Learning and Change in a World of Communications

I have been an educator, administrator, writer and creative artist for many years. During that time, most of the disciplines with which I have been involved have changed. For better or for worse, the very nature of disciplines (of both an artistic and analytic nature), their function and their role within and outside of institutions has been immeasurably altered. The context for this change is not just the individual nature or history of one or other disciplines or practices. Rather, the social and cultural conditions for the creation and communication of ideas, artifacts, knowledge and information have been transformed by the ubiquitous presence of digital technologies. From my point of view, this transformation has been extremely positive. It has resulted in the formation of new disciplines and new approaches to comprehending the very complex nature of Western Societies. However, we are still a long way from developing a holistic understanding of the implications of these social and cultural shifts.

From a cultural point of view, the impact of this process of transformation first appeared in the early 20th century when the cinema became a mass medium and accelerated with the advent of radio and then television (although there are many parallels with what happened to literature and photography in the 19th century). This was the first stage in the advent of mass communications systems. Networked technologies have added another layer to the changes and another level of complexity to the ways in which ideas are communicated and discussed, as well as learned. The conventions that have governed communications processes for over fifty years have been turned inside out by the Internet and this has led to some fundamental redefinitions of information, knowledge, space and time.

Time, for example, does change when the metaphors that we have available for explaining temporal shifts are no longer rooted in conventional notions of seasonal shift and measurement of incremental change. Technology plays a role, but it is not the only player in what has been a dramatic move from an industrial/agrarian society to a mixed environment that is extremely dependent on cultural activity, networks and information.

The disjunctures at work in our society and the upheavals caused by profound cultural and social change have begun to affect the orientation, direction and substance of many different academic and art-related disciplines. Some of these disciplines have been around for a long time. I would suggest that most disciplines have been under extreme stress for the better part of the 20th century.

We are very likely in the early stages of a long-term shift in direction and it may take some time yet before that shift is fully understood. One important way of understanding this shift is through the an examination of what has happened to learning in the digital age and the role that technology has played in sustaining and sometimes inhibiting changes in the way learning takes place bothinside and outside institutions.

Teaching, Learning and Making in Design Education

One of the major assumptions in design education and pedagogy is that students have to “make” or “produce” objects, from for example, web pages to bicycles to books in order to prove that they have learned to become designers. This philosophy is further amplified in popular journals like Applied Arts, which features the work of designers (much as photographic magazines feature the works of photographers) as examples both of production and professional capacity as if the works themselves have enough presence and force to stand for the creative process.

This outcomes based strategy is pervasive in disciplines that frame learning through the products or objects students create. The assumption is that students become more active learners if they transform information and knowledge into something tangible. To varying degrees, this approach has immense value. However, my sense is that the focus on outcomes often reduces the students need to engage in wide-ranging and critical analyses and therefore to make possible the kind of self-reflection that is essential to learning. In other words interpretation, discourse and critique become less important largely because the object is meant to stand not only for function but also for meaning, process and aesthetics. There is in this approach a thin border between 19^th century vocational learning and teaching and the depth that should be required of university students in the 21^st century who wish to become designers.    

The tradition of making that dominates contemporary art and design educational organizations is often portrayed as one of the essential differences that design schools have with more traditional institutions. Making is given a higher value than just thinking or research that may have no pragmatic or immediate outcome.  I would like to argue in this short article that the underlying philosophy of “making” to show progress in skills acquisition is fraught with dangers, among the most important of which is rampant anti-intellectualism. Furthermore, from my perspective, the learning process both within design and generally, is by its very nature so interdisciplinary that the focus on outcomes (most fully exemplified by the fourth year graduation project that comes to stand not only for years of learning but for the general capacity and competence of the student) tends to distort if not undermine creative process as well as innovative and speculative thinking. Of course, I am not suggesting that making is an end in itself, nor that the fabrication of prototypes or objects is harmful or without merit. Rather, one of the most important elements of any creative discipline, in my opinion is that learners become creative problem solvers. In order to achieve that goal many different pedagogical approaches are needed, not the least of which is an awareness of the differences among skills, learning and research. Gaining that understanding means that design students (and for that matter design teachers) cannot approach learning in a linear fashion. There is no easy or simple road to creative and innovative thought or production, unless the purpose of the educational process is framed by a limited understanding of the vocation or discipline within which both learners and teachers are engaged.

