Multilitteratus Incognitus

Continuing on the (one sided) conversation of ANT with Latour we have the 4th source of uncertainty which is Matters of Fact vs Matters of Concern.  I guess, starting off here, that one cannot debate matters of "fact" because they are facts and therefore immutable, whereas "concerns" are broad categories and the "answers" will most likely be in a state of flux. ANT is the story of an experiment so carelessly started that it took a quarter of century to rectify it and catch up with what its exact meaning was. It all started quite badly with the unfortunate use of the expression ‘social construction of scientific facts’. (p. 88) I am wondering what is so unfortunate about 'social construction of scientific facts'.  Is it that the word "fact" was used? or is it the "social" in 'social construction'?  Or is it both? I know that Latour seems to have an issue with how 'social' has been defined (wonder what he t

Image from Flickriver, Brian Hillegas A few days ago, and totally by stroke of chance, I happened upon a twitter discussion between @HybridPed ,  @otterscotter , @actualham , and a few others.  I am not sure what the original topic was but I came in when they were discussing assessment. Do we assess learning or competency? Some regarded learning as transcending competency and some saw competency as transcending learning. It's hard to to really have a meaningful exchange of ideas in 140 characters, especially when the twitter train grows and grows. When I jumped into this conversation I took the stance that what we assess is learning, not competency.  Competency, I would argue, is something that develops over a period of time. It is something you hone and improve.  Your skills (i.e. your competency is something) becomes improved the more your practice it. And, by practice, I mean being present while doing it and analyzing your own performance while doing the task, not just g

It seems like the cosmos is back on another round on beating down on the venerable dissertation as final exercise for a doctoral degree. Stephen Downes posted yesterday this article from Times Higher Education which is asking the question as to whether or not the Doctoral Dissertation is obsolete .† The article quotes Jeremy Farrar of Imperial College London: “An awful lot is going unused and unread,” he says. “Is this really appropriate for the modern world? Communication within the science world and with the public is becoming shorter and snappier, yet our PhDs still seem to be stuck in the 1960s.” Another strand here is a recent post from Maha who writes : What’s a PhD got to do with…. Writing 6,000 word articles? My PhD was over 100,000 Words. That prepared me for writing books but not articles. Some PhDs are composed of articles but most aren’t so…  Working collaboratively – you work alone and you learn to manage. Then in real life your research can be so much bett

Well, it's week 6, the last week of #rhizo15 that Dave will host. The topic of this week brings us back to the original topic of this rMOOC: A practical guide for Rhizomatic Learning . It's hard to really come up with something that encompasses the meaning and approaches  to rhizomatic learning  - heck, I am only now starting to "understand" it and I've only been really thinking about it for 18 months.  Sure that was that brief exposure in Change11, but that almost doesn't exist in my mind. I started off thinking that in #rhizo15 I would finally be able to read an engage with Deleuze & Guattari and their book a thousand plateaus , but that didn't quite happen. I was deep in the thick of it with my second doctoral course (end of first year, yay!) when the #rhizo15 started, then I was working on a #rhizo14-related project with fellow "classmates" from #rhizo14 on Actor-Network Theory, so I ended up starting to read Latour, and now we'

Did someone say "swarm"? Alright. I've completed the first half of Latour's book on Actor-Network Theory titled Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory . In a couple of blog posts (really soon) I will be continuing my exploration of ANT through this dialogue I've developed with Latour. I also, at the recommendation of Maha (I think) read Cressman's brief overview of ANT ( PDF here ). So now, inspired by Maha's post , I turn my attention to utilizing ANT (whatever my rudimentary understandig of it is) toward an analysis of the #RhizoResearchGroup's use of collaborative technologies.  Specifically I am dealing with Google Docs (or at least some elements of Google Docs given that ANT can lead you down a rabbit hole). Briefly I would describe ANT as being a philosophy, or frame of mind, that attempts to account for both human and non-human elements in various interactions. Non-human elements can be technology, such as the ke

