So this week when Dave asks:
#rhizo15 week 5 – Is community learning an invasive species? http://t.co/g6YOBq7GXf
— dave cormier (@davecormier) May 12, 2015
I feel defensive and protective about community. I just don’t understand how community can possibly invade. It’s like asking someone to go to the moon and map out the dark side.
Community only tries give us what we need. It is a reflection of our own commune with others. Our commune. Our commun(e)ication. . There is no one community. We can’t really even measure our community.
It doesn’t exist if you don’t. It is not outside of you, separate from you, it is you. It will take the energy that you emit, conduct that through people, and like all energy in our universe, will return back at you at some point. If you give a little, you will get a little in return.
If you name community learning an invasive species, it will necessarily invade. If you treat a rhizome like a weed, it will be even more weedish in response to your attempts to quell its nature.
How you commune with learning, your subjective choices in that conversation, makes learning more or less rhizomatic than any design framework or model.
I turn again to Martin Shaw, mythologist/storyteller (who was in my head for content as a myth) in which he introduces an extract from his book, (A Branch from the Lightning Tree) with this conversation about community:
“At least a third of the notion of community should live entirely in the imagination and shouldn’t continuously be wrestled into the literal.”
You touch nicely on the holographic nature of community here, Angela: we are in community and community is in us. We make the community and it makes us. We cannot separate the two, and to understand either, we must understand the one in the other. Thanks for saying it so well.