Rhizomes, I’m back to them again. For those of us in MALAT you will recall the rhizomes from Dave Cromier in the LRNT 521 course where he talked about being open on the web as an opportunity to create networks that decentralize and create community.
At the time of this writing I have not put an approved ARP proposal in yet with one of the reasons being I am interested in loads of things. The half finished applications are stacked, all with different areas of interest. Working at a two year college I am not sure I will ever have the opportunity to research anything ever again and so I want this opportunity to be a good choice, one that I can keep momentum going with over the time period and hopefully one that makes a difference to my community or has the potential to once it is done.
I am teaching a 100 level business ethics course right now and my students, brought up the idea of technology transfer as a way to elevate social enterprise goals through our book club and blogging activities. Gurneet has some experience with technology transfer agreements in his previous work in India and this it turns out is an important piece of the puzzle of how to create equitable access to technologies. I love how what started as a reading club blogging activity in this 100 level course grew into connections he made all the way to technology transfers and their benefits to both corporate and public interests. Am I as the teacher an expert in such things and did my curriculum account for technology transfers as a subject? For sure not but what happened by using the book club format for discussions and blogging is the community began to construct itself creating offshoots of topics and exploration and sharing their expertise and background in ways they could imagine more equitable tech futures.
I love what grew from the work these students did but also how it is also growing into adding a potential interest of mine to the pile of ARP topics to look at, I am an offshoot of this particular topic now myself and I also appreciate how I can share this with my graduate level colleagues and how this small thing, giving students space to bring ideas and their areas of expertise into the learning community seems to reduce the gatekeeping between levels of education. Cromier (2008) describes rhizomatic learning as spontaneous and the “curriculum is not defined by experts; it is constructed and negotiated in real time by the contributions of those engaged in the learning process” (para.12). When we worked with this in our early courses I got it theoretically but could not identify rhizomatic learning. I think I am finally getting there now. Rhizomatic learning is spontaneous growth, with unpredictable knowledge building off each root. Just like Arjun and Gurneet built technology transfers from social enterprise and now I might build off their forwarding of this topic in my research we see the learning in community being spurred on by curiosity and constructing it together through sharing our understandings.
References:
Cromier, D. (2008). Rhizomatic Education: Community as Curriculum.Innovate: Journal of Online Education.(4)5
https://www.learntechlib.org/p/104239/
Chada,G. & Sood,A. (March 29, 2022) Arjun and Gurneet. Ethics 150: Just another OpenETC WordPress site.
https://ethics150.opened.ca/2022/03/29/arjun-and-gurneet/