Thinking Like Grass

Like most everyone else for the past six months, I've been thinking about MOOCs (note that on Susan Bainbridge's current Connectivism Scoop page, easily half of the scooped articles are about MOOCs (2nd note: if you are at all interested in Connectivism and MOOCs, then you should follow Susan's Scoop. It's invaluable, and I deeply appreciate her work.)). I've introduced a good friend of mine to MOOCs and Connectivism, and he read the things I sent him. He was interested in the concept, but he had two immediate concerns about MOOCs:

• Social sharing can legitimize any kind of knowledge, like racism, sexism, imperialism. Without an ethical standard, knowledge is free to kill as well as to cure. (Which is not to say that traditional education is ethical—I don’t think it is. But there are other options.)
• And the second is the danger of elitism. I don’t see my students getting very far in their rhizomatic education. (Which is not to say that they will get very far in traditional education either.) I guess I would call this feature the “appearance of democratic education.”

He concluded by asking if I have read "Morris' News from Nowhere—a late 19th-century British utopian novel" in which the citizens "have no theory of education at all, and no specific practices either." I have not read the novel, but I will—after all, turnabout is fair play, but I want to respond to Dan's concerns.

First, I have not thought much about the ethical aspects of Connectivism and MOOCs, nor have I read much about ethics from anyone else in the connectivist discussion, but I think Connectivism and cMOOCs have an ethical perspective built into the first O in MOOC: Open. MOOCs are open in any number of ways, but especially in terms of network connectivity. Anyone is free to connect to and engage a MOOC, and they will do so IF they perceive value in the connection. No one has to connect, and in fact, most of the people who sign-up for a MOOC do not engage the MOOC in any degree that might be significant to an observer—say a college administrator looking for the ROI. This should not bee sting as a bad thing. Rather, it should be seen as bee efficiency. Apparently, when bees want to move their hive, the scout bees fan out in all directions. Most of them find nothing, but a few find something, and through their connections, they channel the other bees into these promising pathways until finally the way to a new hive emerges. What starts as chaos (MOOCers will be familiar with this sense of early chaos in a MOOC) turns out to be a highly efficient way to create new meaning for the hive. Still, it's highly wasteful, like most MOOCs. Fortunately, the cost of each connection to a MOOC is almost nil, so the waste is functionally irrelevant. But the waste identifies quite efficiently those students who are in some way ripe for learning whatever emerges from the MOOC. Those who are not ripe simply fade away with little to no damage to the MOOC. I like this bee efficiency.

This openness to connectivity is an aspect of network dynamics, I think, and it has to do with a shift in the way value is created in a network as opposed to a hierarchical structure. In a hierarchy, one's relative value is measured by the number of people under one and subject to one. In a network, one's relative value is measured by the number of people willing to connect to one. This is an obvious oversimplification, but it points to a seriously different dynamic in the relationships among people in a functional group. The relationships in hierarchical groups are based more on power, benevolent or otherwise, while the relationships in network groups are based more on mutual attraction. Engagement or not is up to the agent, and this is a powerful kind of agency.

This radical shift in agency demands an equally radical shift in ethics. It seems to me that ethics for the past few hundred years has been based on the need to manage exchanges across discrete boundaries. In other words, reductionist thought makes each of us a position within a hierarchy—a "cog in something turning" as Joni Mitchell put it—with quite distinct boundaries between positions, or agents, and agency has been defined in terms of who gets to tell whom what to do and how to think and how to reward and punish those exchanges. This kind of ethics, this Lockean social contract, does not work if, as a node in a network, you have no fixed position, if you are free to engage or disengage connections, and if the connections depend on mutual attraction, as they do in MOOCs. We need an ethics of complex, multi-scale networks, which is partly how I define a MOOC. Perhaps such an ethics exists, but I don't know about it (any philosopher out there willing to enlighten me. I'm a fairly quick read.)

So I revise what I said earlier about connectivism having a built-in ethics. It doesn't. Rather, it seems to me that the openness of connectivism and its MOOCs calls for a new ethics based on a rethinking of agents, their boundaries, and their exchange processes. The ethics that works for an agent occupying a position in a reductionist hierarchy will not work for an agent acting as a node in a dynamic, complex, multi-scale network. The networked, connectivist agent needs a new ethics that guides the dynamic choices that help identify useful connections and cultivate those connections and eventually close some of those connections. To put this in MOOC terms, MOOCers need a new ethics that guides their choices about which MOOCs to engage, which agents and content within the MOOC to engage, and how to engage: how to both give and take value within their networks. Actually, I think give and take are the wrong terms, too strongly tied to the reductionist, hierarchical ethics with its exchanges across discrete boundaries. We need an ethics that helps us become value within a network, increasing the value of the network to the benefit of the entire network. I suspect, then, that ecological movements may be working out the details of the kinds of ethics that I'm looking for. I'll have to check into that.