I wrote (a few days ago) that I am re-designing  an introductory course in instructional design ( see syllabus here ).  In my assessment activities I've decided to go with a pass/not pass model.  There will still be something approximating traditional rubrics and categories for different things that learners need to address in each activity, but I am toying with the idea of doing away with prescriptive rubrics like this one †.  I think that grading rubrics, and the exercise of sitting down to create one, is invaluable for instructor and instructional designers.  It helps you go through the process of articulating what you want learners to be able to do in this activity. There is only one problem, not everything can have a meaningful rubric.  For instance, in the rubric I linked to, how does one convey to learners that they minimally summarized vs. summarized something?  Or summarized vs. extensively summarized?  Qualitative feedback is obviously important to help disambiguat

Continuing on my exploration of ANT, and asynchronous and indirect dialogue with Latour - this blog post will cover the third source of uncertainty, which according to Latour, is that Objects have agency too! As with the previous blog posts, I've pulled out quotes from the book that seemed interesting, or that I reacted to in some way, and I am responding to them here. no tie can be said to be durable and made of social stuff (p. 66) This quote seems to continue Latour's assertion that there is no such thing as "social" or "social stuff" and that "social", or the meaning of needs to be negotiated and better understood.  It also continues the thought that social can only be seen from the actions of its actors, the traces they leave behind, and that these bonds are not durable because they need continuous reinforcement. I guess Social is a perishable item. Left to its own devices, a power relationship that mobilizes nothing but social skil

A few things happened this week which seemed to point to a nexus on grading, grades, and a throwback to Week 3 of Rhizo15 on what counts . The three thing that came together for me were Whitney's post from Week 3 , My own grades from EDDE 802, and me designing (or rather re-designing) the introductory course in instructional design which I will teach/facilitate/rhizolead this summer.  All these things happened independent of one another but in reading Whitney's post I realized that there was some sort of coming together in a nexus, or rather a vortex of grades and assessment. Part I:  A reaction to Whitney's post Whitney writes that she is not a fan of grades and that she has found them motivating at times, and demotivating at other times. This got me thinking about my own connection to grades.  People assume that since I have earned 3 master's degrees I am naturally some sort of smart person and that I care about grades. The reality is that I don't.  I don

Continuing on the exploration of Latour and ANT, the second source of uncertainty according to Latour is: Action is Overtaken . To be honest a few days after I've read the chapter and copied interesting parts from it for this post, I am not really sure what that means... I had to look the chapter title up to make sure that I wasn't making a mistaken ;-)  As with previous blog In most situations, we use ‘social’ to mean that which has already been assembled and acts as a whole, without being too picky on the precise nature of what has been gathered, bundled, and packaged together. (p. 43) This seems to sound just about right.  I think that "social" as a term, in general, has been abused and over-used since the advent of "social media".   Anything that has interaction between two entities is termed to be social, but what does that really mean? It doesn't really help that a lot of tech, and edtech, companies just parade the word out as a feature ...

I was going for a News show feel with that title. I don't think it came across.  The more I think about it the more I am thinking that video might satiate my dramatic tendencies - but that would take more acting talent and more time.  It's just text for now! If you have an idea for a name for a Mock News Show (like the Daily Show but for EdTech, drop a comment ;-) ) So, week 5 Rhizo15 - this means that there is only one more week left if I am not mistaken. Dave talks about the doom and gloom of community . It's such an invasive species.  It assimilates all that it touches. Oh my!  Just to set the stage here Dave asks if community is just replacing one authority - the instructor - for another, which I would guess he means the Hegemony of the Group.  Is the course becoming an echo chamber?  Does the rhizome choke the air out of everything it touches? I am pretty sure that Dave is being controversial here (surprised?) and possibly a little tongue in cheek. Generally s

Look for traces of the "social" One of the things I like about Rhizo14, and our collaboration, is that we keep going, exploring our participation, and collaboration post Rhizo14 through a variety of lenses.  This keeps the mind active and exploring new areas.  I've been meaning to get acquainted with Actor Network Theory (ANT), but the time is rarely right. Classes, work, other projects conspire to distract me :-).  That said, with a presentation looming for some of us in the rhizo14 group, it's time to read about ANT.  The book recommended is Reassembling the Social: An introduction to Actor-Network-Theory by Bruno Latour. I am currently 100 pages in (out of 300) and I am getting the sense that Latour likes to write, and likes to give a lot of examples, but doesn't really get to the point - at least quickly enough for my satisfaction.  If one thing can be said about me is that I am stubborn.  I will get through this book.  Now how to segment it and talk a