1. A herd of freely associating,
autonomous cats: how a Facebook
group helped turn a bunch of
cMOOC participants into a learning
community
flickr photo by rsgranne http://flickr.com/photos/rsgranne/25091156 shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license

2. Ashley Shaw
@ashleygshaw
Rebecca J. Hogue
@rjhogue
Sarah Honeychurch
@NomadWarMachine
Maha Bali
@bali_maha
Lenandlar Singh
@lenandlar

3. • P2PU (a community course platform): Rhizomatic Learning: The Community is
the Curriculum https://courses.p2pu.org/en/courses/882/rhizomatic-learning-
the-community-is-the-curriculum/ (the “official” course page)
• Twitter: #rhizo14
• Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/Rhizo14/
• A G+ group:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/102331797178606749149
• Personal blogs: https://gbl55.wordpress.com/mooc-comment-scraper-output-
rhizo14/
• … and more (Diijo, Mendeley, Pinterest …)
"it's a bit hard to sort out #rhizo14 which was the educational version of the
neverending story from #rhizo15 which started before the course began :)" quote
from Aaron J-R
What was #rhizo14?
Image by Christina Hendricks http://blogs.ubc.ca/chendricks/2015/04/27/learning-subjectives/ shared under a Creative
Commons (CC BY) Licence

4. flickr photo by Johnny Grim http://flickr.com/photos/grimages/1168546636 shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-
ND) license

5. “Communities”

6. Groups & Networks
• Downes (2007) draws a distinction between groups and networks. He
describes them as follows:
• Groups
“a collection of entities or members according to their nature or their feature or their
properties or whatever, their essential nature, maybe, their accidental nature, maybe,
whatever, but according to their nature. What defines a group is the quality the members
possess in common and then the number of members in that group. Groups are about
nature, they're about quality, they're about mass. They're about number.”
• Networks
“an association of entities or members where this association is facilitated or created by a
set of connections between those entities.”
He suggests that groups are defined by their “unity” while networks are defined by their “diversity”

7. Communities & Collectives
Seely Brown & Thomas (2013) describe the “collective” as:
“a collection of people, skills, and talent that produces a result greater
than the sum of its parts. For our purposes, collectives are not solely
defined by shared intention, action, or purpose (though those elements
may exist and often do). Rather, they are defined by an active
engagement with the process of learning”
They contrast a collective with a community and suggest that while communities
can be passive, collectives derive their strength from participation. They further
noted that “In communities, people learn in order to belong. In a collective, people
belong in order to learn”, Seely Brown & Thomas (2013)

8. Communities & Networks
• Wenger, Trayner & De Laat (2011) see communities and networks as “two different types of social
structures”. They offer the follow definitions:
• Networks (Social)
“… a set of relationships, personal interactions, and connections among participants who have
personal reasons to connect. It is viewed as a set of nodes and links with affordances for learning,
such as information flows, helpful linkages, joint problem solving, and knowledge creation”
• Communities (of Practice)
“… the development of a shared identity around a topic or set of challenges. It represents a
collective intention however tacit and distributed – to steward a domain of knowledge and to
sustain learning about it”
They suggest that these characteristics can be dominant enough to classify a group as “pure
communities” or “pure networks” (p. 11)

9. Groups, Nets, Sets, Collectives
• Dron & Anderson (2014) offer “a typology of social forms” into which a collection of learners can
participate to make sense of learning using social media. They offer the following descriptions for each of
the 4 elements in this collection:
• Groups
“intentionally convened collections of people that have leaders, hierarchies of control, and formal or informal
processes that define how they operate. Groups typically have an existence that is independent of the people in them”
• Nets (Networks)
“Networks consist of and may be described by the connections between people. These are often mediated and
structured by social objects such as blogs, community centres or social networking systems like Facebook, LinkedIn or
Google+. Unlike groups, networks are not designed, have no devised processes, no independent existence, no explicit
hierarchies, no explicit leaders, no explicit membership - they simply exist as an emergent entity that is the result of
individual connections between people. ”
• Sets
“are simply collections of people and their creations that share a common attribute. From an individual's perspective,
sets demand no social commitment of the sort found in groups and no social connection of the sort found in networks.
It is possible to be a part of a set without knowing anyone else in it and, indeed, it is possible to participate in a set
without being aware of doing so”
• Collectives
“a class of entities that emerge from collective intelligence. Collective intelligence can occur when multiple individual
entities act together in ways that mean they are most usefully understood as a single super-organism”…” A collective is
not a social form in itself but is a consequence of the aggregated behaviours of people in sets, nets or groups”

10. Others?
• Hives?
• Borg?
• Swarms?
Bee image: flickr photo by bathyporeia
http://flickr.com/photos/bathyporeia/14604626324
shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license.
Borg Image: flickr photo by caseorganic
http://flickr.com/photos/caseorganic/7382742276
shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC) license Hive
image: flickr photo by Chiot's Run
http://flickr.com/photos/chiotsrun/3864953022
shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC) license
Rhizomagic badge by @GiuliaForsythe

11. Tagxedo.com, 2015
Why Facebook?
1. We’re already here
2. Affordances
3. Bridges personal and professional
4. Alternatives

12. The place where the action was, was Facebook.
“It was a platform I was already using
consistently for my life, with my family,
as a consultant posting updates to
projects, and for my agency, and the
addition of an adult learning
component really enlivened FB for
me… it animated it in a new way.”
“It's just convenience to use FB
because, first thing in the morning or
last thing at night I’m using it on my
mobile phone, I'm lying in bed, and it's
just convenient. I don't have to go
searching.”
“The FB space is wide and friendly - it
opens its arms to all - from the
experienced MOOCer or Rhizoer - to the
less confident or the transient or the
one who lurked and only spoke once.”

