On Digitalizing Classrooms (and Thought)

I wanted to comment on the issues of digitalizing education (and how this effects and perhaps benefits the transmission of knowledge) Dr. Stockton said that she was working on Monday and thought that we could perhaps try to collectively think/speak/act in ways that might increase the educational (or fun) potential of the class.  And perhaps more importantly, how this class as an internet community with loose but structured links in the real world might serve to replicate some of the functions of more “organic” i-communities (blogs, forums, etc).  These topics are sort of pressing because they are happening, and we are a part of them.  AND they open up new possibilities for thinking, learning and becoming.  Digitalizing classrooms could provide less hierarchical modes of learning and interacting as a scholarly community.    Below is an excerpt from an email I sent to Dr. Stockton about this topic.  I’ll try to unpack the abtruse jargon used by the fairly obscure philosophers, I promise. :

“As far as the digital student and community topic goes, I think that is super interesting and also important considering that while perhaps currently difficult to talk about (at least in concrete/informed ways), the postmodern community is something that needs to be talked about and perhaps called into being.  I don’t know where you stand on this or where your theoretical grounding/allegiance lies, but I think  Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome can be a jump off point for how (global) internet communities can/do form and exist and change.  This is complicated of course by their ideas about  the normal conception of identity and representation, both of which are common focal points of i-communities.  However, I think the mutability and literal anonymity of virtual identities subverts such concerns.  Also Hardt and Negri’s idea about the multitude-as layed out in Empire and elaborated on in Multitude could also inform something working toward an understanding.  As well as, the commons, not their idea certainly, but considering their work is highly concerned with globalization (Westernization) and how the common/s rub up against systems of capital and Empire.”

So if you’re somehow miraculously still reading this, and Wikipedia didn’t help (or you didn’t care to open six new tabs), the rhizome is a concept originally pertaining to the structuring of knowledge itself (it actually originally pertains to plant biology and root structure, but whatever).  Deleuze and Guattari conceived as the traditional modes of storing, using and transmitting knowledge as hierarchical and linear, they called this arborescence (tree-like, vertical).  For a whole lot of reasons, they didn’t like this, so they hypothesized that instead knowledge was (or should/could be) rhizomatic, like grass roots–literally the roots of grass–it connects with numerous other, seemingly unrelated pieces of knowledge (or grass).  It creates connections, disjunctions, different connections and so on and so forth.  Such non-hierarchical, versatile and constantly changing forms of knowledge create opportunities for creativity and innovative thoughts and ways of thinking.  The rhizome was part of their attempt to combat the dominant system of logic, which they saw as reductive and hegemonic.  “Principles of connection and heterogenity: any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be”(D/G, A Thousand Plateaus).  This opposes the normal binary logic that through linguistics and ideology circumscribes one’s (our) ability to think .  It’s really a lot more complicated than this, and probably a lot more complicated than I could ever imagine–but such a model can be (and has been) applied to things other than knowledge.  Most notably, the internet.

Hardt and Negri’s multitude can be summed up as basically a social rhizome, an group of people seemingly very much unrelated, yet interconnected in strange ways ( or possibly not), there’s more to it that has a lot to do with hating capitalism–although the multitude is not reactionary, but I’ll spare everyone.  I’ve wasted way too much of my time on this, I’ll try to not waste yours.

So what happens when rhizomes become realized?  Can they be consciously implemented?  Should they?  Should our educations be non-hierarchical?  Is it too hard (too much work on our part) to make them not be?  Can top-down attempts to de-centralize power work (in this case a professor creating the digital community)?  Do we really care?