This leads me to Dan's comments about elitism and that he doesn't see his "students getting very far in their rhizomatic education." If he means that, unlike elite students, most college students lack the internal motivation and skills to engage an open network of inquiry and discussion, such as cMOOCs, then he's probably correct. Aside from the graduate courses at elite universities, too much of our education is an exercise in what Deleuze and Guattari (A Thousand Plateaus, 1987) call tracing, a careful, meticulous repetition of patterns and truths already laid out for us in a curriculum and watched over by proctors keen on sameness and competence. Open cMOOCs call for mapping, or a process of "active construction based on flexible and functional experimentation, requiring and capitalizing on feedback" (Cheun-Ferng Koh, 1997). Thus, our students have learned to trace well, but they see no advantage in going outside the line, in mapping new territory for themselves or others. The last thing a successful student wants to do on a test is to tell the teacher something that she doesn't already know. That is largely and by default defined as failure. Tracing well does not prepare one for success in a MOOC. Actually, that skill frustrates both the MOOC and the student.

If, on the other hand, Dan means that in the open network of a MOOC a few students will attain more status and value than most others, then he is also correct. The power laws of scale-free networks express the strong probability that some nodes will be more well connected than most other nodes. This happens in every MOOC that I have engaged. Often, the teacher or weekly leader in a MOOC is a highly connected node, but I suspect that this is in some part residue from traditional education, in which the teacher is the ONLY well-connected node in the hierarchy (too often connections among students—talking—are censured and censored). In the best MOOCs, sub-networks develop as students connect to each other in their engagement of a mutually interesting and enriching discussion. MOOCs encourage this kind of networking within the network, and often enough, one or two nodes of those sub-networks gain more status, become elite, through more connections from other nodes. I do not see a problem with this, but I do think it is distracting to those students who are looking for the correct content to trace competently rather than for the new content to map usefully.

Finally, like Dan, I wonder if education can do without theory and practice. I think it can, but only if we are thinking of theory and practice as mechanisms for promoting tracing rather than mapping. When many first-time MOOCers move from tracing in the traditional classroom to mapping in a MOOC, then they feel a loss of theory and practice. They are disoriented. The lines drop out from under their feet, and this causes real stress and grief for many, which those students have expressed in blog posts, tweets, and feedback in many of the MOOCs I've engaged. And these are elite students, by the way.

So as with the call for a new ethics, I think MOOCs call for a new theory and practice in education especially, and I'm fairly certain that this new theory and practice will strike many of us as NO theory and practice. I think Deleuze can offer some suggestion here. I read an article by Xiao-Jiu Ling called Thinking like Grass, with Deleuze in Education? (Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, Vol 7, Num 2, 2009) in which Ling draws so tempting implications from Deleuzianal thought:

Then, what could Deleuze mean to the field of Education? My first temptation is to simply boldly borrow his phrase above and to propose thus: There is no need for education: it is necessarily produced where each activity gives rise to its line of deterritorialization. To get out of education, to do never mind what so as to be able to produce it from outside! [italics in the original] Perhaps, it is indeed a Deleuzian repetition that we can aim for in education, a kind of repetition that is a transgression, in which its possibility hinges on opposing as much to moral (nomos) law as to natural (physis) law (DR, p. 2-3). By working in opposition to the order of the always already-existing laws, in the spirit of parrhēsia prefigured by Diogenes the Cynic, Deleuze is proposing new possibilities of working in the direction of creating artistic realities; that is, to treat philosophy itself as an artistic endeavour in its essential nature. And if one is to realize the fundamental role that education plays in forming our frames of thinking, that is, providing existing and always the dominant images of thought of our society in general, the relevance of Deleuze’s analysis and his “anecdotes” of philosophizing is hard to deny. Or, at least we are tempted to make this parallel: that if philosophy can be made fecund with the open-mindedness of an artist, then the work of education can also be made fertile through the exigency of treating it as an artistic engagement, something that not only demands creativity but more importantly a critical consciousness of the ethical dimension that is inherent in education. (43,44)

Well, let's talk about this some more, later.

