Eating Barnes & Noble

You have to start somewhere — the middle seems best.

I was sitting recently in Barnes and Noble scanning some magazines, drinking coffee, but mostly thinking about how there may be only six degrees of separation between me and Angelina Jolie. Think about it: I know someone, who knows someone, who knows someone else, who knows someone else who actually knows someone else who knows — and can contact, that’s important — Angelina Jolie. Just six steps to heaven. That isn’t much distance to cover, and yet, here in Barnes and Noble, I don’t feel quite so connected to Ms. Jolie as this little formula seems to imply. Moreover, I am impressed at how quickly following this six degrees of separation plunges me into utter ignorance.

I, of course, know the first person of the five between Angie and me, but there’s a better than even chance that I don’t know the next, or second, person in the chain. The chances are really slim that I know any of the remaining links. I probably have never heard of these people and will likely never even know of them unless some freakish incident starts a traceable chain reaction leading me to Africa and Angelina. I remember reading somewhere an article that calculated the decreasing odds of knowing the friend of a friend of a friend and so on. I could google the article to provide you the reference, but I’m too depressed. The sweet honey of elation is turning to bile in my mouth. Six degrees, it seems, is sufficient for removing most everyone on Earth from the reach of this little light of mine.

I begin to wonder if this principle holds for most everything else, and the bile rises again. A few examples will suffice, I think.

I am sitting at a table-for-two in a Barnes and Noble in Macon, Georgia, in early 2011. The table has a round top made of some burnt orange, synthetic material mounted to a metal post, itself mounted into a thick, heavy, round metal foot. I can recognize this as a table, and I can use the technology to hold my coffee, my laptop, my magazines, my elbows, and my thoughts about six degrees of separation. If anyone were with me, I could use the table to create a conversational space and to mediate the interaction between myself and the other. I know tables fairly well, having used them all my life. With only one degree of separation between this table and me, I know it much like a friend, even though this particular table and I have only just met.

However, as soon as I introduce a second degree of separation, then my knowledge coarsens. Where did this table originate? Who made it? How did they make it? How did the table get here? I have basic concepts of how a factory might build tables and what that factory might look like and who might work there, I understand how the shipping industry in general works, I understand that corporations bid and buy great quantities of furnishings and other supplies, but these are general concepts which lack the tactile specificity of my knowledge of this particular round, red table. The factory that made this table is, in my mind, a stylized box with stick figure people. Place holders, really, for the reality of organization, production, and materials that I know must lie just behind this table.

If I move one more degree of separation with questions such as where did the raw materials used by the factory come from, then my knowledge becomes even coarser and details vanish altogether. What do I know of oil and steel? I have seen oil wells and petrochemical plants in south Texas and Louisiana, and I once spent a few weeks on a pipe-laying platform in the Gulf of Mexico. Oil comes out of the ground. That must sound stupid to a petrochemical engineer (someone with a formal education comparable to my own), and it must sound incredibly stupid to an oil derrick worker (usually someone with far less formal education than I have), but it's about the best I can do with oil. I think I once saw a steel mill outside Chattanooga, Tennessee, and one summer after high school, I worked in a plant that produced cooking oil. It was my job to puncture the caps and empty the bottles that quality control had deemed unfit to sell. I never learned to distinguish the good bottles from the bad, and anyway, I don’t think this is the right kind of oil for producing business furniture.

See? Just two degrees of separation, and I am in almost total darkness. I am reduced to mumbling to hide my ignorance.

But, I think, perhaps the problem is with tables and manufacturing. After all, I have no great experience, expertise, or training in that field. What about literature? I'm in Barnes & Noble, surrounded by great, less great, and not great literature, and I have worked and trained in this field for a long time.

From my table, I can see the mural above the coffee shop in the corner of this Barnes & Noble. The mural is a stylized scene of a quasi-Parisian café populated with great writers, mostly of the Twentieth-century: Nabokov, Parker, Hemingway, Singer, Faulkner, Miller, Capote, and Williams.

As with my round, red table, I begin on rather solid ground, in a clean, well-lighted place. I know all these authors' first names: Vladimir, Dorothy, Ernest, Isaac, William, Henry (or perhaps Arthur?), Truman, and Tennessee (or perhaps William Carlos?). I have read all of these people — some deeply, some superficially, but all of them and others besides. I have actually met only one of them, however: Isaac Bashevis Singer. I took a couple of creative writing classes with Prof. Singer at the University of Miami in 1981 and 82 when I was working on my doctorate. He has passed away now, but I remember a kindly grandfather figure who could clearly see beyond more than two degrees of separation. He had that genius, that strong a light. I don't seem to have that.