In contrast, experience design is part of an effort to recast design process so that at a minimum fabrication can meet creativity in a middle zone, a space where designers can reach out to potential audiences or users, a space that is both highly contingent and not entirely framed by use. The challenge for successful experience designers then centres on communication, language and quality of interaction, that is, how to fabricate a relational environment that may or may not have objects as their focus. Experience design suggests something about the challenges that now face all designers as the ground upon which creative engagement shifts from makers to users, inverting the creative process so that the latter is often more responsible for their experiences than the former.

Ironically, this is the same problem that artists face. The fabrication of something from nothing and the translation of ideas into artifacts cannot be reduced to a series of mechanical decisions, but requires a combination of self-reflection and self-appraisal as well as external evaluation and critique. Concepts don’t become aesthetic objects just because the craft needed to make or create something has been well learned or even well executed. If creativity were a simple matter of craft or even technique, then there would be little aesthetic or technical difference among artists or designers or users. Self-reflection can be learned. At the same time, learning to work beyond the limitations suggested by any craft or technique is the foundation upon which both innovative and critical articulation rests. The challenge both for learners and teachers is how to open up an increasingly narrow and narrowing set of assumptions about the pragmatic outcomes of the learning process. This is one of the key challenges both for the discipline and the institutions that teach design.   

Leadership in Art and Design

This talk was presented at the European League of Institutes of Art, Leadership Symposium held at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in December of 2011.

Designing the Future: Leadership in the 21st Century - Ron Burnett from Emily Carr University on Vimeo 

Transdisciplinarity: A New Learning Paradigm for the Digital Age?

I have been an educator, administrator, writer and creative artist for over fourty years. During that time, most of the disciplines with which I have been involved have changed. For better or for worse, the very nature of disciplines (of both an artistic and analytic nature), their function and their role within and outside of institutions has shifted. The context for this change is not just the individual nature or history of one or other disciplines or research practices. Rather, the social and cultural conditions for the creation and communication of ideas, artifacts, knowledge and information have been transformed. From my point of view, this transformation has been extremely positive. It has resulted in the formation of new disciplines and new approaches to comprehending the very complex nature of western societies. However, we are still a long way from developing a holistic understanding of the implications of these social and cultural shifts and this brief essay can only offer a hint as to why so many distinct changes have happened in such a short time. 

From a cultural point of view, the impact of this process of transformation first appeared in a symptomatic fashion in the early 20th century, when the cinema became a mass medium and accelerated with the advent of radio and then television (although there are many parallels with what happened to literature and photography in the 19th century). Networked technologies have added another layer to the changes and another level of complexity to the ways in which ideas are communicated and discussed, as well as learned (and in so doing further fudging the boundaries between disciplines). The conventions that have governed communications processes for over fifty years have been turned inside out by the Internet and this has led to some fundamental redefinitions of information, knowledge, space and time. 

Technology plays a role here, but it is not the only player in what has been a dramatic move from an industrial/agrarian society to a mixed environment that is as dependent on cultural activity, networks and information as it is on the state and conventional notions of political and economic activity. The disjunctures at work in our society and the upheavals caused by profound cultural and social change have begun to affect the orientation, direction and substance of many different academic and art-related disciplines. Although some of these disciplines have been around for a long time, part of my argument in this essay will be that most disciplines have been under stress for the better part of the 20th century. We are very likely in the early stages of a long-term shift in direction and it may take some time yet before that shift is fully understood. One important way of understanding these changes is through the an examination of what has happened to learning in the digital age and the role that technology has played in sustaining and sometimes inhibiting changes in the way learning takes place both inside and outside institutions.  

I will discuss post-secondary institutions because I know them best, but I believe that many of the following arguments apply to most forms of education. Modern universities now operate within a context that is both challenging and undergoing fundamental change. My effort in this essay is to try and understand why some of our disciplines may be in crisis and why transdisciplinarity may be one of the best solutions to that crisis. It is my feeling that a combination of phenomena and a particularly difficult context for education has begun to foreground a series of contradictions that require some elucidation. These include increasing questions about the relevance of university education for the future and questions about how universities manage themselves and what the balance should be among research, teaching, learning and administration. 