13. …the conversational space - the dialogic space - and the
visual space…
“What I also like about the FB - is that you can like - you
can comment - without having to sign in, log on -
remember ALL your passwords. Damn it - it’s words and
visuals and friends at play!”
“Of the various platforms,
the FB group was most like
a synchronous
conversation, which was
important to me as many of
us wrestled with new
ideas. Post a question or an
idea and someone from
some other time zone
would answer, almost
always.”
“most people posted their blog links on FB as well as
Twitter - so the FB allowed access to many different
strands of conversation”
“This is a multimodal space
- where the visuals are
attractive and draw you into
a feeling a collegiality and
'being with' with the
posters….The FB feels
populated with diverse
voices - it feels both
synchronous and
asynchronous - it is less
reverential - less deferential
- it is rhizomatic..”

14. The FB interactions led to relationships out of which deeper discussions
arose.
“In my whole Master’s degree I probably connected with
about five people over four years who I could call or email
now, a couple of years later, with a question about research
or academic roles or whatever - out of the six (or twelve or
more) weeks FB #rhizo14 group I developed a good dozen
relationships with people I would be able to contact with
similar questions.”
“… the environment we’d created with “serious”
conversations interspersed with images, collages, songs,
references to movies etc., moments of doubt and
uncertainty, and great trails of humourous bantering - was
in itself a model of rhizomatic learning - maps, tracings,
ruptures, subversions, lines of flight, and the possibility that
any node can connect with any other node.”

15. the tweets and the blogs felt like monoliths standing alone in a field -
that you crept up to and touched – ALONE
“Though I like Google Plus more, and
though there was a Google community
next to the FB-community during
Rhizo14, the place where the action was,
was Facebook.”
“Twitter was an uncomfortable space,
one where I felt that no matter how
much I tried to participate, I was still
shouting into the ether, hoping someone
would hear. In contrast, the Facebook
group felt less ephermeral.”
“ I liked how it was possible to develop and enjoy the “social
presence” of others in a way - to see their photos, get a glimpse
of their life, or of what they wanted to share - and then from
there check out their more expansive blog postings and twitter
conversations.”
“Facebook because that's all my brain could handle.”

18. Exclusion: Open but Not
“The “Log into Facebook” screen
that greeted me when I followed
a link was like a locked door, and I
did not have the key”
-- Kevin (dogtrax)
flickr photo by Ravages http://flickr.com/photos/ravages/14823826230 shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license

19. Personal/Professional lines blurred
• How many of you feel
uncomfortable using Facebook
for professional purposes?
Copyright Mac Toot, used with permission

20. Facebook’s Questionable Ethics
flickr photo Wat is Privacy Graffiti door by gruntzooki http://flickr.com/photos/doctorow/15270312221 shared
under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license

21. Information Overload
flickr photo The book balancing challenge by Armchair Caver http://flickr.com/photos/armchaircaver/4676851166 shared under
a Creative Commons (BY-NC) license

22. Distributed Conversation
flickr photo The Art Gallery of Knoxville by AGoK http://flickr.com/photos/16038409@N02/3897997969 shared under
a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license

23. Not all found the convo rich
"My sense is that it made my behaviour less rhizomatic, more passive. I
had to consciously get out there, to explore away from that space.
Maybe the herd tramples the rhizome."
- Nick Kearney (did not do facebook in rhizo14 but did in rhizo15)

24. Discussion
Image by Clarissa Bezerra @Clarissamfb

25. References
• Downes, S. (2007). Groups versus Networks: The Class struggle continues. Accessed September 3, 2015. Available at
http://www.downes.ca/post/42521
• Dron, J., & Anderson, T. (2014). Agoraphobia and the modern learner. Journal of Interactive Media in Education, Open for
Learning Special Issue, np. Retrieved from http://jime.open.ac.uk/jime/article/view/2014-03
• Seely Brown, J., & Thomas, D. (2013). Learning in the Collective. Hybrid Pedagogy. Available at
http://www.hybridpedagogy.com/journal/learning-in-the-collective/
• Wenger, E., Trayner, B., & De Laat, M. (2011). Promoting and assessing value creation in communities and networks: a
conceptual framework. Accessed September 3, 2015. Available at http://wenger-trayner.com/wp-
content/uploads/2011/12/11-04-Wenger_Trayner_DeLaat_Value_creation.pdf

26. Ashley Shaw
@ashleygshaw
Rebecca J. Hogue
@rjhogue
Sarah Honeychurch
@NomadWarMachine
Maha Bali
@bali_maha
Lenandlar Singh
@lenandlar