But I did not meet any of the other writers except through their poems and stories and through the countless things written about them, so I lack that tactile specificity that I have even with this round, red table. I have a better sense of their writings. I know well the spare elegance of Hemingway's prose and the labyrinthine elegance of Faulkner's, or the joy of a heart beating against a forest floor and the obsessive, deadly passion of a spinster for her poisoned lover. I have richer understanding in this space, but everywhere I look, I see more shadows than light. I have more questions than I have answers.

I am an old man sitting in a clean, well-lighted place, but the light does not extend far. Or rather, it extends just far enough to let me know how much darkness is out there.

You have to stop somewhere — the middle seems best.

Beatles vs Stones: Google Gives the Facts

I know Google takes some hits in the press from those who fear that the company is taking over the world, but for what I pay them — which so far has been zero — I think they are a wonderful company that has offered the world some extremely valuable resources, often at no cost. I'm playing now with Ngram Viewer, one of their latest freebies, and within 10 minutes, it has helped me resolve one of the longest running intellectual questions of my generation: who was the greatest rock band: the Beatles or the Rolling Stones?

At last I have some hard evidence to counter the silly, often drunken or stoned (pun intended) opinions of those who thought the Stones were the greatest. Clearly, the Beatles are the top rock band ever. And not only do they beat-le the Stones, but they also beat-le Elvis and Michael Jackson. You want proof? I got proof.

Ngram accesses a huge database of about 500 billion words printed over the past 200 years. As the New York Times reports: "Google has made a mammoth database culled from nearly 5.2 million digitized books available to the public for free downloads and online searches, opening a new landscape of possibilities for research and education in the humanities." Using Ngram Viewer, anyone — a 4th grader, for instance — can research the frequency of terms and phrases within a body of literature for a given time period. I chose to look at English between 1950 and 2000 to see how often the Beatles were mentioned, especially in comparison to the Stones, Elvis, and Michael Jackson. As you can clearly see in the graph below, the Beatles are mentioned far more than the other performers.

The Beatles vs the Pretenders

Despite the dip in the mid-70s after their breakup, the Beatles never lost prominence over their rivals. I conclude, then, that the Beatles were culturally more important and more prominent than the Stones, Elvis, or Michael Jackson. To my mind, that makes them the greatest rock band.

I did a bit more research in Ngram Viewer and discovered that John Lennon was wrong when he said in 1966 that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus Christ and that Christianity would fade away. As you can see below, Jesus Christ is far more prominent in the literature than the Beatles or any of the others or all of them together. Jesus Christ is the Superstar, at least in this analysis, and the Beatles are a far distant second.

Jesus Christ vs the Pretenders

And I did all of this in about 10 minutes. Really. Using Google's Ngram Viewer to access their database of 5.6 million books and over 500 billion words, I was able to generate an enlightening view into the long, strange journey that we've all been on since my birth in 1951.

Thanks, Google.

And what does this have to do with complexity and critical thinking? Well, just a quick note: aggregation is one of the keys to critical thinking. You must be able to gather data from a wide range of sources to have a chance of capturing the complexity of any slice of reality. And then you must be able to slice and dice that data to look at it from a variety of perspectives to illuminate it, to inform it, to give it meaning. Ngram Viewer gives us access to a collection of data that none of us could have ever hoped to have access on our own, and it gives us a tool that allows us to manipulate that data in ways that highlight and clarify it without ever destroying the context from which it comes. This is very powerful.

What's Wrong with Critical Thinking?

In my last post — sad to say, over a month ago — I began the process of questioning whether or not my writing about complex thought was loose and vague. To my mind, it is not. However, I do believe that it is a bit too abstract, and I wish to bring it down to earth, to the specific classroom, to specific people trying to learn specific things.

My colleagues and I in Albany State's QEP program have just spent two months talking about how to integrate critical thinking into the college classroom. We ended the discussion with a specific deliverable: a statement about critical thinking for our QEP syllabi that would be intuitively obvious to the average college student, accompanied with an evaluation rubric that detailed how we teachers intended to assess the students' use of critical thinking in the class. I think all of us were surprised by the intractability of the issue. We found it quite difficult to identify just what we meant by the term critical thinking for our own specific classes, and we never did arrive at a single definition that satisfied all of us. We also had difficulty finding language for the students.

