Tag Archives: map

How can we measure learning? Week 2 #rhizo15

Data or it didn’t happen.

— Shit Academics Say (@AcademicsSay) April 18, 2015

How can we measure learning? Can we measure learning? Define learning. What did I learn today? I learned about the Australian Indigenous artist, Vernon Ah Kee.

Ah Kee is also part of the Proppa Now group and is one of the most political aboriginal artists of his time.

The above is from his 2002 collection titled “If I was White”. I was interested in reading the transcript.

6×5 A4 grids transcribed L-R, downwards:

If I was White
I could walk down the street
and people would pay no particular
attention to me.

It may not seem like much
but if you’ve ever had
a shopkeeper tell you to
Buy something or move on, or
simply follow you around the shop,
it’s significant.

If I was White
people would speak to me.

Wouldn’t you feel a little lonely
if you were the only White person
in a new school
and nobody including the teacher
understood you or your culture?

If I was White
I would think like a White Person.

If I was White
I would believe myself to be equal
to anyone.

If I was White
I would be more likely
to live longer.

If I was White
I would be less likely
to spend time behind bars.

If I was White
just think of all the names
I wouldn’t have been called.

If namecalling does not seem
all that serious to you
then you haven’t heard the names
I’ve been called.

If I was White
a lot of the fights I’ve been in
would not have been my fault.

If I was White
I wouldn’t have been in so many fights.

If I was White
I would not be part of the Stolen Generation.

If I was White
I would have been counted in the Census since 1901.

If I was White
I could live, shop, and socialise
wherever I want.

If you’ve walked into Real Estate
Agencies where houses and units
To Let suddenly become Taken,
and just as suddenly become
Available when you leave, then
you know what I’m talking about.

If I was White
I would be accepted.

If I was White
I could group together
all the people who don’t
look like me
into their own separate
communities.

If I was White
I could accept a life of privilege,
wealth, and power
that the exploitation of Black
People has brought me
without even blinking.

If I was White
I could stand back,
walk on by, sit on the fence,
and do nothing.

If I was White
I would think I have every right
to be here.

If I was White
I would fit in.

If I was White
I would not have to live in a country that hates me.

If I was White
I would have a country.

If I was White
I could say This land
has been in my family
for three generations.

If I was White
I could say My family
have lived on this land
for two hundred years.

If I was White
I could say My father worked hard
to buy this land.

If I was White
I could buy bandaids
the same colour as my skin.

What if all bandaids were black?

If I was White
and in an accident, I would be
wrapped in white bandages.

If I was White
I wouldn’t be asked if I was
Fullblood, Half-caste, or part White.

If I was White
I would not hear other White People
say to me You don’t look like you
have alot of White in you, or
You don’t look White.

If I was White
my fair skin
would not be such an issue
with other White People.

If I was White
it would be okay
to claim to be White.

If I was White
I wouldn’t have to claim to be White
just to get a job.

If I was White
I would be taken at my word.

Try accepting everything written
here as being true
simply because I say it is.

If I was White
I could really identify with
Australian TV Soaps.

If I was White
I could really identify with
Australian TV Advertising.

If I was White
popular Australian newspapers
would print what I want to read.

If you don’t think so
then count how many Black People
appear in the weekend social
pages.

If I was White
I could go to church
and Jesus Christ would
look like me.

Imagine Christ images all over the
world being black.

If I was White
I would not have to be smart
to keep a good job.

If I was White
I would have more chance
of getting a job.

If I was White
I could wear a suit and tie
and not look suspicious.

If I was White
I could own a luxury vehicle
and not look suspicious.

If I was White
I could shop in luxury stores
and not look suspicious.

If I was White
I could walk
in a white neighbourhood
and not look suspicious.

If I was White
I could dye my hair blonde
and it would not look strange.

If I was White
I could have blue eyes
and it would not look strange.

If I was White
I could marry another White person
and it would not look strange.

If I was White
I would have a better chance of becoming PM.

If I was White
I could write history any way I please.

If I was White
ignorance could be my excuse.

If I was White
I would have nothing to fear
from Police.

If I was White
I would not have to explain
the things I say.

If I was White
the world would make
more sense to me.

If I was White
I could make myself believe
that Black People were evil.