WAC 4: ePortfolios

I have grounded my concept of a writing across the curriculum program (WAC) in connectivist theory: that knowledge and communication are network phenomena, a function of mapping and traversing complex, multi-scale networks. As Stephen Downes says in his post Types of Knowledge and Connective Knowledge, "connectivism is the thesis that knowledge is distributed across a network of connections." To my mind, language is one of our primary tools for mapping and traversing these networks. Indeed, language is more than a tool—language is a fundamental part of the knowledge and communication networks themselves. Language is like DNA: it is the tool and instructions by which the organism/network emerges, it is part of the scaffolding of the emerging organism/network, and it is part of the maintenance system for the emerged organism/network. Language, like DNA, is woven into the very knowledge and communications that emerge from its play. It's a bit like making the blueprints and hammers and saws part of the house they are helping to build.

But this is still a very abstract concept that may not have an intuitively obvious application. A core, practical application in my WAC is the ePortfolio, an ideal application that fits nicely into a connectivist, network perspective. I'll say why, but first let me point out that I am not saying that ePortfolios are connectivist. A constructivist, cognitivist, or behaviorist can use ePortfolios as well as any connectivist, but I particularly like a connectivist take on ePortfolios. Here's why, and let me cite my source up front: Jonan Donaldson's article Digital Portfolios in the Age of the Read/Write Web in the current issue of Educause Review Online. Mr. Donaldson, an instructional designer at Oregon State University, says all of the things I want to say about ePortfolios and more, so I'm leaning on him heavily in this post.

The first key feature of ePortfolios is that they have emerged from the read/write web. I began using ePortfolios when the e(lectronic) in ePortfolios meant a PowerPoint burned to a CD. This was decidedly old-school and not very network aware. All that is changed, and now ePortfolios are best understood as a function of complex, multi-scale networks. This implies that all ePortfolios are on the open Web and not locked within some organizational silo and that they are owned and managed by the student.

Jonan Donaldson lists a number of affordances provided by ePortfolios:

• ePortfolios help shift from teacher-centric education to student-centric education, as students become active producers of knowledge rather than passive consumers of knowledge. Rather than simply learning the eternal truth from their teachers, students use ePortfolios to create connections among their bits of personal knowledge and the people they encounter in school. This fits well with Downes' contention that "The very forms of reason and enquiry employed in the classroom must change. Instead of seeking facts and underlying principles, students need to be able to recognize patterns and use things in novel ways. Instead of systematic methodical enquiry,… students need to learn active and participative forms of enquiry. Instead of deference to authority, students need to embrace diversity and recognize (and live with) multiple perspectives and points of view." ePortfolios can provide the scaffolding for this approach to learning.
• ePortfolios provide students with intrinsic motivation. As Donaldson points out, "Turning consumers of knowledge into producers of knowledge transforms learning into an active experience." Mapping networks is not a passive activity, and it requires some intrinsic motivation. Deleuze and Guattari make this clear in their distinction between mapping and tracing the rhizome. Traditional education is largely a matter of tracing which depends on extrinsic motivations such as rewards and punishments rather than mapping which relies on intrinsic motivations.
• ePortfolios enhance student autonomy. Donaldson says, "Not only can students individualize the look and feel of their portfolios through templates and design options, they can also enjoy increased individualization of content and the delivery format of portfolio artifacts." ePortfolios let students "recognize patterns and use things in novel ways" and "learn active and participative forms of enquiry." In other words, it helps fit the knowledge to the student rather than fit the students to the knowledge. (Many may seem autonomy as inconsistent with networking, but this is a misunderstanding of networks. Each node in a network must maintain its own autonomy and integrity to perform its role in the network and to make the network what it is.)
• ePortfolios enhance collaboration. Donaldson notes wryly that "it is often said that we learn best when we do, but perhaps it would be more appropriate to say that we learn best when we do together." A network demands collaboration and cooperation (in Downes' sense of the term) among its various nodes, and research shows that when students connect to (network with) a teacher, another student, or a community of practice, then they are more likely to stay in college and succeed.
• ePortfolios enhance digital literacy, as Donaldson notes, "incidentally while tackling the learning objectives at hand." Students learn to recognize, validate, and use a wider range of patterns in different kinds of data and information (text, image, video, audio, number, and more), and they learn to orchestrate this data into coherent, appealing documents. These are incredibly valuable skills.
• ePortfolios enhance students' digital image. Most of today's college students already have digital image that is unfortunately not under their control and not always positive. Building an ePortfolio helps the student to learn how to build a professional brand and why that brand is important. The online world is not going away, and our students must know how to navigate it and use its powers.
• ePortfolios enhance students' 21st century writing skills. As Donaldson says, modern writing means "being able to create digital content that conveys information effectively for dissemination through websites, blogs, wikis, online presentations, illuminating graphics, audio content, and video content." This ain't your grandma's writing. Rather, this is the production of illuminated manuscripts: documents illuminated with image, video, sound, calculation, hyperlinks, and yes, text. ePortfolios help us learn this kind of writing, the kind of writing we will do in the 21st century.

