Too long for twitter, too short for my blog

Research project introduction - version 2

Thanks hugely for all the help i got yesterday from many cool peeps.

 The 2008 paper Rhizomatic Education: Community as Curriculum claims that, in a field where there is no accepted canon of knowledge, where knowledge is constantly renegotiated, that teaching from a set curriculum can be problematic. The solution it proposes is to visualize the community as the curriculum. (Cormier, 2008) The curriculum of a given course lives in the leaners, in their existing connections to others, and in the points of information available over the network. (edit: This paper, and the follow up paper, both explore the philosophical underpinnings of the theory, what is required is a sense of the practical results of the theory in action.)

Using a critical, narrative inquiry approach, I hope to explore both my own experiences in attempting to look at education from this perspective as well as engage others who have tried this in their own contexts. The hope is to explore what happens when this educational theory hits 'the real world'. Through web based forms and audio/video interviews I intend to collaborate with the participants in order to get a sense of their own experiences. I will also be hosting a peer debriefing discussion, where I can engage in a discussion with the participants and others from the educational community in order to further challenge the assumptions coming out of the participant dicussions. (Creswell, Miller, 2000)

I hope to gather stories, experiences and challenges in order to better understand how seeing the community as the curriculum has worked in different contexts. There are several current examples in different contexts of vastly differing interpretations and presentations of the work. The research will lead to several presentations, papers and the restructuring of my own course design depending on the results found.

where the research will be conducted - cloudworks as community peer review

      1. where the research will be conducted

There will be three separate locations for the study. The first will be the website 'davecormier.com' where a questionnaire will be available for people to fill out. The second will be interview discussions by VOIP (with follow up interviews and other material contributed by the interviewees). The third will be the use of the cloudworks system at Open University for a more community involved discussion that will be open to everyone. This third system will provide another point of entry but will also serve as a community peer review method.

First draft - introductory summary (yucky draft... but started) max 250 words

      1. Briefly describe the rationale and purpose of the study

This project intends to track the ways in which the concepts surrounding 'rhizomatic education' changed for instructors when it was confronted by real life situations. If we take as a premise that knowledge is, at least in some contexts, the results of negotiation, then it follows that the theory itself might change in classroom use.

The publication of the rhizomatic education: community as curriculum article in 2008 lead to some educators using the concepts within to structure their approach to education. This research project, then, hopes to assess how the educators first interpreted the paper, why they thought it would be helpful to adopt some of the concepts for their own work and how those concepts changed in the negotiation that followed with their students.

      1. What new knowledge is anticipated as an outcome of the study

This study, if successful, would result in a broader understanding of how the rhizomatic education concepts work in real life situations as well as offer narratives that others could use and build upon to try the same concepts in their own educational context.