However, all of our various definitions of critical thinking shared the common assumption that critical thinking is the function of a single mind acting upon ideas, arguments, and evidence with the intention of clarifying, ordering, and assessing them. We accepted the Cartesian separation between subject/knower and object/known and the resultant reductionism and fragmentation of knowledge that separation leads to. I am dissatisfied with this consequence of our work, and I want to explore Morin's ideas about how to develop complex thought.

In his short book Homeland Earth, Morin calls for a reform in thinking as a necessary precursor to saving humanity and our planet. He grounds his shift in thinking in very practical terms and towards very practical goals, and his example may be useful to me. First, I am attracted to his discussion of the problems with the scientific and technical systems of thought that have dominated much of the world and almost all of the Academy for the past three hundred years. According to Morin, reductionist, fragmented thinking has given rise to specialization of knowledge, along with the subsequent specialization of research, work, business, and too much else of life. This specialization abstracts knowledge from its context, essentially removing it from that which gives it meaning. The bit of abstracted knowledge becomes incredibly clear in its isolation, but also increasingly meaningless. As Morin says:

Specialization abs-tracts, that is, it extracts an object from a given field, rejects the links and interconnections with its environment, and inserts it in the abstract conceptual zone of the compartmentalized discipline, whose boundaries arbitrarily break the systemicity (the relation of a part to the whole) and the multidimensionality of phenomena. It leads to mathematical abstraction that splits itself off from the concrete, in part by favoring everything that is calculable and formalizable and for the rest by ignoring the context necessary for the intelligibility of its objects (123, 124).

Thus, a discipline such as economics, "which is the most advanced of the social sciences in terms of mathematics, is the most socially and humanly backward of the sciences, as it abstracts itself from the social, historical, political, psychological, and ecological conditions that are inseparable from economic activities" (124). The resulting blindness and incompetence with the economy, Morin insists, is a major problem for our world. The skin-on-skin exchange of money in a business transaction cannot be reduced simply to numbers and cannot be separated from the psychological, social, environmental, and spiritual context in which one person meets another person to trade money for a good or a service.

Of course, it is easy to see this same blindness and incompetence in education. The visceral engagement of a student with her world in order to learn about that world cannot be reduced to a number or letter grade and cannot be separated from the psychological, social, environmental, economic, and spiritual context in which that student engages her world. Meaningful learning for the student depends both on the discrete, individual chunk of knowledge engaged AND on the links and interconnections that embed that chunk of knowledge into an ecosystem along with the student. And this embedding into an ecosystem is complex as it extends equally into the external ecosystem, the world, and the internal ecosystem, our bodies, especially our brains. This complex embedding results in each of us being embedded into the world through our learning, and the more we learn, the more we are embedded into — not separated from — the world we are learning. We ingest our learning, literally into our guts and brains, and through that learning, the world ingests us.

The problem I see with critical thinking is that it mostly encourages and serves this reductionist, fragmented way of thinking. The role of analysis, for instance, is to reduce any issue or thing into its constituent parts, to separate those parts, to clarify them, and to arrange them logically. This makes great sense, as I have said in an earlier post, and can provide genuine insight, but ultimately it leads to what Morin calls a blind knowledge. This is most easily seen in the biology class as the professor dissects an anesthetized but still live frog into its constituent parts, naming each, describing its functions, and telling how it fits into the other parts. All the while, the professor is blind to the fact that the frog is no longer a frog. It was no longer a frog the moment it was removed from its frog ecosystem. There is so much more to know about the frog than its weight. And we can see this same reductionism at work in the literature class as the professor dissects an anesthetized but still live sonnet into its constituent parts, naming each, describing its functions, and telling how it fits into the other parts. Again, the professor is blind to the fact that the sonnet is no longer a sonnet. It was no longer a sonnet the moment it was removed from its sonnet ecosystem. There is so much more to know about a sonnet than the name of its author and its meter and rhyme scheme.

Now, am I attacking analysis? No, I am not. Analysis is incredibly useful and can provide genuine insight into both frogs and sonnets. As Morin notes, "thinking that compartmentalizes, divides, and isolates allows the specialists and experts to be very effective in their compartments and to cooperate efficiently in noncomplex areas of knowledge, especially those having to do with the functioning of artificial machines" (124,125). However, by itself, analysis can lead only to blind knowledge that has incredible acuity and efficacy within a very narrow discipline, but that is benignly meaningless or randomly harmful in life with all its rich, complex, and unpredictable interconnections and interactions. We need a complex critical thinking that can reconnect the products of our analyses into the interconnected, rich ecosystems of mind and world. In my next post, I want to explore what some of those kinds of thinking might be.