I want to add to Donaldson's list that ePortfolios connect students to their communities of practice—first as students and then as fledgling professionals. Blogs, Twitter, RSS feeds, and more tools that can be aggregated on an ePortfolio help connect students to their personal learning networks and to their communities of practice. They connect to each other to get through school and then to practicing professionals to join a profession.

Finally, perfect WAC would include ePortfolios from the faculty and staff. I know of no better way to teach students how to build an ePortfolio than by building one myself.

Yes, ePortfolios.

WAC 3: Writing to Connect

I said in an earlier post that the first objective of a writing across the curriculum program is "to enable students to learn more and better." In this mode, students are using writing as a tool for mapping knowledge networks both in their own minds and in the world about them. The second objective is to enable students to connect with others. In this mode, students are using writing as a tool for exchanging knowledge networks with others.

I think that even a casual reader will sense that these are not unrelated goals; rather, they are interconnected goals. Often, we writers learn best when we are connecting with others, and we connect best when we are learning. From a writer's point of view, the distinction is a matter of focus rather than a change of goals. When writing to learn, we are focused on ourselves; when writing to connect, we are focused on others. For the writer, however, this shift is a complex and dynamic boundary along which a skillful writer constantly checks and refines what she knows with what she wants to achieve with the reader and vice versa. This shift is dynamic because the skillful writer is constantly looking back and forth, and it is complex because what she finds in her own knowledge feeds into and affects what she wants to achieve with another just as her interaction with the other feeds back into her own knowledge.

By the way, I am using the phrase writing to connect rather than my earlier phrase writing to communicate. I want to emphasize the connectivity that writing enables, and of course, that connectivity includes communication, but I think it can include more. Connectivity also resonates with the concepts of networking and connectivism in a way that communication does not. Let's see.

So writing is a network phenomenon that connects us to other people. A writing across the curriculum program can first cultivate writing to connect through the development of personal learning networks (PLNs) for each student. This, of course, connects us back to writing to learn, but as should be obvious, I see no separation between the two modes of writing (the one hardly makes sense without the other, though over the years I have found it convenient and useful to talk about them and to teach them separately). A PLN, built mostly through writing and reading in both electronic and print modes, connects each student to other students, to teachers, and to a profession (I am not using profession merely in the sense of a future job, but more so in the sense of a community of practice). Ample research shows that successful college students form strong connections to one or more of three aspects of college: other students, favorite professors, or a discipline. Students who do not connect to at least one of the aspects of college tend to falter, fail, and leave.

The original purpose of college, of course, was to foster such personal learning networks through close, physical proximity on a campus. Such physical proximity is still important, but physical connectivity is now supported and extended through electronic networks that allow any person to connect usefully with so many more people. A useful writing across the curriculum program must rely heavily, then, on these electronic networks.

In addition to helping students build PLNs, a useful WAC program helps students connect to a community of practice (COP). In one sense, one can view a college education as an introduction to and indoctrination in the conversation germane to a particular community of practice. Colleges teach students to walk the walk and talk the talk of some scholarly or professional community of practice. WACs help students first become familiar with the conversation of a COP and gradually to participate in that conversation. It's useful to say that one becomes a professional member of a community of practice when one can engage in the dominant conversations of that community (to rip-off a phrase from George Siemens). WACs cultivate the abilities of students to engage those conversations.

Finally, useful WACs should help students to connect to the world through project-based learning relevant to the students' COPs. Project-based learning is an ideal vehicle for enabling the kind of real-world writing that engages the world (a customer or client, for instance) to effect some change or elicit some response.

Hmm. Does this wear well? I'll have to think on that.

