Rhizomatic Blogging

Dave Cormier’s post in his blog on rhizomes and blogging makes an excellent point when he stated that “the number of self-selected, personally empowered bloggers will be overwhelmed by those who are being told to blog.”

There is going to be a need to place private blogs within walled gardens, enabling a public and private face to emerge, enabling what he calls both rhizomatic knowledge (tentative, provisional knowledge built through consensus by group collaboration) and, for lack of a better phrase, a type of knowledge more representative of slow blogs.

Dave Cormier described his passion with blogging, how his passion for recording ideas promoted him to get started and keep going. He commented on how others explained their experiences with blogging as being a crystallization of their ideas over time, and how ideas tended to flow along with their personal histories.

He defined the rhizomatic web of knowledge as “knowledge that can ebb, flow, mutate, and grow from a variety of nodes as they crop up and the contents of those nodes grow” (Cormier, blog post).

Dave identified the once prominent place of online reflective journals, where bloggers blogged because they either simply wanted to, they had something to say, or they wanted others to hear what they had to share.

He has raised a critical point in the ethical use of requiring studnts to blog, and asked the question of what happens when those who blog are no longer self-selecting, when they feel they must in order to compete?

He asserted that these are not things we should even be teaching people, moving learners away from the way they wish to work. He then argued that this sense of being extroverted and wanting to broadcast your ideas to others does not represent the majority of society.

Dave calls for a type of blog which has posts that persist over time. He would like to see a type of blog that would unite the creative energies of both the introverted and extroverted to interact freely.