Gaps Between Galaxies: Learning in MOOCs

(I started this post, then published it unfinished. My apologies to any who saw that unfinished, briefly published post. I know better.)

I involved myself in a wonderful conversation over at Dave Cormier's blog about #PLENK2010 and PLEs, and I want to reflect on that experience and draw some lessons for myself. Also I want to move my comments back to my blog and not clutter Dave's blog, though the links are still here if anyone wants.

First, I think that such conversation is among the best things that can happen in a MOOC (massively open online course) such as PLENK 2010. The organized sessions and the prepared spaces on the wiki are also quite beneficial and educational, but nothing quite matches the spontaneous learning that happens in these open web spaces. Deep space, the gaps between galaxies, that's where the best learning is for me.

As often happens in such conversations, we conversants formed some agreements and some disagreements. While I found the agreements satisfying and validating [I'll have to explore later the role of agreement in supporting knowledge formation], I found the disagreements more stimulating, as they forced me to look again at my thoughts. I think that agreement can sometimes close a discussion too early. The main complaint that grabbed my attention was that Dave and I were engaging in a bit of hand-waving and loose talk about the nature of PLEs, which I interpret to mean that we had slipped into arcane, esoteric pedantry at best or into sloppy writing at worst. So I looked back at the conversation and found that it still struck me as relatively clear writing (writing can ALWAYS be clearer) about an important issue. So what was I to make of the complaint? Why did three seemingly bright people NOT see the same issue in the same way, consider the same evidence and arrive at the same conclusions?

It occurs to me that this is a fine illustration of the kind of rhizomatic learning that I have been trying to talk about. Let me explore this with the help of a metaphor: people and groups as galaxies. PLENK 2010 is a massively large galaxy (a rhizome) composed of 1,500 people, massive content, the Internet, computers, languages, theories, and so on. I visualize it as a galaxy not from on high, as a god might, but from the inside, as I do the Milky Way. Moreover, each of those 1,500 people and other points of light (content, Net, etc.) is itself a galaxy just as large as PLENK 2010, or larger.

To my mind, this is not loose talk. This metaphor is quite pointed (in the complex way that all metaphors are pointed) in addressing a misconception that most of us struggle under: what Edgar Morin calls the simplified thought of reduction and disjunction. We are in the habit of speaking of people or knowledges as single things, closed units, when we know that they are not. Each person is a complex constellation of physical and mental points, each of which is also a complex constellation of yet other points, and each of which is a point within some other complex constellation of points. This is a fractal, complex way of envisioning reality, and it is quite scientific and hard-headed. Quite concrete. And yet quite foreign to the way we've been thinking for the past several hundred years of scientific positivism and reductionism.

Actually, this complex view of people and classes seems to account best for the confusion many expressed when first trying to engage PLENK 2010. They seemed to view PLENK 2010 as a massive field of stars, a galaxy, that at first seems like so much white noise, an undifferentiated background. They frantically look for a Northstar to get their bearings, and if they don't find one, they panic. This is where Dave Cormier's advice about clustering comes in handy. When approaching a new galaxy, we must pick a point of light or two and map to those to see if there is a match to any points in ourselves. If not, we move on until we find some points that map. We then connect with what we can recognize. We anchor to a couple of points of light: to people, concepts, theories, or interesting conversations. It hardly matters what so long as we anchor. If we never find those anchors, then we fall away (as many seem to) and turn our attention back to the other galaxies (rhizomes) to which we are already linked: work, family, etc. etc.

But if we can and do anchor, then we change the galaxy, the rhizome, to which we anchor. In this case, we change PLENK 2010. As we come to know it, map to it, it comes to know us, or map to us. We change the group, and the group changes us. To use other metaphors, we exchange energy and DNA and fluids. Or as I said so loosely before: “The individual learns from the environment, and the environment learns from the individual. In the interplay, they shape and reshape each other, learn and relearn from each other, teach and reteach each other.” This is precisely what happened in this conversation on Dave's blog. This happens all the time among cells, and it happens to us as cells in a society, or a class. To quote perhaps too much from Morin:

The intelligibility of the system has to be found, not only in the system itself, but also in its relationship with the environment, and … this relationship is not a simple dependence: it is constitutive of the system. … This connection is absolutely crucial epistemologically, methodologically, theoretically, and empirically. Logically, the system cannot be understood except by including the environment. The environment is at the same time intimate and foreign: it is a part of the system while remaining exterior to it. … Theoretically and empirically, the concept of an open system opens the door to a theory of evolution, that can only come from the interaction of system and eco-system … In other words, it is a theory of living systems. (On Complexity, 11)

To my mind, then, education is a theory of living systems, and as such, it must include both the individual system and the eco-system, considered together as a meta-system, both dependent on the other and both autonomous. Morin is, of course, approaching his topic in the above quote from the point of view of the individual system (person, cell, star, whatever). Later, he adds that the eco-system cannot be understood except in terms of its included systems. In short, a learning theory must account for the individual system (the learner) and the eco-system (the world), and it must account for the complex interaction between the two, or among the many, to be more precise. It must account for the knowledge within the system and the eco-system and how the interplay (including the random and the black swans) within the eco-system changes the knowledge flowing in both systems and eco-system.