WAC 2: The Rhizomatic Document

It occurs to me that some people may not agree with my characterization of writing, especially in the sense of an actual text or document, as a network phenomenon. After all, scholars have long emphasized the linear nature of printed documents, such as books, typed letters, and journal articles. Electronic documents such as this post have introduced hyperlinks, which so impressed scholars at the beginning of the Internet age, but for these scholars, the novelty of hyperlinks is that they in some way disrupt the inherent, natural linearity of documents. I think this linear view of documents is wrong. Documents have always been network phenomenon, but that fact has been obscured by the mechanical technology we used to produce them and by the lack of electronic technology to see them otherwise. While it's obvious that words in a document are arranged in a line, this line is better visualized as a curving line of genes in DNA: the starting point for an unfolding in complex network fashion into a very, non-linear organism. The words in this post are not individual bricks added one by one to build a wall between you and me for you to analyze or not. Rather, the words in this post are a set of instructions keenly sensitive to their interconnectivity to the other words and to the particular arrangement among all the words to create multi-scale, dynamic patterns that may or may not echo in you.

To my mind, the linear view of writing is part and parcel of the general linear view of reality that has been key to Western intellectual thought for the past few centuries. While the reductionist, linear methods of Western science have been wildly successful in many ways, the development of chaos and complexity theories has done much to expose the limitations of reductionist linearity as a worldview. The old linear views were based on well-established linear mathematics and linear arguments. It was very mechanical, as was much of the technology that supported such thinking. It is easy to see how someone who makes a living out of setting metal type would tend to see a document as a linear structure. But as Gleick shows in his book Chaos, the non-linear mathematics of chaos theory has revealed the limitations of linear mathematics and, by bold extension, the limitations of a linear, reductionist world view. Edgar Morin's book On Complexity shows how complexity theory—which to my mind is subsuming chaos theory, but that may be because I don't understand either well enough—how complexity theory is likewise exposing the limitations of the reductionist, linear worldview. As Albert-lázló Barabási notes: "we always lived in a connected world, except we were not so much aware of it," mostly because we didn't have the technology to see it. Now we have that technology and the concomitant patterns of mind to see that the Universe is so much more than a reductionist, linear mechanism. It's time to turn this complex networking lens on writing.

And we are turning the network lens on writing, even when we don't recognize it as such. I read just yesterday an article in The Atlantic by Peg Tyre entitled The Writing Revolution, in which Ms. Tyre describes how Principal Deirdre DeAngelis turned around her failing New York high school, New Dorp, by implementing a writing across the curriculum program that placed "an overwhelming focus on teaching the basics of analytic writing, every day, in virtually every class." The result was "an extraordinary blossoming of student potential, across nearly every subject—one that has made New Dorp a model for educational reform." Unfortunately, the article seems to cast this most fortunate development in a return to basics narrative, pitting old-fashioned instructional methods against misguided, New-age methods:

In a profoundly hopeful irony, New Dorp’s re­emergence as a viable institution has hinged not on a radical new innovation but on an old idea done better. The school’s success suggests that perhaps certain instructional fundamentals—fundamentals that schools have devalued or forgotten—need to be rediscovered, updated, and reintroduced. And if that can be done correctly, traditional instruction delivered by the teachers already in classrooms may turn out to be the most powerful lever we have for improving school performance after all.

This is certainly one way to view the New Dorp saga, but not the only way. I prefer to look at New Dorp's story as a success of network thinking. To my mind, New Dorp discovered that its students did not know how to use language to map a complex network of ideas. As one New Dorp teacher noted: "the best-written paragraphs contained complex sentences that relied on dependent clauses like although and despite, which signal a shifting idea within the same sentence," but the 14- and 15-year olds at New Dorp "were missing a crucial understanding of how language works." The students could not generate useful knowledge networks in their minds when they were reading, nor could they generate useful knowledge networks on paper when they were writing, because they did not understand the grammatical and syntactical connectors and connections which arrange words into meaningful patterns. As one student said of her own skills: "I could read, sure. But it was like a sea of words … The more writing instruction I got, the more I understood which words were important.”

Writing is not just a sea of words. It is not simply stringing along a sequence of words, brick by brick, even in grammatically correct ways, until one reaches 500 words, which is what most of my students seem to think writing is. Rather, writing is a mapping of words that interconnect and relate to each other  and to neural networks, social, and physical networks in significant ways. The sequence of words, the proximity of words to other words, the frequency of words, and the repetition of words unfolds the meanings of words, and naive readers and writers miss these dynamic and critical inter-relationships. Naive readers and writers see just a wall of bricks—one word following another in a line. They do not see the unfolding of a sequence of words in a meaningful orchestration of networked patterns. In other words, they do not see the unfolding of a sequence of genes in a strand of DNA that eventually blossoms into a kitten, which in my experience is a most non-linear, chaotic, complex structure, certainly as complex as any James Joyce novel.