 At the same time, I am concerned with the evolving role of disciplines within post-secondary educational institutions and the challenges that a new context is introducing into the learning environment. What is that new context? Well, it is not one thing or one phenomenon; rather, I believe that we are in the midst of a ‘sea change’ in our understanding of the communications setting that is the underpinning for learning, pedagogy and education. This is a bold claim. For example, it is not possible, in my opinion to examine what we teach without linking that to the networked world. Information now flows from so many venues that what we mean by content needs to be examined from many different and sometimes-conflicting perspectives. Educational institutions are becoming one of many possible places that learners can seek information and knowledge, but they are no longer the only place. 

An interesting phenomenon which exemplifies this point and which is enhanced by using the Internet is auto-didacticism, people who teach themselves. A good example of this is in the computer sciences where students as hackers learn programming from each other as well as from sources that are sometimes legitimate and other times not. Another example is the many different ways in which young people alter the computer games that they play. There is a vast movement of gamers who have learned how to ‘patch’ games and introduce ‘mods’ which transform not only the aesthetic of the game, but often its intentions. The marvel of auto-didacticism is the extent to which at least in the digital era, learning turns into networked dialogue among anonymous individuals who dedicate themselves to projects that they are working on. The development of the LINUX operating system (which was the product of thousands of peoples contributions) is a further example of this growing and important shift in how ideas and information are exchanged. All of these examples point towards a complex landscape in which learning takes place within a variety of different settings and where notions of authority as well as authorship are under constant pressure.

The digital revolution has disrupted and will continue to disrupt what we mean by learning and how we organize our disciplines. Suffice to say, that to think about transdisciplinarity in a networked world is to think about disciplines in a different and evolving context of interconnection and complex forms of communications and interchange. The fluidity is sometimes startling, but a necessary if not creative condition which can transform the exchange of ideas. Or, put another way, the public sphere is no longer dependent upon the particular forms of dialogue to which we have grown accustomed and new forms will have to be developed. This doesn’t make universities redundant as much as it shifts the ground for the conversations that we can have and has significant implications for the processes of communications that we engage in on a daily basis.

The discipline of Communications (which matured over the last thirty years) perhaps more than others represents the shift from a mono-disciplinary approach to a multi-disciplinary strategy. This may well be its undoing, but at a minimum I believe that communications has helped us to conceptualize as well as explain some of the changes that we are experiencing. The status of disciplines like communications does of course largely depend on the definitions that we apply to the activities of research and practice within both education and society. For example, the fact that there is now a discipline in the universities with the name of media studies is largely the result of the increasing importance of media in society and a growing recognition that critical as well as theoretical research is needed if we are to understand how the media work and what their influence is on our daily lives. The disciplines that we are a part of at universities have grown out of shared social, political, cultural and economic concerns. Disciplines are based on a systematic history, one that includes not only particular methodologies, but also specific concerns that are sustained in a cohesive way over time. 

In Western cultures disciplines developed because of a felt need for sites of rational discourse, reason and a sense that without boundaries knowledge cannot be rigorously pursued or deepened. Yet, those boundaries are neither as natural nor as fixed as the history of disciplines would suggest. Nor should they be. Rather, as with knowledge and learning, the question is how to create sites of engagement, which will support some degree of stability while recognizing the need for continual change and responsiveness to the social, cultural and economic pressures that surround the learning experience.  

Disciplines are examples of the synergistic relationship between the perceived needs of social formations and the common assumption that economic and political progress comes from an educated populace. The assumption that education and progress are linked is of course an eighteenth as well as nineteenth century concept, which developed in part because literacy was assumed to be central to bourgeois society. It was and still would be a heresy to suggest that literacy may not only be found through the comprehension of texts and that there may be many other venues that encourage personal and social growth. I am of course not arguing against the value of literacy, just against the received opinion that to understand means to read, to learn means to write and that reading and writing are the foundation upon which all else is built, especially in the educational system and particularly in the digital age. 

The discipline that I received my doctorate in is Communications. Historically the development of the discipline of communications was the product of a convergence among a nascent media studies, cultural studies, film studies, literary studies, cultural anthropology, semiotics, feminist studies and art history. It is clear that a broader mapping was needed to sustain the multi-disciplinary interests of different scholars. This was also, clearly, a response to changes in our societies. Other areas like linguistics, sociology and political science watched in amazement as communications researchers borrowed and begged from everywhere in order to engage with some of the central cultural and social phenomena of the 20^th century. It is fascinating how quickly communications with its sub-disciplines like film studies, media studies and cultural studies spread and how many departments were created or recreated to accommodate faculty and student interest. So, we have an interesting paradox. Aren’t these developments evidence of the ability of disciplines to evolve and change? Doesn’t this suggest that universities are supple and responsive places? This profusion of disciplines also suggests that the antennae of researchers were carefully tuned to the changes going on in society at large. As media became more ubiquitous, as more and more devices of communications appeared, as our entire society geared itself towards a technological shift, many departments and disciplines, many teachers and administrators responded in a positive and constructive manner. 

