Reflections on the course - rhizome as teaching zone: Complexity and the hive mentality in SL:

In developing a course on Generative Art (offered winter 2009) my colleague and I spent about a year discussing, researching, and debating the best way to approach this topic. Throughout this course I tracked my own engagement with the topic as well as the pros and cons of approaching the subject with a sequence of student projects. Much of our thinking on a pedagogical model built on open-ended questions was developed by teaching this course. When we decided to offer a class on Virtual Worlds we opted to employ the same rhizomatic model.

For those unfamiliar with this idea – in A Thousand Plateaus Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari discuss the rhizome as an alternative metaphor to traditional educational models. Unlike the “tree of knowledge” with roots and branches that grow ever upward, the rhizome spreads out horizontally and can be entered and negotiated from a variety of different locations. As they state, “any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be” (7). For Deleuze and Guattari “tree logic” is built upon repetition, on tracing and reproduction of given forms of knowledge. The rhizome, on the other hand, involves mapping and not tracing. “What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real” (12) - so – not just theory, not just practice - praxis. An educational model driven by mapping “has to do with performance, whereas the tracing always involves an alleged ‘competence’” (12-13). Student engagement with this model transpires at the level of personalized understanding through an individual knowledge base and not via the collective assessment or test-driven model of alleged competence.

So – unlike a more traditional approach where as the teacher I might have a body of knowledge that I pass on to the students and then test them to see how much of what I know they now know - the rhrizomatic model functions within a relatively contained subject – such as gen art or virtual worlds - but in which the pathway though the subject is different for each student. Rather than begin with the standard introductory material, the students were exposed to the subject by wrestling with open-ended assignments designed to raise more questions than answers. In the case of the gen art course students presented their solution to the prompt “create a sound producing machine” the second day of class. We then collectively discussed the idea of the machine, of types of sound, and different aspects of each solution. With the recent Virtual Worlds course students were asked to create a Second Life account and design and outfit an avatar by the third class, a project that forced them to gain a greater understanding of this virtual world in a short time frame by exploring a variety of SL locations, avatar options, shops, and interacting with other avatars. These inaugural projects provided the framework and skill set focused on problem solving that were then refined over the course of the term.

The rhythm established for these courses was project, then reflection, and then the theory behind the project. Rather than simply imitate someone else’s solution or parrot the instructors’ understanding of the subject, this process allows the student to understand the material from the inside out, as a personal journey in which their discoveries, ideas, issues, and approaches are all validated. With an open-ended project there are no wrong or right answers, all responses are valid. One of the main appeals of this type of structure is that not only do students often surprise the instructors, classmates, and even themselves with answers to these questions, but they often exceed expectations. As opposed to models that might involve something as proscribed as a written assignment, where students may simply execute the minimum work required (the typical “how many pages does it have to be?” question), the projects, executed and displayed in a collective environment, generally cause students to not concern themselves with minimum standards, and often work to and, at times, beyond their perceived potential.

One of the other positive side effects of this teaching model is that it allows students the flexibility to pursue their own interests. One of my major discoveries this term was how vast SL is. Our initial intent was to use SL as a laboratory space for projects, but also have the students explore other virtual worlds – we made some classic games like Myst, Uru, and WOW available to them alongside classic other world and “cyberpunk” literature by William Gibson, Ray Bradbury, Vernor Vinge, and Jorge Luis Borges. But nine and a half weeks of class time (minus a week for snow days) left precious little time to explore one world let alone many. In a way this worked to our advantage, since the concentration on one world through the eyes of 18 participants all moving in different directions (16 students and 2 instructors) allowed us to develop a complex understanding of this world in a relatively short time period. One of the off-shoots of the rhizome idea is the “hive” mentality – a collective mind that is far more powerful than a single mind – something that is difficult to achieve with a traditional pedagogical model.

Despite this approach to the course, one aspect of it did reflect a more traditional model. When offered to meet in SL rather than in the classroom all of the students opted to physically come to class. So – the space of the classroom became our lab with 18 people on 18 different computers occasionally sharing the same virtual space. This created an environment where clusters of students – some physically next to each other, some not, engaged in exploring this world as both individuals and members of a team.

The course moved from the avatar project, to taking the class on a field trip, to learning to build. Along the way there were scheduled conversations – we greatly appreciate SunQueen visiting us at such an early hour and answering our many questions – to unscheduled – I was delighted that my friend Bobo could join us for a few minutes. Partaking of Gracie Kendal’s 1000+ Avatar Project was a way to document the avatars, but also as a process of socialization as students interacted with Gracie and each other while waiting to have their pictures taken. It was interesting to note at this point in the term that the wild array of images present during the avatar assignment (zebras, hotdogs, hamburgers, pigfaces, etc) was much more contained during the “formal” portraits. As I commented in an earlier blog entry – when we traveled together at the start of the term we elicited comments about how odd we were, I am not sure that would be the case by the end of the class. Habituation? Fitting into a community? Boredom? I don’t know yet. But all of these steps led to the final projects – developed over the last few weeks of class. Bob and I did not prescribe a direction, but suggested that the areas of technological, conceptual, ethnographic, experiential, and reflective that emerged in our class discussions would provide useful avenues.

As happened with the final projects in the gen art class, we were blown away by the variety and complexity of these final projects. We had students explore such things as importing and exporting media (video, sound, and sculpties) from RL to SL and from SL to RL. There were students that explored the cultural or sociological aspects of this world by joining role playing communities, interacting with family members via SL, and arranging a series of “blind dates” in world. There were build projects in the form of an elaborate sound sculpture, the development of homes, and a giant game of dominoes. We had one student write a play about his experiences in SL, and others who documented their mischievous interactions with other avatars via still images and video. These projects provided the class as a whole with an image of SL – as a complex and multifaceted virtual world – that would have been impossible to establish had all of the students worked on the same type of project. My only regret is that we ran out of time to pull all of these varied pieces together. While we did have some time to reflect during the final exam, another class period or two would have been appreciated. It is with this type of reflection that we could speculate on the size and shape of the subject, as well as the individual pathways mapped by each student.

But, the explorations continue. When asked how many students would be back in SL after the class was over nearly all of the them said that they would. The one thing that I wish we had been able to address more fully is the interactive aspect of this space. Many of the students referred to SL in their blogs as “a game,” which in some respects it is, and yet it is also something else. We did spend some time comparing this world to chat, IM, email, Facebook, and chat-roulette (which I have not yet experienced but have been told by a number of people that it routinely consists of penis, penis, penis, someone to chat with, penis, penis, penis). But there is something markedly different about talking with someone you are sharing space with – cyberspace yes, but space nonetheless. Bob has commented that despite the filters and mediatization that goes on in SL there are really only a few neurons that separate one user from the next. I still see it as a distance, but perhaps more reflection will narrow that gap. My hope is when we offer this class again we can dig that much deeper into this delightfully complex world.