Tyre actually captures this network thinking when she quotes Arthur Applebee, the director of the Center on English Learning and Achievement at the University at Albany: “Writing as a way to study, to learn, or to construct new knowledge or generate new networks of understanding [italics added] … has become increasingly rare.” Applebee is correct, I think, and the solution is a rhizomatic program of writing across the curriculum which provides students numerous, persistent, and ubiquitous opportunities to use writing and reading documents as tools for learning. As with any beginners, these opportunities can begin small, just as Tyre describes happened at New Dorp:

In chemistry class in the winter of 2010, [student] Monica DiBella’s lesson on the properties of hydrogen and oxygen was followed by a worksheet that required her to describe the elements with subordinating clauses—for instance, she had to begin one sentence with the word although. 

Although … “hydrogen is explosive and oxygen supports combustion,” Monica wrote, “a compound of them puts out fires.” 

Unless … “hydrogen and oxygen form a compound, they are explosive and dangerous.” 

If … This was a hard one. Finally, she figured out a way to finish the sentence. If … “hydrogen and oxygen form a compound, they lose their original properties of being explosive and supporting combustion.”

This is not the old drill-and-practice and diagramming sentences characteristic of back-to-basics grammar and writing. Rather, this is using writing to map the complex relationships among chemistry concepts. Yes, it begins small, at the sentence level with precise prompts. That's fine. This provides the scaffolding for Monica to begin to construct paragraphs with even more complex networks of ideas, and this helps Monica to become a better writer and a better chemistry student. That sounds like a win-win to me.

WAC: Writing to Learn across the Curriculum

I have the opportunity to design a new writing across the curriculum program for college, and I'm interested to see how I might translate theory into practice. I have been writing for three years now about networking, connectivism, and rhizomatic education, but it has all been rather abstract. So let's see what practice might look like.

Let's start with a statement about writing: writing is a network phenomenon. Writing's first job is to engage, develop, and render explicit internal, neural networks. As Olaf Sporns says, and as I have quoted often enough, "Cognition is a network phenomenon" (Networks of the Brain, 181). Writing is the networking tool that helps me to verbalize my cognition. It helps me to reinforce and reform my cognition. Writing is one of the best tools we have for cultivating thought and translating it into a text that helps the writer to clarify for herself what she means. This is the primary mode of writing that I am using in this blog. I am writing first for myself to explore my thoughts, mostly about networking, connectivism, and rhizomatic structures. I don't mean to insult any who might read this blog—indeed, many have made comments that have greatly helped me to clarify my thinking—but this blog is where I do my thinking and learning. I'm really my own first reader here, and I'm writing this blog first for my learning.

As a tool for learning, writing works in two different directions. First, writing works from the inside out. Writing helps me to engage, shape, and map my thoughts in a recursive probing that I can follow and remember. Writing helps me to make what I know explicit to myself, and that is of inestimable value to me. Once my thoughts are explicit, once they are mapped to a text, then I can interact with them more objectively and systematically than I can if they are just floating about in my head. I can keep my thoughts, remember them, much better and more reliably if they are mapped to words in a document than if I just keep them in my head. I do not mean to denigrate purely mental thought—often I think things through long before I put them in text, and I am aware that much cognition is not even available to the conscious, rational mind—but I want to speak for the added benefits of writing as a supplement to cognition. Writing affords me a conscious engagement with my thoughts that is difficult to get any other way. (This recursive dynamic between the external textual network and the internal neural network is worth much more investigation than I am giving it here, but that's for later.)

Thus as a learning tool, writing works first from the inside out, but it also works from the outside in. As I have experiences—most often through constant reading and conversation with others, but pretty sunsets are also included—I use writing to develop new knowledge networks and to engage my existing networks in different ways. This allows new knowledge to bloom in my mind, and writing about those experiences is a physical process that reinforces and cultivates those new mental blooms in ways that few other activities can do.