As near as I can tell, Connectivism has as good a chance of explaining this kind of complex learning as any learning theory that I know of, and that is why I'm attracted to it. Finally, it's this kind of complex learning that interests me. While behaviorism has taught me a few things about learning, in the end, if learning is no more than stimulus-response, then let computers do it. They don't get bored.

I suspect that I'll continue to write about this, but I have a paper to finish for publication. Later, scholars, and thanks for the wonderful ride. And special thanks to Dave Cormier and Scott Leslie.

Complexity and Personal Learning Environments

In a recent post to Dave's Educational Blog, Dave Cormier made a number of comments about MOOCs (massively open online courses) in general, #PLENK2010 in particular, and personal learning networks/environments. Most of what he had to say was, as usual, quite insightful and very much in line with the way I tend to think about these issues, but he expressed a rather forceful caveat about the phrase personal learning environment (PLE). In short, he does not like its potential emphasis on the personal, or individual learner distinct from the group. He says:

It is easy to see the transition to PLE as the ‘rebel yell’ of education. The splitter leaving the fold to strike out on their own to a place where they can make their own decisions, commune with knowledge on their own terms, thank you very much, and not be under the evil yoke of a power mongering educator and not have to suffer the ignominy of working in groups with other classmates. The lone learning warrior, learning on their own, without guidance. It is an easy vision to have as the discussion around PLEs is often put in opposition to LMSs and this often degenerates to “institution bad, learn on your own”. While this is a very interesting debate, it is not the same as the debate around learners managing their own learning content.

I see learning as a social activity. I don’t care if you’re engaging with dead white men in a book, it’s still a conversation. (albeit one sided in that case) The problem with the PLE (when contrasted with the LMS) is that it can easily move the focus to THE LEARNER and not THE LEARNERS. In this way the move from LMS to PLE can be seen as a move from with people, to without people. We don’t learn much alone. We need to keep the focus of the discussion on the disaggregation of power, not the disaggregation of people.

I appreciate his concern that the debate around this phrase "can easily move the focus to THE LEARNER and not THE LEARNERS' and his conviction that "we don't learn much alone," though I worry that he overstates his case. I think most educators recognize "the lone learning warrior" as a romantic myth somewhat akin to the myth of the starving poet, scribbling away in his lonely garret overlooking the smokey rooftops of Paris, plumbing the depths of the human soul in a fearless and solitary obscurity. If such creatures exist, then they are such black swans as to be outside the theories of either learning or writing. They are gunslingers, high plains drifters, steppenwolves, and like black swans, we cannot account for them.

Dave is right that we do not learn much alone, at least not until we have gained sufficient learning apparatus and context (language, heuristics, concepts, worldview, etc) from our group that we can begin to make some discoveries on our own, and even then, we almost always take this somewhat solitary learning back to the group for verification and validation. However, I think his efforts to avoid defining learning as primarily the work of an individual (the personal in personal learning environment) has blinded him to the rich and complex potential of the phrase personal learning environment, and I'd like to offer an alternative reading that explores that complexity and avoids reducing learning to the exercise of a single, solitary, individual mind. My discussion here is informed by Edgar Morin's short book On Complexity (2008), and I am perhaps as much trying to understand Morin as I am trying to illuminate personal learning environments. Complexity has its rewards.

If I understand Dave correctly, then he is arguing against the tendency to reduce learning to the exercise of a solitary brain. This tendency is shared by many learning theories which view learning as something that happens within each individual. Behaviorism focuses on the change in the behavior of the individual, and even social constructivism places learning in the minds of the individuals of the social group.  Most learning theories tend to see learning as some operation an individual mind performs on the external world of objects, internalizing ideas, concepts, behaviors, or patterns that existed independently in the objective world. These theories, in turn, are institutionalized in an educational system that issues individual grades to individual students, and those educational institutions are couched in a culture that preaches and rewards individual achievement, as if Bill Gates alone was Microsoft.