If I was White
I could shelter my children from
the evil that exists in the world.

If I was White
I could lie to my children about
the evil that exists in the world.

But I am Black
and I am as misunderstood as the next Blackfella

but I am beginning to understand the White Men.

What did you learn from that text art by Vernon Ah Kee? Does it make you curious to  know more? Does your understanding shift into another context? Are you thinking about this in a broader sense? How did you feel when you were reading this? How did you feel when you were thinking about it?  How would you assess the learning during all of that?

Give yourself a mark out of ten. Make sure you address the outcomes which sit neatly in lines next to their dot points. Don’t forget to ignore everything that is not neatly summarised by these points. Don’t go including the metacognition.  Make sure you toss all those airy fairy ‘what if…’ thoughts. Don’t even think about including the way you felt when you were reading the text; that’s not important and we can’t be getting all touchy feely when we’re assessing serious learning outcomes.

So, back to Dave.

Dave:

Learning is a non-counting noun.  It’s not something we should worry about counting, I don’t think measuring it makes any sense. Once that’s done, what can we measure? Dig into the possibilities of measurement. What can we use to send to administrators? Some way of talking about using all these numbers and  How can we map out the rhizome? a tool for people to map out their own rhizome.  I understand this conflicts with the freedom but work with that.

Really. This is hard. If I knew how to do that …

Taking a look at my own learning which has taken place in MOOCs lately – Connected Courses and now Rhizo15…

If we are talking about connected learning rather than the consumption of learning then counting is no longer useful. You can’t ‘count’ connected learning but connected learning does count. Turn it on its head. It counts. Show it, write about it, share it, discuss it – make it transparent. There it is; you can see it for yourself.

Learning is complex. Yes, we could map it. But… there’s so much to take into account. It’s giving me a headache. Big data.  That term gets bandied about a bit lately. Looking it up on Wikipedia gives me a bigger headache. (Not sure where I saw this image; someone shared it on Twitter?)

And don’t forget –

As I’ve said in a previous blog post, Einstein, Newton, Edison, Tolstoy, Pasteur, Lincoln – these are only some of the notable gifted people throughout history who were assessed as failures in school.

How could that happen? Is it happening now? How reliable are our methods of assessment? One thing I know – we should definitely assess assessment.

Dave Cormier, I can’t answer your question. Fail me.

 

Mixed metaphors. Putting the jigsaw together can be challenging when it’s a rhizome

Image source: Mashable

Warning: My current confusion (chaos) – which is (I remind myself) a necessary state during the process of understanding – has got me clutching at different metaphors in an attempt to liken rhizomatic learning within a rhizomatic connectivist MOOC to this and that.  Already I have mentioned a jigsaw and a rhizome but I will also be talking about a river (which is actually a rapid) as well as swimming and drowning. Sorry.

Feelings and happenings:

So I’ve jumped into the MOOC Rhizomatic Learning, otherwise known as #Rhizo15. In Connected Courses I had my first taste of being part of a MOOC which is a Massive Open Online Course. Some of the people I met and continue to interact with have done #Rhizo14 (Rhizomatic learning: the community is the curriculum) and so I eavesdropped a little and was intrigued.  And by the way, I learned that #Rhizo15 is a cMOOC and not an xMOOC.

So, the MOOC.

It’s massive so you feel initially as if you’ve been thrown into a raging river while trying to study a map. The map you’re using is rendered useless and the only way to keep going is learn how to swim while you’re drowning.

It’s open. As much as you  might be feeling there’s enough to interest you in your career and life, your social network, suddenly it’s as if a section of the planet has been sliced with a giant cheese knife. You can see inside and you realise there is so much activity going on in there  that you didn’t realise,  and from afar it looks both fascinating and frightening. You draw closer to make sense of the activity; you try to find patterns in the activity, guides for the social behaviour, but there is too much going on at once, and so you give up trying to figure it out and jump into one of the conversations. Only when you do, they lead you to so many more – for example, in the Facebook group: Rhizomatic Learning: a practical discussion,  the Rhizomatic Learning Google+ community and around the Twitter hashtag #Rhizo15.

Suddenly there are not enough hours in the day and you desperately want to keep up. But you also want to be everywhere at once. You remember you have a job and personal life and you wish you could put them on hold for a while.

