Archive - Apr 2015

Date

April 16th

#rhizo15 A Primary Task?

Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 04/16/2015 - 17:13

Last night, in the #rhizo15 Facebook page, a participant spoke about looking for ways to benchmark her participating in #rhizo15. It feels to me like part of what is being asked is, if I don’t know where I’m going, how do I know if I get there, or if the trip was worth it? It is a serious question, but it doesn’t feel like it applies to me.

One reaction I have is from the poets. Robert Louis Stevenson said, “To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive”. T.S. Eliot put it this way:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Yet I understand this may not resonate for everyone, so I’ll also look at this from another angle, the experiential learning of group relationship conferences. Of course a great starting point for this is the quote from Aristotle, "for the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them”.

I’m especially interested in the journey rather than the destination, and learning about the process of learning by learning. I’m not sure what the #rhizo15 experience will be like, but I’m currently looking at it from a perspective of a group relations conference.

Group relations conferences usually have a “primary task”. Here are a couple examples:

The primary task of this learning organization is to study the development and exercise of authority, leadership, power and justice, in the context of change, through the inter-personal and inter-group relations that develop within the workshop as an organization. Unlike traditional learning systems, there are no lectures, panels or power point presentations. Instead, the workshop is based on reflection-in-action; learning focuses on our experiences and interactions with each other in real time.

And another:

The primary task of the conference is to explore, experience and learn from the development and management of roles and systems: to experience leadership, authority, integration processes, self-management in role, diversity and psychodynamic processes in organisations. This goal can be reached by allowing yourself and others to experience the conference, to communicate these experiences and to ex-amine their meaning in order to learn.

Lasts I checked, the Facebook post had about sixty responses. There’s a lot of grist for the mill there. What is it about uncertainty in learning that produces such a response? Is anxiety part of this? Anxiety about what? That you won’t fit in? That you’ll say something stupid? That you’ll end up eating crow? That you’ll end up wasting some of your time? What are our anxieties about #rhizo15? What are our anxieties about other people being anxious? What are our responses to these anxieties? What can we learn from these responses?

So, what might a primary task of #rhizo15 be? Pulling a little bit from the two statements above, and what I’m picking up here and there in various blog posts, tweets, and Facebook posts, I come up with something like:

The primary task of this learning organization is to explore, experience and learn from the development of learning networks, content, and the use of technology in promoting online learning.

What do you think?

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#rhizo15 Comment Response

Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 04/16/2015 - 02:00

The #rhizo15 conversation is taking off, including a post on Facebook about the use of Minecraft to help autistic students. One of my responses was fairly long, and I'm presenting it in whole here. It lacks some of the context, but illustrates, I believe, some of the thoughts I feel are important in the discussion.

Scott - I find my thoughts line up fairly nicely with what Lyn is saying (or at least what I'm hearing of it). From my background in computers and artificial neural networks, tied together with my interest in group dynamics, I view a network, in and of itself, as inert, and not particularly powerful or significant. It there is interaction on the network, collaboration, then it becomes an interesting topic.

Once there is interaction, there are pressures placed on all the participants, very much along the lines of group relations that Wilfred Bion talks about. These pressures, a conflict between who we think we are or want to be, and what the network wants us to be is a key area of learning.

What is interesting about online networks, and especially virtual worlds, from MOOs to Second Life to Minecraft, is that we have an opportunity to explore different ways of presenting. It starts from the old saying, “On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog”. In the mid 90s, I saw a lot of people exploring gender identity online: males who would present as females and vice versa, people who would choose non-binary gender identities, and people who would change identities at a moment’s notice. When I moved to Second Life, I ran into many members of the disabled community presenting themselves as temporarily able bodied. To me, all of this answers clearly your question about virtual worlds allowing subjectivity to flourish.

There is another component, which I suspect is important in Lyn’s work. She talks about autcraft as being a closed server creating a safe space with no bullying. I’ve seen plenty of online bullying in virtual worlds, dating back to the infamous Rape in Cyberspace in LambdMOO in the early 90s. Yet it is possible to create safe spaces where members of the network are given even more opportunity to explore subjectivity, and it sounds like autcraft is a good example of this.