If Edgar Morin is correct, then this tendency to reductionism is part of a scientific habit of mind, or paradigm, that we have inherited from Descartes. "Descartes formulated this master paradigm of Western civilization by disjoining the thinking subject … and the thing being thought of … and by positing 'clear and distinct' ideas as principles of reality" (3). Science has bought into this paradigm of simplicity, and the results have been stunning, in all the connotations of that word. As Morin says: "This paradigm has dominated the adventure of Western thought since the seventeenth century. It has without doubt allowed for very great progress in scientific knowledge and in philosophical reflection. Its ultimately noxious consequences did not begin to become clear until the twentieth century" (3).

For Morin, this reductionist tendency works in two ways, both quite familiar to us today: we either reduce reality to a collection of discrete parts, logically arranged, and logically interacting (scientists do this) or we reduce reality to a unified New Age Whole, Gaia, the Force, God, or the Big Soup (spiritualists do this). In terms of personal learning networks, we either reduce learning to the personal and lose sight of the network, or we reduce learning to the network and lose sight of the personal. For most of us, reality is either/or: either all interacting parts (a unified field theory) or one big, vibrating w/hole (a different unified field theory). A thing is either this or that, but not both; either here or there, but not both.

Morin says that both reductions are too simple to account for the complexity of reality. Rather, we need to keep both in mind. We must replace the connectors either/or with and/and/and. To my mind, this line of thinking is strongly reminiscent of Deleuze and Guattari's complaint against arborescent thinking in A Thousand Plateaus (1987): "One becomes two [Unity and Parts]: whenever we encounter this formula … what we have before us is the most classical and well reflected, oldest, and weariest kind of thought. Nature doesn't work that way" (5). For D&G, reality is a rhizomatic multiplicity, and "multiplicities are rhizomatic, and expose arborescent pseudomultiplicities for what they are. There is no unity to serve as a pivot in the object or to divide in the subject. … A multiplicity has neither subject nor object, only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions" (8).

Perhaps a simple (too simple) illustration is in order.  I'm an English teacher, so this example comes easily to mind.
Consider the period (punctuation mark) at the end of this sentence --> . I made it big and supplied an arrow so that you would notice it; otherwise, you might not. We can address this period as a discrete element of punctuation, a subset of grammar, itself a subset of semantics. It has a name, period, which gives it a unique identity. It has a definition, a role, a verifiable existence. Clearly, a period has scientific meaning as an entity all unto itself. It is an individual.

Yet, all by itself, its meaning is trivial to the point of meaninglessness. On a line by itself, it's just a silly little dot:

.

Ahh, we say, right! The period means nothing as an individual. Only the whole sentence/paragraph/post/blog (whatever holistic level you wish to use) has meaning. And so we merge the period into the whole, and again we see that it becomes meaningless (it also raises hell with spell check and word wrap):

Considertheperiod(punctuationmark)attheendofthessentence.Imadeitbigandsuppliedanarrowsothatyouwouldnoticeit;otherwise,youmightnot.wecanaddressthisperiodasadiscreteelementofpunctuation,asubsetofgrammar,itselfasubsetofsemantics.ithasaname,period,whichgivesitauniqueidentity.ithasadefinition,arole,averifiableexistence.clearlyaperiodhasscientificmeaningasanentityalluntoitself.itisanindividual.


Obviously, reduction of the period into either scientific objectivism or holistic subjectivism (or any other duality you choose) destroys the meaning of the period. We must see the period as both itself and as a part of the whole. Both these simple views are at times expedient and even enlightening, yet if they become the only approach to the period, then we lose the meaning. In Morin's terms, we lose the complex reality of even something so relatively un-complex (I won't say simple) as a punctuation mark. According to Morin, individuals must have a complex autonomy based on dependence rather than freedom. We must see that the period emerges from the ecosystem of language. Though it draws its energy and structure from printed language as a whole, it must maintain its integrity as a period. It cannot droop into a , or rise into an i. The individual and the whole have a recursive reciprocity that defines them both. The period defines the paragraph, which defines the period, which defines the paragraph, and so on, back and forth.


Brains are like this. They are composed of neurons, all of which must remain individually unique, and yet all of which must be organized into a functioning brain. By itself, a neuron is almost as meaningless as a period, though not as un-complex. And if enough neurons join together into enough brain, then mind or consciousness emerges out of the interplay between micro and macro. This is where the magic happens, and as of yet, we do not have the language that captures this complexity. Still, reducing mind either to the interplay of discrete neurons in the brain or to some cosmic consciousness or Soul misses the complex, concrete reality of mind.


