Quick Friday post on how things are progressing in the “Rhizomatic Learning” course on P2PU.org, brought to you by the edupunk sparkplug Dave Cormier.
With the proliferation of learning platforms on the web and abundance of resources, Dave envisioned a course where the “community is the curriculum.” Rhizomatic learning asks us to rethink our assumptions about learning on the web–if we unravel learning outcomes, traditional assessment, content delivery, retention and engagement, what does a course look like? If we design to empower learners and prompt collective knowledge and personal evolution how does a course “work”?
So far? It’s pretty badass.
I just had an awesome chat with Dave after his unhangout session last night, and wanted to recap a few of the learnings:
- Let folks choose where they want to engage. While the “homepage” for the course is on P2PU, there are 100+ folks in the Facebook group, 300+ folks in the p2pu.org course, a flourishing Diigo group, and over 600+ tweets engaging #rhizo14 on Twitter.
- Each platform has a volunteer “steward” or “native” with admin responsibilities, so the facilitation is distributed.
- Platforms are less important than connective tissue. Dave pointed to IFTTT as a way to form connective bonds between the different learning communities on different platforms.
- Prompt folks to interact with each other by visualizing the community on a high level. Martin Hawksey‘s very stellar tool “TAGSExplorer” pulls the tweets tagged #rhizo14 and shows a snapshot of the network at a very high level:
Folks in the course will be prompted to reach out to a learner who is yet unconnected to the conversation, but this visualization is a superlative way to nurture collective identity and reinforce the “networked” theme of the course as a whole.
If you’d like to join the course in progress: