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Desire Lines
Interconnecting Blood Vessels with Major Channels, c. 1680s, from Tibetan Medical Paintings: Illustrations to the Blue Beryl Trettise of Sangye Gyamtso (London: Serindia, 1992).
Landscape designers often speak of “desire lines” – the tracks left by those who depart from official pathways. This pattern suggests we design courses as main routes that will be continually departed from and intersected by participants following their own Desire Lines. The Web offers an environment in which learners can – and indeed must – learn to navigate through an overwhelming quantity of information to gather what is personally relevant. Desire Lines facilitate INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACHES and QUESTIONING AUTHORITY. They intersect with the erotics of TEACHERS. The SPIRAL pattern can help use find ways to understand and utilize the magic of Desire Lines. ***
Hypertext allows us to create complex, multi-layered spaces that invite learners to pursue their personal passions. Yet the radical openness of the Web can easily overwhelm, and learners can become lost and disconnected from one another.
Peters (2004) argues that online learning is by nature individual and intuitive. He finds the Web particularly suited to autonomous, self-regulated learning. But a course that is too open will be incoherent, with unproductive dialogue and unmanageable teacher workload.
Akerlind and Trevitt (1999) note that online learning requires (as it allows opportunities for) student independence. Students must change their paradigm of what learning is, from a passive experience in which knowledge is transmitted to them from experts, to an active one in which they explore materials and attempt to restructure ideas and information to create personal and social meaning. He notes that this necessary reorientation of assumptions about teaching and learning can be very stressful. Student disorientation can inhibit learning unless it is acknowledged and addressed. Strategies suggested by Akerlind and Trevitt include clarifying students’ existing assumptions, and relating learning goals to desired real-world outcomes. Other approaches suggested by the pattern of Desire Lines include:
Anderson, Annand and Wark (2005) observe that learner independence is celebrated in one stream of distance education theory, while another theoretical stream conceives of the social interaction between instructor and learner and among learners as the crucial site of knowledge construction. They note, “the value of interaction in the educational process and consequent creation of interdependence advocated by constructivists has at times been challenged by evidence that many students consciously choose learning activities that minimize their interactions with teachers and other students” (p. 5). Many students find that online interactions take to much time, are irrelevant to their concerns, or are insufficiently alive to support their learning (p. 9). Anderson et. al. posit that “rather than progressing lockstep through prestructured content, students and instructors should be able to create diverse learning paths through an increasingly large set of learning alternatives” (p. 11) which may involve social interactions between teachers and learners, but may alternately allow students to establish their own trajectories for social learning through highly interactive learning content. They note that collaboration and communication need not be restricted to scheduled seminars in paced courses. Course design might invite students enrolled in learner-paced studies to collaborate with members of their own place-bound communities. Emerging Internet technologies for social computing “create opportunities for new types of learning communities that allow learners around the globe to study at their own pace, yet engage in meaningful interactions with others….” (p. 12).
Desire Lines posit a view of knowledge that eccentric in its construction. Rather than imagining culture as proceeding from the centre to the margins, Desire Lines suggests a culture of multiplying voices, and rhizomatic movement to dispersed sites in which knowledge is both produced and received. The pattern invites us to attend to Haughey (1995), who writes: “… we in distance education must recognize where we are situated and seek not to reproduce the traditional form for classroom instruction, but instead to provide learning opportunities that celebrate the distances while keeping the connections to the community of learners” (p.8).
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Honour Desire Lines with designs that support highly individual approaches to learning content, while creating pleasurable points of connection. Understand that participants in a course or program may distrust each other, find little value in dialogue, or simply be replete with existing relationships. Is there a way to incorporate students’ engagement in other communities of practice into the design for a course or community? Social exchanges need not be limited to exchanging tit for tat, nodding approval or mounting a challenge. Desire Lines suggests a space and process beyond such judgements and transactions, where each individual’s passion seeps into a common well of compassion.
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Designing with this pattern means we need TEACHERS to pay close attention to students, luring them back to the main pathway when necessary. Students will need clear guidelines with specific objectives and limits, and GOOD TOOLS to support their mindful navigation of uncharted territories. In fostering SPARKLING CONVERSATIONS and using the SPIRAL as a model for culture and communication, we create spaces where rich, complex individualities can intersect with THE DREAMED-OF COMMUNITY.
Spiral
Snail shell, copied from http://www.fssbirding.org.uk/textures&patternsphotopageperu.htm
The technological culture and knowledge economy of the beginning of the 21st century may create a space inimical to learning. In contrast to the hallowed halls and ivory towers of traditional learning environments, learners and teachers on the Internet are at once isolated from one another, and situated right inside a global social context. This context is characterized by the emergency of environmental degradation, the uncertainty of rapid social change, the displacement of traditional cultures, and an overwhelming quantity of information. DESIRE LINES created by students engaged in autonomous learning lure them away from the course and the learning community, while the difficulty of engaging in SPARKLING CONVERSATIONS on the Internet can further isolate learners from one another. The Spiral is an archetypal pattern that suggests a process of both opening, or moving out, and homecoming, or moving in that can inform the design of courses and communities.