The paradox is that this is both true and false. It is false because the newer disciplines simply transported earlier intellectual paradigms onto the media for example without due concern for specificity or context. Modernist notions of canon creation allowed and encouraged a few paradigmatic ideas to become central and foundational far too quickly. The relationships among the various disciplines became obscured. Hovering in the background were concerns that interdisciplinarity was simply too general and not specific enough to encourage rigorous scholarship. And then there was the teaching. Because these areas were and are of interest to students who bath in the phantasmagoria of media and culture on an everyday basis, these courses attracted large numbers of students at all levels. People had to be hired to service demand. Doctoral programs grew. More and more conferences were organized by faculty anxious to understand each other’s work. At the same time, expectations about rigour and connections to more traditional disciplines — to the broader constellation of concerns within universities seemed to be of marginal concern. Ironically, this new area, so unaware of how disciplines can quickly lose their edge, so disconnected from similar research going on in other areas, growing so rapidly found itself to be mainstream in society and under attack in the university. 

Somehow, the broad vision of Communications was being transformed into what looked increasingly like literary studies of the 1950’s. The fragmentation was enormous and continues to this day. This would not necessarily be a negative were it not for the fact that the eclecticism (which I believe can and should be supported in certain circumstances) became self-referential. That is, research in the area referred increasingly to literature that most researchers outside of the field would not or could not read. And in universities the reaction to that lack of interaction is that silos go up, walls are built to keep ideas and people out of each other’s purview. There are many disciplines other than Communications that have followed a similar trajectory. 

I am not suggesting that the inherent transdisciplinary character of communications led to these problems. I am suggesting that the way in which that transdisciplinarity is practiced needs to be examined with close attention paid to the tensions between applied forms of research in communications (international policy, for example) and research that is oriented towards criticism, theory and history. It is an irony that just as Communications became increasingly accepted as a discipline, it fractured from within and lost sight of its goals. The most telling example of this is that early research into the Internet came from interdisciplinary scholars in the science and engineering and not from scholars in communications. 

Now, as the technologies of entertainment and communication have become not only ubiquitous but also foundational to everyday life, there is an increasing convergence among the various strands that broadly speaking make up the study of communications. The digital era is very much about the fudging of boundaries and this has increasingly meant that the study of communications cannot and should not be pursued in isolation of the computer sciences or psychology or the neurosciences. These disciplines are also increasingly attracted to more rigourous forms of research in anthropology and communications.   

How does what I have said impact the development, maintenance and continuation of the disciplines I have been talking about? Well, at the same time that we are researching, inventing and reinventing our areas of interest, we need to stay connected to the many ways in which all disciplines are engaged in a similar struggle. That struggle tries to bring purpose to ideas, tries to create a context for a transformed and transformative humanism and tries to connect the value and depth of research to the process of communication among all members of the community (inside and outside of the university) and most importantly, students.

As I have said, with respect to the discipline of Communications, the arrival of a plethora of new instruments of communications, new technologies and new media has created a wonderful opportunity to bring the sciences, engineering, computer sciences, social sciences and humanities together. I am involved in numerous projects with researchers and practitioners with whom I would never normally have had contact. We are transgressing all of the boundaries and mapping a new territory that hopefully will re-energize our teaching and redefine our disciplines. I say this with some pride but also with trepidation. I recognize how fragile this process can be and have been made wary of the potential for politics and competitiveness to interfere with good intentions and well laid plans. Yet, I am hopeful that our students will resist the seemingly natural tendency of our institutions and disciplines to narrow their concerns, and will keep the pot boiling as to the relevance of the courses that they are taking and the information that they are processing and learning.    

Often, the assumption that is made is that technology has been the main cause of the shift that we are presently experiencing. But, I believe that this change has been in the works since the advent of distribution and communications systems for mass culture and the linking of culture to education and learning. In addition, the motor for many of the changes has been scientific research in a variety of fields, but most especially in physics and biology. The integration of science and technology and the strengthening of the social sciences have combined to transform what we mean by subjectivity and human identity. This is in turn has led to a redefinition of our sense of time and of space. In particular, "time" in the early 21st century has less to do with measurement than with flow, which may well be an excellent metaphor for the direction in which our disciplines need to head. So, by way of summary, let me suggest the following:

1. Technology is one of the drivers of change in the shift to transdisciplinary models, but not the only one.

2. The integration of research in the sciences with research that has led to technological innovation and social analysis has been supported by a massive change in communications and distribution systems. This is turn has changed the ways in which we translate innovation into practice. It has also transformed how we locate and sustain change at the economic, social and cultural level. All of these elements have an impact on what we mean by learning and transdisciplinarity.

3. Networks of communication have altered what we mean by information and also how our culture views knowledge and this has had a profound impact on the arts and on the social sciences.

4. These changes have redefined our notions of time and space and our ability to map and develop explanatory models for what is happening around us with the result that different disciplines have had to alter their direction (good examples are geography and architecture).

5. More importantly the metaphors that we normally use to explain change have been altered by the integration of media and images into every aspect of our daily lives. The digital revolution has merely extended the boundaries of these transformative phenomena. 

6. All of this has affected the definitions and explanations of disciplines and it may be the case that transdisciplinarity provides us with the strategies that we need to understand the radically different boundaries within which disciplines must now operate. 

7. There is a strong desire to recognize the importance of convergence between disciplines and research and scholarship. This desire for convergence must also recognize diversity and difference. It will only be possible to move from specialized and closed approaches within disciplines, if we also acknowledge that their relatedness allows us to select what needs to come together, while celebrating separateness, locality and community.

A significant example of these processes at work is that one of the most important of the physical sciences relating to the brain, the neurosciences, has become a combination of anatomy, physiology, chemistry, biology, pharmacology and genetics with a profound concern for culture, ethics and social context. Genetics itself makes use of many different disciplines to achieve its aims (including data visualization). To survive in the 21st century the neurosciences will have to link all of their parts even further and bring genetics, the environment, and the socio-cultural context together in order to develop more complex models of mind.

It may well be the case that no amount of research will produce a grand theory. But, as the great neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran has suggested, the most puzzling aspect of our existence is that we can ask questions about the physical and psychological nature of the brain and the mind. And we do this as if we can somehow step outside of the parameters of our own physiology and see into consciousness. Whatever the merits of this type of research, it cannot avoid the necessity of integration and the inter-related nature of our disciplines. The need for a common ground has never been greater. The question is, will our institutions be up to the challenge?

Museum in a Hat

(*Museum in a Hat refers to a performance by the artist Robert Filliou during which he would pull things out of a hat and give the objects to other performers or onlookers. The objects were in constant transition as was the museum. Filliou had a profound influence on the avant-garde movement in Canada during the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. Filliou’s performance was described to me by Hank Bull, one of the founders of  The Western Front an alternative artist-run centre in Vancouver, Canada which will be celebrating its 38th anniversary in 2011. 

“I am interested in performance as a double-jointed anti-genre in perpetual crisis.”[1] The speaker is Judy Radul.  

“…these voices [with reference to a performance at The Western Front entitled, One Fine Evening] spoke to  as much as they spoke through  the performers. Pre-recorded voices ordered them about, slogans sprouted from their mouths incongruously, speech was accented, patriarchal, computer generated, motivationally enhanced, theoretically implanted, and, in general, authorially skewed.”[2]

Vancouver and its Cultural Landscape

a

sustaining vision of

the intricate palimpsest-of-relationships

supporting every living/dying

thing ought to inform an enlightened polis;

to imagine oneself interacting

with everything (imaginable) at a strategic

moment: pen, brush, spear to hand

is simply what it’s always been about [3]