So what does all this have to do with personal learning environment? I'm so glad you asked. I was beginning to think I'd never get there.


Learning as simply a personal activity or as simply a group activity misses the complex reality of learning. Though it can be helpful to look at either the individual or the group, learning is the interplay of the individual with her environment. The individual learns from the environment, and the environment learns from the individual. In the interplay, they shape and reshape each other, learn and relearn from each other, teach and reteach each other.


Thus, as personal learning environment suggests, learning is framed by personal and environment and cannot exist without both. Another way to interpret this phrase is that learning is one of those activities that joins the individual to his environment. Or perhaps a better way to say this is that learning describes a particular kind of interplay, a particular dance, between the individual and the environment. And if that isn't complex enough, then imagine that all six and a half billion humans are all engaged in a similar dance—each with her own nuance, steps, rhythms, intensities, or determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions—world without end, one hell of a whopper rhizome.


The problem, of course, is that we don't have much language yet to talk intelligently about this kind of complexity. Our notions of critical thinking (interpretation, analysis, evaluation, inference, explanation, self-regulation, and so on) are all pretty much individual mental exercises aimed at reducing complexity to simple clarity. We need new ways to examine and think about complex, rhizomatic structures. Morin mentions three ways to think, or principles, that help us approach the complex: a dialogic principle (dia-logic), the principle of organizational recursion, and the holographic principle (by which I think he means what I would call fractal). Deleuze and Guattari mention cartography and decalcomania. I was pleased in our Elluminate session yesterday (Wed, 2010 Oct 06) when George Siemens spoke about mapping learning and knowledge to real life and listed resonance, synchronicity, wayfinding, amplification, and learning/knowledge symmetry aspects of connectivist learning. I don't know if he intends them as critical (or perhaps higher order) thinking skills, but they resonate with me that way. Recognizing and engaging pockets of resonance in an environment seems to be a critical thinking skill needed for mapping the rhizome.


Anyway, I think Cormier would do well to reconsider and find another way to read personal learning environments.

Critical Thinking and Blind Intelligence

I have real concerns about the ability of traditional, Western critical thinking heuristics to be sufficient for negotiating the rhizome, any rhizome.

My primary issue is that all of the CT heuristics that I've found in my research are limited to one mind: mine or yours, but not to both. Critical thinking seems to be a function of the solitary mind as it contemplates and analyzes the separate universe. Most of the scholars I've read so far tacitly assume that critical thinking is a set of operations performed by a discrete subject, the Knower, upon discrete objects, the Known, buying into what Edgar Morin calls the "paradigm of simplification." Morin says that Descartes created this paradigm by "disjoining the thinking subject … and the thing being thought of" (On Complexity, 3). This paradigm of simple thought has "dominated the adventure of Western thought since the seventeenth century" and "has without doubt allowed for very great progress in scientific knowledge and in philosophical reflection" (3); yet, according to Morin, it has led us to a blind intelligence that "destroys unities and totalities" … that "isolates all objects from their environment" … and that "cannot conceive of the inseparable link between the observer and the observed" (4). Simple thought has created a pathology of knowing that is taking a "cruel toll on human phenomena" (5), and as Morin concludes about this "mutilating, one-dimensional vision:"

The inability to conceive of the complexity of anthroposocial reality, both in its micro dimension (the individual being), and in its macro dimension (the planetary collectivity of humanity), has led us to infinite tragedies. … Political strategy requires complex knowing, because strategy plays itself out by working with and against uncertainty, chance, the multiple play of interactions and retroactions (feedback loops). (5)

I like little metaphors when I'm trying to think through an idea, and to my mind, this mode of thought is akin to dissecting a frog, a live frog. If I am skillful enough with my scalpel—my analytical reason—I can neatly divide the frog into its constituent parts, reducing it to a collection of discrete, identifiable, and classifiable parts that will, in fact, help me understand the way the parts fit together and function in frogs, but along the way, of course, I've killed the frog, and I have no skill in putting it back together. This putting back together is not a trivial issue (certainly not for the frog). Moreover, the clean, hierarchical, explicit order that I imposed upon the frog's parts is not only useless for trying to reassemble the spaghetti-mess harmony that had been the living frog, but the hierarchical structure appears to work against reassembly.

This reminds me that for Deleuze & Guattari hierarchical thinking is a type of overcoding of reality that attempts to force all the relevant points of an object into neat little rows, each point occupying one, and only one, neat little place. As D& G note: "A rhizome or multiplicity [such as a frog, or a universe] never allows itself to be overcoded, never has available a supplementary dimension over and above its number of lines, that is, over and above the multiplicity of numbers attached to those lines" (9). I see critical thinking as an overcoding, in this sense, as blind intelligence. Intelligence, yes. Blind, yes. Therefore, of limited use for approaching rhizomatic reality.