In short, writing is a very complex and wonderfully malleable boundary between the networks of knowledge in my mind and the networks of knowledge outside my mind. Writing is one of the key boundaries where knowledge leaks out of me and oozes into me. Writing is like a cell membrane, or the mechanism within the membrane that manages the exchange between the inside and the outside of the organism. It is a zone of engagement. As a tool for building and traversing knowledge networks, writing is one of the best technologies that humanity has invented. Writing makes me smarter and more knowledgeable than I am without writing. I think writing has this benefit for everyone, and I am convinced that the more students write about the things they are learning, the better they will learn those things.

ASIDE: The cell membrane analogy for knowledge exchange is problematic. It suggests too physical an activity. Actually, I don't think there is any physical exchange when I push knowledge into the world or the world pushes knowledge into me. There is no token, no chunk of knowledge, that is passed from you to me and back. Rather, there is an echo of patterns from you to me and back. This is much more like Deleuze and Guattari's concept of decalcomania, in which a pattern in one part of the rhizome (you) is echoed in another part (me) as we encounter each other either physically or via some media such as this blog post. Thus, this echo always happens at some boundary, or some pressing of one structure against another. A text is just such a boundary, or pressing, or zone of engagement. As James Gleick describes so well in his book Chaos: Making a New Science (2008), this boundary is where all the action takes place between or among structures. The boundary is where each structure (my mind and your mind, say) begins to vibrate under the presence of the other, and pattern in the one begins to echo in the other. This echoing of pattern has a definite physical ground, but the physical substrate is not sufficient to explain it.

Anyway, if I am thinking correctly, then the first goal for a writing across the curriculum program should be to enable students to learn more and better. Writing helps students to make better sense of the knowledge networks in their own minds, and it helps to feed those networks with new knowledge from outside.

Why Connectivism?

I've not blogged in over a month, and I have a serious case of disconnection. I'm irritable about it. Really. I'm not so pleasant just now, and I think a large part of it has to do with my loss of connection with my writing, my thoughts, my conversation. Of course, I have good reasons for being disconnected—mostly demands from other connections: family, vacation, a personal blog, work, an election, and more—but those reasons do not ameliorate the dissatisfaction. The only solution is to reconnect. Perhaps a better way to say it is: it's time for me to refire a dormant neuron.

And it occurs to me how differently I think about things now and how I owe much of that difference to this conversation about connectivism.This has been a most important conversation for me, and I'm uncomfortable when I don't exercise it regularly. So what is it that makes connectivism important? If I had to chose one word for you, then I would say networks, networks in both their formal sense as mathematical, scientific structures and their informal sense as rhizomatic, literary structures. I admire and respect the first way to think about networks, but I love the second. The first is a revered teacher, the second a passionate lover. Both aspects of networks have reshaped my thinking about most everything in life, but especially the way I view education and rhetoric. Networking is an archetypal meme that radically changes the way I see my world. For me, this has been big stuff.

I've been reminded from several sources just this past week about the revolution that is occurring all around us as the networking meme (virus might be a better term) spreads. The webzine Edge had a great conversation with Albert-lázló Barabási about thinking in network terms. Barabási notes first that "we always lived in a connected world, except we were not so much aware of it." We became aware of networks as technologies gave us a way of better viewing them. This is the same as our using telescopes to learn that the Earth is but a speck of dust on the outer edge of the Milky Way galaxy. We had always been a speck of dust on a speck of dust, but the telescope helped us to see that. Similarly, we have always been nodes in physical, chemical, biological, social, spiritual, intellectual, rhetorical networks, but it took computers and computer networks for us to appreciate that fact and to address it. Now, as Barabási notes, "We never perceived connectedness as being quantifiable, as being something that we can describe, that we can measure, that we have ways of quantifying the process. That has changed drastically in the last decade, at many, many different levels." New technology has given us the ability to approach rationally a phenomenon that has always been here and sensed on some (usually spiritual or artistic) level, but not quite graspable outside of poetry and prophecy. At last, science has the tools to systematically deal with networking, and it's going to change everything.

The network meme is in the DNA of connectivism. As far as I know, connectivism is the most coherent  and vibrant attempt in educational theory to deal with education as a network structure, and for me, that is connectivism's greatest value. Just as many scholars are doing in physics, chemistry, biology, sociology, mathematics, and other disciplines, connectivism places networking at the core of its methodology and thinking. Networking guides its practice and preaching. Connectivism has converted me, and like the Apostle Paul, I hope to take this new thinking to my home town: Rhetoric. I believe that networking will revolutionize rhetoric and writing instruction.