This poem by Roy Kiyooka exemplifies many of the themes which have been at the heart of the extraordinary artistic output of The Western Front (hereafter referred to as WF) over the last twenty-four years. Kiyooka plays with the idea of the palimpsest both as a metaphor of erasure and as a way of keeping history present through the traces of our culture’s work with ‘pen, brush and spear’. Nothing ever disappears in this processing of events and of history. Cultural activity builds on the past, even as that past changes with every artistic interpretation of it. Kiyooka was part of a large group of artists, performers, poets and intellectuals who shaped the modernist movement in Vancouver in the 1960's and early 1970's. It was out of this activity that the Western Front was created in 1973. In addition to Kiyooka, Robert Filliou and Ray Johnson were formative influences on the WF. “Ray Johnson visited Vancouver once briefly in 1969 as a guest of the UBC Fine Arts Gallery for an international exhibition of visual/verbal concrete poetry and correspondance art, entitled, Concrete Poetry — an exhibition in four parts which also included contributions by Robert Filliou and the internatiional Fluxus community. Filliou’s first visit was in the summer of 1973 when he came as a guest of the newly founded Western Front Society. The work of both artists, often deliberately ephemeral, used puns, riddles, events and performances to convey ideas….For Filliou, research was the door through which anyone could enter and participate in the creative process. Artists could think of themselves as researchers influencing the culture.”[4]

History and art, the ability to imagine the impossible, to make the real and the imaginary mix, to make the everyday a work of art and to make art a part of the everyday were not just thematic explorations for Kiyooka, Filliou and the many other major artists and performers who came to the WF in the early days. They were at the heart of their sensibilities as artists. The transformation of art from an object-oriented enterprise to a lived experience for artist and community alike is what has defined the WF throughout its history. In some respects, the WF was developed as a community centre with both a service and an artistic mandate. To this day, its facilities are open to booking from members of the community and its festivals and events are attended by a diverse and largely heterogeneous group of people. The WF has a strong sense of the local with an equally profound understanding of the international art scene and a connection into worldwide activities which it has imported into Vancouver on a regular basis. 

If you are interested in reading the rest of this essay, please contact me at r bur nett at ecuad dot ca  

---

[1]Judy Radul, “You Don’t Say: Voices from the Incongruous Outside,” Catalogue for the Exhibition/Performance, One Fine Evening, Curator, Eric Metcalfe, The Western Front, Vancouver (1996), n.p.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Roy Kiyooka, “Notes Toward a Book of Photoglyphs,” Capilano Review , Second Series: 2 (Spring 1990): 80 quoted in The Verbal and the Visual, Collapse  #2, Vancouver Art Forum Society (1996): 55.

[4] Michael Morris and Vincent Trasov, “Letter from Berlin,” in Robert Filliou: From Political to Poetical Economy, Exhibition catalogue, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, 1994, pp.72-73.

W/Here: Contesting Knowledge in the 21st Century

W/Here is a symposium organized by Emily Carr University of Art and Design and the European League of Institutes of Art. The conference will be taking place from December 7-9th, 2011. 

Programme

“W/Here: Contesting Knowledge in the 21st Century?” will include perspectives from artists, designers, musicians, educators, administrators and cultural workers who have deep commitments to the role of Higher Arts Education. Over the three days at both emily carr university and other cultural locations around Vancouver the Symposium will address the following themes:

Have We Ever Been Modern | The Institutions of the 21st Century

Dispersed Learning | The Students of the 21st Century 

DIY Open Source Culture and Learning Cultures | Leadership in the 21st Century

MOBILE WORKSHOPS A series of mobile workshops have been planned, with groups of 20 participants visiting a range of Vancouver’s cultural organisations, to experience how these themes manifest in the configurations of arts organisations today.

New Approaches to Applied Masters Degrees | Masters in Digital Media, Great Northern Way

First Nations Culture and the Digital Turn | Museum of Anthropology

A Creative Commons for the City | W2 Community Media Centre

Alternative Models of Creation | Progress Lab 1422

Virtual/Real/Virtual (3)

(This is the third and final part of a presentation to DIGIFEST in Toronto in late October of 2011)

"An Ad Hoc Committee of the National Association of Research in Science Teaching
(NARST) stated in 2003 that there are three “important characteristics of learning… First, learning is a personal process, second, it is contextualized, and third, it takes time…Learning occurs when people reconstruct meaning and understanding; a different way of thinking, perhaps, or a different way of responding to an idea or event. Learning that occurs today depends on yesterday’s learning and is the foundation for tomorrow’s learning. The cumulative, iterative process of learning emphasizes the importance of time.”. Our own research in this area reinforces the importance of iteration." (Susan Stocklmayer, Public awareness of science and informal learning - a perspective on the role of science museums, published by the National Academies in the US)

Learning takes time and follows many pathways. A good teacher can create a map with destinations, but the routes have to be developed by the students. Those routes may meander for a while because the iterative process is not the same for everyone. Knowledge and information can be shared along the way. Wisdoms can be imparted through discussion and interaction, but these travels will always be characterized by the richness of the unexpected sometimes colliding with the expectations of teachers and other times producing engaged and engaging dialogue.