I’m sorry to hear that you are running into people outside of Rhizo that you find are being disrespectful to you. It is a factor that needs to be considered carefully with any network someone joins. I hope this clarifies some of my thoughts in response to your and Lyn’s comments.

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April 15th

#rhizo15 Part 1 – Uncertain Learning Subjectives

Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 04/15/2015 - 21:19

Today, #rhizo15 starts. It is tempting to put it into some nice sort of box, with learning objectives about learning how to better create online courses, but that seems incomplete or misleading. Learning Subjectives – designing for when you don’t know where you’re going provides a better starting point.

The idea of jumping off into the unknown has long been appealing to me. It is part of the reason I like unconferences, like the upcoming Podcamp Western Mass. Get together with a bunch of bright people around an interesting topic and see what happens.

So, what do I hope to get out of #rhizo15? I’m not sure, but I find a good starting point to be a paper presented at the 1999 International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations (ISPSO), Our Best Work Happens When We Don't Know What We're Doing.

In keeping with our own thinking and with the specific context of our own work, our version of Bion's assumption about the effects of exposure to truth is that learning comes from working at the edge between knowing and not-knowing. The core activity linking our organizational research, consultancy, management and teaching - namely, 'learning', or 'growth of mind' - involves exposure to truth-in-the-moment. This depends on the capacity to stay at the edge between knowing and not-knowing.

This also provide a good opportunity to introduce myself to people finding this post through #rhizo15, or for that matter, to people who have become readers of my blog over the years, without having a good sense of where I am coming from.

For the context of #rhizo15, I will highlight some areas I hope to explore, and skip over other areas which are less important. I’ve been on the Internet since 1982. If you know where to look, you can find stuff I wrote online in 1982 which is still online today. I worked for a while on Wall Street, which is where I came in contact with organizational consultants, including ISPSO and the work of Wilfred Bion in Group Relations. I’m particularly interested in how various thoughts about objects, fit together in various psychoanalytic traditions include Freud, Klein, Winnicott, Bion, and Lacan. I’ve participated in various online experiential learning based groups centered around the work of Bion in the past. This may be a blog post or two of its own.

During my years on Wall Street, I also did a little bit on artificial neural networks. I’m particularly interested in the relationship between artificial neural networks, social networks, how this relates to group dynamics, rhizomes, and for that matter the singularity This may be another blog post of its own.

In 2003, I helped write some of the social media software for Gov. Dean’s presidential campaign. I later worked in technology and social media for other campaigns, and have run for office myself. How does or could rhizomic learning and MOOCs relate to politics and governance? Another fun topic to explore in a later blog post.

I was the first person in Connecticut, according to reports I’ve seen online, to be on Twitter, and have I was one of the first people with Google Glass in Connecticut. I’ve been an early adopter and been involved with research on many innovations in computer mediated communications. I’m not sure what else I have to say on these topics, but there may be another blog post in all of this as well.

These days, I work as a social media manager for a nonprofit health care agency focused on providing primary care with a special focus on underserved populations. I have set up a Moodle for the agency and have recently taken a MOOC on teaching with Moodle, I may have written about this some in the past, and I’m not sure if there is another blog post in this topic.

And finally, at least for this evening, I’m currently taking a MOOC from Harvard on the poetry of Emily Dickinson. I had taken their MOOC on Walt Whitman a while ago. I’ve taken to sharing more of my poetic attempts online. Originally, I moved to New York City after college to be a poet, but that never panned out. I’m also focused on my religious viewpoints, which are perhaps best described as a socially liberal mix of Anglicanism with a splash of reformed theology.

Where will all of this go? It will be interesting to see.

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April 14th

Empty Nesting

Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 04/14/2015 - 20:32

Fiona is off on a school trip this week, so it is just Kim and I at home. It is sort of like a test run of being an empty nester. So, what did we do? I dealt with some issues at work, we did some taxes, and I’ll probably go to bed early, fighting a head cold, and having not caught up on the online Dickinson class I’m taking or started preparing for the next class, on Rhizome learning.

In the queue, rhizomes, politics, moocs, more poetry, and perhaps even some thoughts on how they all related.

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