into a classroom encourage mapping? As a rhizomatic structure, social networks connect students to people and information far beyond the small, hierarchical group called Keith Hamon's English 101, Section 32, Spring, 2010, with its little collection of readings, smattering of exercises and papers to write, its twenty-five registered students, and single instructor. When both the instructor and the students realize and accept that they are no longer corralled into a confined, hierarchical space, but that they are free to roam in the entire World Wide Web, then the tendrils and shoots of the class can extend to anyone, anywhat, anywhere. Points can proliferate. We can start from a multiplicity of points and pursue a multiplicity of points. We can wallow, or we can run. We can be here and jump there through asignifying ruptures that will challenge the identity, the signification, of the class.

We can follow our creativity and passions, or create them if they don't exist.

And especially for the writing classroom, this passion and creativity is most important. Over a career spanning thirty years, I have read more than my share of bland, vapid, mindless prose written merely to satisfy the requirements of an assignment—an assignment that I made, so I've no one to blame but myself. I really don't want to read anymore of that writing, so I am hopeful that the introduction of rhizomatic structure into the classroom may help connect me and my students to our passion and our creativity and to each other.