I'd better start writing. Wow. I do feel better. I hope you do, too.

Agency and the Death of Steve Jobs

A Sunday School Lesson:

The common attitude about Steve Jobs reflects the old view of agency, especially in business: that one person causes things to happen. Most of us so hope that is true, but the reality is that Apple was much more than Steve Jobs and that Jobs could not have done iPads without Apple and Apple could not have done them without Jobs. Steve Jobs became for most people a handy reduction of the complexity of Apple.

The iPad is an emergence of all the parts working at Apple, much like this post, which is an emergence of the billions of underlying calculations and logical processes within my MacBook Pro. Whatever meaning you derive from the words in this post absolutely depends upon the regular mathematical and logical processes at work in the heart of my 2.4 GHz Intel Core i5 processor. These processes are causal: one process leads logically, predictably, and necessarily to the next process.

One might be tempted, then, to extrapolate the causality at work on the processor scale to the social blog post scale. This is a big mistake. The processes at work in my CPU do not cause the meaning that you and I see in this post. Those underlying electronic processes are necessary for meaning to emerge at this scale – a post on our computer screens – but they are not sufficient to explain it. Try it: follow the flow of electrons, translate them into a stream of 1s and 0s, watch as those trillions of 1s and 0s combine, split, store, dump, and interact, and you will never see any evidence – not even a glimmer – of the meaning in this post. You would see a fantastic light show, but you would not see this post or its meaning. You can't get from there to here.

At least not without a gradual process of emergence from network scale to network scale through the rhizome of this blog. The 1s and 0s aggregate into bytes to form letters (and I'm doing a lot of glossing here), but even the letter you think you see on your screen is an emergent entity. You are really looking at millions of pixels interacting in certain ways so that what you accept as letters emerge on your screen. As you see these emergent letters, the vaguest wisps of what we commonly think of as meaning are starting to emerge, but even here at the scale of morpheme and grapheme, you would be hard pressed to actually see the meaning in this post. You cannot find causality even at this nearby scale: morphemes and graphemes are necessary for meaning, but they, too, do not cause meaning. As the morphemes and graphemes aggregate in certain ways into words, then we get closer to our common concept of meaning, but even at this scale – so close at hand – it's very difficult to find the cause of the meaning that we see in this post.

Common meaning does seem to emerge as words aggregate into sentences. Ahh, this is it, we say. Now we have meaning, now we can explain meaning. Perhaps. But just for fun, take any sentence out of this post to stand alone:

At least not without a gradual process of emergence from network scale to network scale through the rhizome of this blog.

I chose the first sentence (yes, I know it is not a complete sentence) of the previous paragraph. It was handy. By itself, it means almost nothing, or almost anything, which is the same thing as far as meaning goes. Of course, it's difficult for you and me to read that sentence outside of the context of this blog post because we've already read it within context, but if you want some small fun, share that sentence with someone who hasn't read this post and see what meaning they make of it. I'm willing to bet not much.

So we have to move up to the paragraph level, then, for meaning to emerge? That helps, but not as much as we might hope. So move up to the post level? That's better, perhaps. If I've written well, then this post might have some hope of standing alone as a meaning-bearing artifact, but really, if you don't also have some sense of this blog in general and of the conversations about emergence, rhizomes, and connectivism, then does this post make much sense? I don't think so. If any of my Composition I students read this, they will not likely understand much of it. And of course, we have not yet considered our own brains and the rhizome of meanings that we each bring to this post. Is that where the meaning is? In our several heads?

The answer – to my mind, at any rate – is quite clear: the meaning isn't in any one of those places. Rather, the meaning is distributed across all the rhizome from the neat march of 1s and 0s in my CPU to the cacophony of conversations across the ages about what it means to mean something. And here's the magic: the more meaning you perceive across the rhizome, then the more meaning you can perceive in any one location.

The meaning of the iPad isn't located in Steve Jobs, either. Rather, the meaning of the iPad is distributed across the rhizome: in the thousands of people across the globe who helped create it to the millions of people who use it and the billions who don't, to those who love it and those who hate it. Steve Jobs is necessary for understanding the iPad, but he is not sufficient. He is part of the DNA of the iPad, just as electronic processes are part of the DNA of this post, but he is not the meaning of the iPad. Rather, the iPad cannot be reduced to Steve Jobs, ultimately not even to Apple. The meaning is distributed throughout the rhizome, and if you want to map that meaning, then you must go know/mad.