{"id":96,"date":"2014-01-22T15:53:05","date_gmt":"2014-01-22T15:53:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/impedagogy.com\/wp\/?p=96"},"modified":"2014-01-22T15:54:59","modified_gmt":"2014-01-22T15:54:59","slug":"i-have-seen-this-somewhere-before-no-wait-dont-tell-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/impedagogy.com\/wp\/blog\/2014\/01\/22\/i-have-seen-this-somewhere-before-no-wait-dont-tell-me\/","title":{"rendered":"I Have Seen This Somewhere Before, (No, Wait . Don’t Tell Me.)"},"content":{"rendered":"

I am swamped and I am reading how others <\/a>are swamped<\/a>.\u00a0 I am tempted to call this cognitive dissonance, but I don’t think that concept catches or carries the embodiment that is #rhizo14.\u00a0 Instead,\u00a0 I have been trying to process just like Agent J in MIB<\/strong><\/a>:<\/p>\n

\"Searching<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/object><\/p>\n

This morning I remembered.\u00a0 I had been in this neighborhood before.\u00a0 How could I have forgotten?\u00a0 What I remembered was an astonishing blog post by one of my favorite web iconoclasts, Venkatesh Rao<\/a>.\u00a0 I have been dogging his blog, ribbonfarm<\/a>, for many years.\u00a0 I have been slowing reading and re-reading his book Tempo <\/a>for almost as long. What I remembered was his take<\/a> on James C. Scott\u2019s<\/a> concept of ‘legibility’.\u00a0 Scott argues that the state in order to\u00a0 carry forth its institutional imperatives (taxation, for example) takes complexity either in nature or in society and reduces it to counable and manageable chunks.\u00a0 The picture below speaks volumes more than I could.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>(\u201cA Big Little Idea Called Legibility.\u201d\u00a0 Web. 22 Jan. 2014.)<\/p>\n

Rao uses an example from Stephen Johnson to elaborate on the concept:<\/p>\n

In Mind Wide Open<\/a>, <\/em>Steven Johnson\u2019s entertaining story of his experiences subjecting himself to all sorts of medical scanning technologies, he describes his experience with getting an fMRI scan. Johnson tells the researcher that perhaps they should start by examining his brain\u2019s baseline reaction to meaningless stimuli. He naively suggests a white-noise pattern as the right starter image. The researcher patiently informs him that subjects\u2019 brains tend to go crazy when a white noise (high Shannon entropy) pattern is presented. The brain goes nuts trying to find order in the chaos. Instead, the researcher says, they usually start with something like a black-and-white checkerboard pattern.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Rhizomatic learning invokes the illegible, the complex, and the organic.\u00a0 It is not so much uncomfortable so much as it irreconcileable.\u00a0 Rao sums up, “it is easier to comprehend the whole by walking among the trees, absorbing the gestalt, and becoming a holographic\/fractal part of the forest, than by hovering above it.”\u00a0 It isn’t that we can’t see the forest for the trees.\u00a0 It is that we can’t become the forest when we make the trees legible.\u00a0 In this sense many of the current attempts to make learning legible are doomed to complete or nearly complete failure.\u00a0 The messified feelings we get from rhizomatic learning arise not from the process but rather\u00a0\u00a0 from an attempt to demystify and order\/control\/guide the process .\u00a0 We say to ourselves (or at least I have said to myself), “How can I use this in my classroom, my professional life, my life?”<\/p>\n

We likely can’t in the normal, transactional sense.\u00a0 Rhizomatic learning is a sample of one.\u00a0 And then another.\u00a0 Our attempts to generalize beyond that might be doomed to the same failure that curriculum planners often come to when they textbook-ify a discipline.\u00a0 That is not just an uncomfortable feeling for some. That is terrifying for some.\u00a0 For me it isn’t about letting go, for me it is about letting come.\u00a0 I must let the forest come, let the gestalt arise, let the zeitgeist form.\u00a0 [Insert any words here because mine fail.] As always, I could be wrong.<\/p>\n

\"It_s_always_like_a_Gordian_knot_-36958\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am swamped and I am reading how others are swamped.\u00a0 I am tempted to call this cognitive dissonance, but I don’t think that concept catches or carries the embodiment that is #rhizo14.\u00a0 Instead,\u00a0 I have been trying to process just like Agent J in MIB: This morning I remembered.\u00a0 I had been in this
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