Spinning Mind through Online Social Connections

My mind is spinning. I wish I could have more hands, time to blog about so many projects, ideas, insights and encounters I’ve had in just one day. As I cannot change reality, I’ll just jot down snippets of what I’ve seen around.

Web 2.0 Wednesdays

Here they come again with a wonderful idea. Michele Martin, one of our fantastic mentors in the Comment Challenge, has listened to the group and will start tomorrow a Web 2.0 Wednesdays. This is the idea:

Each Wednesday I’m going to post a Web 2.0 activity for you to try. If you have the time and inclination to do so, then please join in. If you don’t–the activity just doesn’t do it for you or you’re too busy with other thing or whatever–then don’t worry about it. Wait until the next time. This is not, repeat NOT, something to put on your “to do” list and feel badly if you don’t get to. I don’t want to read any posts that say “I’m behind on the Web 2.0 Wednesday activity,” because it’s not meant to be that kind of thing. Seriously. This is low pressure learning.

This sounds just a perfect follow up to the interactions, connections that were started during the Comment Challenge month. However, what’s best is that anyone can join with no pressure at all, just the fun of being learning and sharing discoveries with others. So, why don’t you join us?
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Digging Diigo – Exploring Online Social Bookmarking

It’s a wonderful learning opportunity and a great pleasure to have been invited by Gladys Baya, the creator of the learningwithcomputers group, to moderate a month on a topic that might interest the group. I chose bookmarking. In fact, I was going to talk about delicious, which I was familiar with, but Diigo allured me in a good, social sense. So, Susana Canelo and I took the plunge and started yesterday to dig Diigo with the learningwithcomputers members.
http://learningwithcomputers07.pbwiki.com/online_bookmarking
It’s already in full swing. Members are joining our Diigo group, interacting and actively participating in the forum. This opportunity pushes me to further explore collectively the limitless possibilities of creating meaning in a group thro
ugh the connections between links, tags and brilliant minds. A challenge!
Anyone is more than welcome to join us there.
Diigo LearningwithComputers Group
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The Rhizomatic Model of Learning

Today I attended to a crowded online presentation by Dave Cormier. I was really interested in listening to what he had to say a
s I read his article in Innovate, Community as Curriculum. What he talks about is exactly what I see happening in the two amazing Communities of and for Practice I’m part of, the Webheads and the LearningwithComputers groups.

A rhizomatic plant has no center and no defined boundary; rather, it is made up of a number of semi-independent nodes, each of which is capable of growing and spreading on its own, bounded only by the limits of its habitat (Cormier 2008). In the rhizomatic view, knowledge can only be negotiated, and the contextual, collaborative learning experience shared by constructivist and connectivist pedagogies is a social as well as a personal knowledge-creation process with mutable goals and constantly negotiated premises.

He goes on with his views on the nature of online learning.

In the rhizomatic
model of learning, curriculum is not driven by predefined inputs from experts; it is constructed and negotiated in real time by the contributions of those engaged in the learning process. This community acts as the curriculum, spontaneously shaping, constructing, and reconstructing itself and the subject of its learning in the same way that the rhizome responds to changing environmental conditions.

I see this happening all the time with the webheads and learningwithcomputers circles. The group, the connections, and interactions shape the construction of meaning. Members suggest, test, explore, discover, make sense, create meaning, build knowledge. There’s no expert. There’s a collective willingness to learn and explore and from this point everyone is prompted to contribute. What the group wants to learn shapes the kind of knowledge the group will get. I guess this is exactly Dave’s point of contextual knowledge.

However, I still feel it’s so distant from my physical reality…In my school, most of educators have no clue of the potential the virtual world holds in sharing, building, re-shaping, mixing and remixing concepts, ideas, meaning. I feel part of an utopia totally disconnected from what I see happening to education in general. This question was asked to Dave, but I think there’s no simple answer:
How would learners and educators be engaged in the rhizomatic model of learning?
My head is spinning!
Cormier, D. 2008. Rhizomatic education: Community as curriculum. Innovate 4 (5). http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=550 (accessed June 17, 2008)