And sleep! What is happening when you sleep! You’re missing out on conversations and posts, and your time zones are not synchronised with much of the population so at the start of the day you have so much to catch up on.

But while you are taking part in conversation in groups all over the place, reading and commenting on posts, you realise that there are books you haven’t read, educational theorists you should be researching. You need background so that you understand more fully what people are talking about. When will you have time to do this?!

STOP.

At this point I’m stopping before I hyperventilate. Time for a bit of grounding reflection. Dave Cormier introduced the MOOC as a curriculum that writes itself. It’s writing itself now from many, many spaces and simultaneously. I remind myself that nothing is compulsory; everything is optional.  A bit of focus and self control amongst all the choice and I should be able to replace anxiety with a calm acceptance of the raging river, and manage to keep afloat.

Okay so that’s all about how I feel about taking part in cMOOCs.

Who am I? (for some reason I don’t feel like doing this now)

A brief introduction (suggested by Dave Cormier) for those who don’t know me:  I was born in Australia to parents of Russian and German background – mainly Russian. For a while I taught English, German and French at school and a Russian at a Saturday school. Now I’m a teacher librarian but I won’t try to explain my role in this post although I really should finally write a post dealing with the frustrations I have explaining my role.  Currently I’m at a selective boys’ secondary school 9-12.

Happily I found my way into cMOOCs after looking for an online learning community. When I ‘became’ a Google certified teacher I found myself pulling back from going further with this role and I wasn’t sure why; I just knew it wasn’t me, and I felt like a phoney. I love Google tools and encourage their use but I didn’t see myself as a promoter of Google or as an expert presenting Google to others. I didn’t feel at home with the cohort of confident, outgoing people who seemed to have no problem taking on this role. I needed to find people with whom I could ask questions instead of giving answers and continue learning. The cMOOC communities are where I want to be.

(I’m not happy with this introduction.)

More importantly (for me), why am I here? It’s because I’ve connected with super-moocers like Maha Bali, Terry Elliott, Laura Gibbs, Kevin Hodgson, Simon Ensor, Tanya Lau, Sarah Honeychurch, Laura Ritchie and many others through Connected Courses – all people I admire greatly and would like to keep talking to.  And in the last few days I’ve connected with so many more people I want to talk to and learn from.

And how can you even try to keep up when someone like Keith Hamon writes a post that will take me a semester to really get through?

So, what is rhizomatic learning? Many people know a lot about this but I’m just starting so I go back to Dave Cormier’s 2011 post where he talks about successful learning :

Rhizomatic learning is a way of thinking about learning based on ideas described by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in a thousand plateaus. A rhizome, sometimes called a creeping rootstalk, is a stem of a plant that sends out roots and shoots as it spreads. It is an image used by D&G to describe the way that ideas are multiple, interconnected and self-replicating. A rhizome has no beginning or end… like the learning process.

What does successful learning look like?

the rhizome pertains to a map that must be produced, constructed, a map that is always detachable, connectible, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits and its own lines of flight. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 21)

I should read A thousand plateaus by Deleuze and Guattari. Someone shared The Beginner’s Guide to Deleuze (I think Sarah Honeychurch and Kevin Hodgson).

Meanwhile others have led me to this 2010 video by Dave Cormier about how to successfully navigate a MOOC. Good place to start.

I really want to write about what happened after I shared the Mr X story in my previous post but I thought I’d get this post over and done with and then devote a post just to Mr X. See you soon. (Or not).

Newsmap – attractive news

newsmap

What is Newsmap?

Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator. Treemaps are traditionally space-constrained visualizations of information. Newsmap’s objective takes that goal a step further and provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe.
Newsmap does not pretend to replace the googlenews aggregator. Its objective is to simply demonstrate visually the relationships between data and the unseen patterns in news media. It is not thought to display an unbiased view of the news; on the contrary, it is thought to ironically accentuate the bias of it.

So, in a way, Newsmap is an interpretation of the news, allowing patterns and biases to be visualised.

I think this needs to be viewed over time to get a feel for it. Meanwhile, it stands out as being a very attractive way to get world news.

Has anyone explored Newsmap? What are your thoughts?