Critical Thinking: A Definition

I've started thinking much about critical thinking in preparation for a series of workshops that we are doing at my school, so of course, I asked myself what critical thinking has to do with life in the rhizome. As is almost always the case, I'm finding connections, but then, isn't that what the rhizome is all about? The very first characteristic of the rhizome as described by DnG is: any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be (7).

The first connection that I want to explore is the role of critical thinking in cartography and decalcomania, the two mapping heuristics that DnG discuss. I think that these have been the two most difficult principles of rhizomatics for me. Perhaps critical thinking will give me a way to wrap my head around these concepts.

Let me start with a definition of critical thinking, not such a trivial task, as I have found out. Critical thinking tends to be one of those catch-all terms that everyone uses, nodding to each other in presumed agreement, while meaning slightly or totally different things. To my mind, critical thinking is a cluster of mental heuristics that increase my chances of reasonably and scientifically observing some slice of the world and deciding what to do or to believe about what I observe. Critical thinking helps me more skillfully respond to my world. What are these mental heuristics? I've found several lists, but the 1990 Delphi Report from the American Philosophical Association (Critical Thinking: A Statement of Expert Consensus for Purposes of Educational Assessment and Instruction) provides perhaps as solid a starting point as we are likely to get. The Executive Summary of APA's Delphi Report says:

• We understand critical thinking to be purposeful, self-regulatory judgment which results in interpretation, analysis, evaluation, and inference, as well as explanation of the evidential, conceptual, methodological, criteriological, or contextual considerations upon which that judgment is based. CT is essential as a tool of inquiry. As such, CT is a liberating force in education and a powerful resource in one's personal and civic life. While not synonymous with good thinking, CT is a pervasive and self-rectifying human phenomenon. The ideal critical thinker is habitually inquisitive, well-informed, trustful of reason, open-minded, flexible, fair- minded in evaluation, honest in facing personal biases, prudent in making judgments, willing to reconsider, clear about issues, orderly in complex matters, diligent in seeking relevant information, reasonable in the selection of criteria, focused in inquiry, and persistent in seeking results which are as precise as the subject and the circumstances of inquiry permit. Thus, educating good critical thinkers means working toward this ideal. It combines developing CT skills with nurturing those dispositions which consistently yield useful insights and which are the basis of a rational and democratic society.

They later list 6 primary skills with sub-skills:

Critical Thinking Skills
Interpretation	Categorization Decoding Significance Clarifying Meaning
Analysis	Examining Ideas Identifying Arguments Analyzing Arguments
Evaluation	Assessing Claims Assessing Arguments
Inference	Querying Evidence Conjecturing Alternatives Drawing Conclusions
Explanation	Stating Results Justifying Procedures Presenting Arguments
Self-Regulation	Self-examination Self-correction

This is a fairly workable list and grouping, but a tighter grouping is provided by Sohindar Sachdev in the book Critical Thinking Through Technology in Science and Mathematics Education (2001). Sachdev groups 19 different critical thinking skills into three categories:

1. Interpretive Reasoning - "the cognitive processes by which we begin to understand the information that has been remembered or observed."
2. Strategic Reasoning - "the cognitive process by which we develop the conclusion provided by interpretive reasoning."
3. Adaptive Reasoning - "the cognitive process by which we extend the knowledge beyond the criteria established by strategic reasoning."

Of course, I immediately see ways that I differ from these definitions. I start my critical thinking with observation, which neither of these definitions seem to do. To my mind, observation is an interpretive act, and if you are not observing in some systematic, critical way, then you are likely to see or not see most anything. But I don't choose to quibble about this just now. I think the above definitions of critical thinking form a useful starting point for my thinking about critical thinking, so I'm willing to see how far this boat will row.

In short, then, critical thinking is one way that I increase my chances for coming to know my world and positioning myself within it. If I think with some skill and grace, then I will better align with the world and make my way through it. As I mentioned in my previous post about the work of becoming an individual, "you work out the meaning of your life by the constant positioning, realignment, connecting and reconnecting of yourself with all the other selves in the rhizome." Critical thinking is one of the ways that we position, realign, connect, and reconnect ourselves with the world. It can be a fine way. It is the academic way, the path of Western intellectualism and science. Is it a rhizomatic way? I have my suspicions, but more on that later.