Estimated reading time: 1 minute, 47 seconds

This is a very interesting thread. I was thinking about nouns and verbs as I read it. It’s fairly easy to think of community as an entity even if we can’t define exactly what the community is, see its boundaries, know who’s in or out, or what it means to belong to that community. In rhizo14 we had to think about ‘community’ – it was in the title and it was where the curriculum was. Network for me brings 2 things to mind – socio-technical platforms where we connect (the noun)and our own individual networks that map our connections – the ‘performed’ network (the verb).. If the people who ‘did’ rhizo14 could map their individual networks and they were overlapped , perhaps the dense areas might be community(ies) in rhizo14 (‘performed’ communities). I think what Alan said about co-evolution is very helpful in trying to understand community(ies) at rhizo14. I am still puzzling about the formation of community and what ‘the community is the curriculum’ meant on rhizo14. Like Simon, I am not sure how ‘community is the curriculum’ fits with rhizomatic learning.
When Simon said, “Ah yes, I think that one thing which worked in #rhizo14 (but for a while) alienated some more science-bound academics was the rich diversity of media, emotional, spiritual, nonsense produced.” I wondered who were the science-bound academics on rhizo14 and wondered if he thought I was one of them 😉 Now that’s idle speculation but of more interest to me is how the auto-ethnographies and the research that Jenny and I are doing can complement each other in producing a richer but still very partial picture of the rhizo14 experience. Dave was kind enough to give me some time recently for a conversation about some of the issues in rhizo14, and I will be blogging that soonish. I think that we can learn from those experiences and by sharing them others may learn, or at least, think too.