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The Internet plays a key role in creating a global context of social instability and individual anxiety. Can the Internet also be used to create a quiet, inviting and stimulating learning space in which wisdom can emerge?
The Spiral reminds us to address this complex problem with designs that embody paradox and resist closure. It is a pattern that can be applied to both individual learning and group process.
A pedagogical model of “situated inquiry” suggests we incorporate a spiral pattern into course and program design. According to this model, learning is an iterative process, involving repeated circling from an original question. Rather than overloading students with too much information and unconnected assignments, we can design to allow reworking of the same material. Learning will be superficial if there is too much content (Bates & Poole, 2003). When the curriculum is stimulating without being too demanding, students have sufficient time and space to develop a personal, authentic voice (Smyth, 1989). A spiral path of inquiry allows learners to incorporate new understandings, deepen approaches and address challenges from the instructor and critical friends. Here the repetition, focus and familiarity of the circle are balanced by the excitement, discovery and challenge of an open-ended form.
Model of Situated Inquiry: The outer circle describes the fluid and shifting context of all inquiry, while the inner circle describes the dynamic spiral of individual and community learning (this inner circle is adapted from the “Inquiry Page” Website, Anonymous, 2004). Changing relationships between culture, nature, the known and the unknowable continually limit and influence inquiry. Shifting paradigms and power relationships provide a motivating context of inquiry and also describe impediments to knowledge construction. Trajectories of inquiry (in pink) work both ways, as individuals in communities both assume and transform the context of inquiry.
In terms of group process, a spiral pattern invites us to consider the centrality of the original purpose or vision that calls the group together. White (2002) observes, “To mobilize people and resources, there needs to be some kernel or point of gravity around which more focussed groups can form” (p.2). For Wenger, McDermott and Snyder (2002), the “domain” of a community of practice – the common purpose (or common ground) that gives meaning to interaction between members – is the crucial element that inspires and sustains learning through group process. Defining “the scope of the domain in a way that elicits the heartfelt interest of members” (p. 71) is the first and most important aspect of community development. And yet, these same authors note the importance of designing with a light hand, and allowing the group’s purpose and value to emerge in dialogue rather than being predetermined by convenors. They note, “Learning requires an atmosphere of openness” (p. 37). For Sandra and Spayde (2001), communities of conversation come alive when seasoned with “playfulness and paradoxicality” that keep participants “in a state of fluid curiosity, willing to become engaged, challenged and startled” (p. 75).
Baldwin (1998) reminds us that the circle is an ancient form for group process. She describes how, inside a circle, people create an oasis of time and space apart from the noise of everyday life in which to regain a sense of personal power and collective potential. In her description of “calling the circle” she describes a process in which leadership is shared, purpose is held at the centre, and people engage in openhearted speaking and careful listening. The circle opens into a spiral form when participants are released to other circles, practices and communities. Brossard (1988) employs the image of the spiral to describe the emergence of a women’s culture that can continually traverse new territory and make sense out of what has been hitherto constituted as unknowable. In contrast to a closed circle where a (privileged) few constitute the meaning of things between themselves, the spiral suggests a form for culture and community that is forever open, interrogative and multiplicable. Comfort and familiarity within clear boundaries are required for both individuals and communities to flourish (Weil and Rosen, 1997), and yet it is just as important to open to the new, the unknown, and the marvellous.
Wenger, McDermott and Snyder (2002) suggest that community leaders build a “fire at the centre.” As people are drawn to its warmth and light, new people will join the group, while others, warmed and fed (or “burnt-out”) will go. This continual movement into and away from the centre, suggested by spiral pattern, describes a process that may be particularly well-suited to online communities of inquiry, The technology that can draw people together from diverse cultures, bioregions and backgrounds also leaves each learner rooted in their own discrete communities of belonging, unique circumstances, and home ground, (Anderson, Annand and Wark, 2005; Haughey, 1995) – the spaces where new knowledge generated in an online community of inquiry can actually be used to make a difference.
*** Use the spiral as a design pattern to create online learning spaces, guide group process, and structure individual learning experiences that incorporate the seemingly paradoxical principles of centering, circling and opening. Balance the radical openness of hypertext with specific, situated inquiry. Create spaces and processes for dialogue that can be held special and apart from everyday life, yet make sure that these spaces and processes include openings through which people, ideas and information can come and go.
TEACHERS who engage in personal dialogue with students and ask questions to facilitate SPARKLING CONVERSATIONS assist in creating a rich balance between familiarity and excitement. Varieties of FRIENDSHIP, with opportunities for multiple levels of privacy and disclosure, also support the spiral path of simultaneously centering and opening for participants and communities. |
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