By Rosemarie Emanuele. In Statistics, the idea of “variance” describes how disperse data points are. Are they all bunched right at the mean, or are they very spread out, with some values much larger than the mean, and other values much lower than the mean? I taught this topic last week, and was able to create a visual (and beyond) image for my students. I entered my classroom stomping snow off my boots as I took off my coat and scarf. I asked them the question; “does anyone even remember the heat of the summer?” A room full of tired students who had driven to school in a storm glared back at me. No, no one seemed to remember the sweltering heat and humidity of the summer that had led to a tornado sweeping through and destroying part of the campus. And so I discussed the idea of variation in weather, as it relates to the calculation of the variance of a data set. Read more...

By Laura Tropp. Last week I was reading a Wall Street Journal article, an excerpt from a new parenting book by Jennifer Senior, that discusses time and parenting. This piece focused on differing notions of time management and parenting between women and men. Ultimately, it argued that women often performed tasks that involved childcare and time sensitive-tasks, which took up more mental time. It was hard for me to disagree. I would much prefer folding five loads of laundry by myself than trying to convince any of my children to take a bath before bed. This article also made me think about how our media environments, not just sex/gender identifications, may impact how we see time. Read more...

By Jenny Mackness. This is an open letter to Keith Hamon. Since it is open anyone is welcome to respond, but the thoughts here have been prompted by contact with Keith.
Hi Keith – I have been thinking about your invitation to discuss some of the ideas around rhizomatic learning with you further.
I am still finding it difficult to get my head round it – but maybe that’s because I haven’t read enough of ‘A Thousand Plateaus’. On one level it all seems so obvious. More...

By rhizo14. The rhizomatic learning course #rhizo14 is the first open course I’ve ever taught without affiliation. (though certainly being employed by my university and having an invested and interested partner allows me to have the ‘free time’ to pursue it) I have no partner that I’m working with or no school supporting it. This is the educational exploration I’ve been doing for the last 8-9 years, and I invited whoever may want to join to come along with me for the ride. It is, in many ways, the vision of MOOCs that I have had since we first starting talking about them in 2008. The course participation has been fascinating… and enlightening. Don’t take my word for it, check out some of the highlights for yourself on Cathleen Nardi’s curation page. The course is being ‘designed’, if you can call it that, to expose the concepts of rhizomatic learning through a succession of challenges. The challenges have been developed on the fly based on my sense of what might help push the conversation to a new and interesting place. They are structured to challenge the cultural assumptions that are prevalent around learning and to have people share their responses to it. More...