The tyranny of schedules in schools is that they artificially 'locate' learning at a time and place that may not be convenient for everyone. The schedule cannot account for iterative processes because it generates a linear type of learning that goes against the essence of learning experiences. We have created schools where the mapping from experience to learning is not fluid enough to match the needs of a new generation.

Iteration, non-linearity, informal learning. These are all characteristics of networked environments which by their very nature encourage what has been achieved by the Khan Academy for example. Here is one individual without any resources other than his own skills and intelligence, who decided to create a learning environment through video demonstrations. He has 2600 hundred courses up at this site and receives thousands of learners every day. Students use the site to move at their own pace. Khan is pointing to something very important. Courses and their contents can now be customized to the needs of learners and learners can choose when and where to learn. 

"To summarise: learning rarely, if ever, occurs and develops from a single experience. It is cumulative, emerging through diverse experiences. It is a dynamic, never-ending, and holistic phenomenon of constructing personal meaning. Much of what people come to know about the world, including the world of science content and process, derives from real world experiences within a diversity of appropriate physical and social contexts, motivated by an intrinsic desire to learn." (Susan Stocklmayer, Public awareness of science and informal learning - a perspective on the role of science museums, published by the National Academies in the US)

So, it seems clear to me that the digital age is emphatically about informality — learning through multiple means in multiple ways and in many different contexts. A key question remains. Can all of this informality be structured? Should it be? How can the dots be connected between learning that is driven by personal concerns and areas like mathematics and writing that need some formality in order to be mastered? Must all learning be governed by choice? Or are there certain basic subjects that require mastery through more formal strategies?

I made the point earlier that digital experiences encourage and support the creation of imaginary environments and imaginary connections. This is not a pejorative comment. Rather, what is exciting about these informal spaces for learning is that they are so imaginative, so full and rich with many choices and many possible avenues of exploration. Informal learning then combines with imaginative projection to allow learners and the public to engage with their ideas in many different ways. The challenge for schools is how to frame and harness these various and sometimes different learning strategies. Teachers need to be as adept as learners in a new and engaged multi-disciplinary ecosystem.

Epilogue (The 21^st Century Student)

I will call him Anthony. He arrived in Vancouver with a trunk full of DVD's. He uses SMS and a variety of social networking tools from Twitter to Facebook to communicate with friends and family. He uses a small video camera to record his everyday life and edits the output on a laptop and then uploads the material onto YouTube.

He is adept at video games, though they are not an obsession. Smart phones are expensive, but he finds the money and uses his phone constantly. This sounds familiar; an entire generation working creatively with Facebook and Vimeo and Youtube and Flckr. He loves old movies, hence the DVD's. He knows more about films from the 1970's and 1980's than most film historians. He can quote dialogue from many films and reference specific shots with ease. He uses his expertise in editing to comment on the world and would prefer to show you a short video response to events than just talk about them.

Cultural analysts tend to examine Anthony's activities and use of technology as phenomena, as moving targets which change all the time, just as they saw pop music in the 1960's as a momentary phase or like their early comments on personal computers which did not generally anticipate their present ubiquity.

However, what Anthony is doing is building and creating a new language that combines many of the features of conventional languages but is more of a hybrid of many different modes of expression. Just as we don't really talk about language as a phenomenon, (because it is inherent to everything that we do) we can't deal with this explosion of new languages as if they are simply a phase or a cultural anomaly.

What if this is the new form and shape of writing? What if all of these fragments, verbal, non-verbal, images and sounds are inherent to an entire generation and is their mode of expression?

Language, verbal and written is at the core of what humans do everyday. But, language has always been very supple, capable of incorporating not only new words, but also new modalities of expression. Music for example became a formalized notational system through the adaptation and incorporation of some of the principles of language. Films use narrative, but then move beyond conventional language structure into a hybrid of voice, speech, sounds and images.

As long as Anthony's incorporation of technology and new forms of expression is viewed as a phenomenon it is unlikely that we will understand the degree to which he is changing the fundamental notions of communications and learning to which we have become accustomed over the last century.

Anthony however has many problems with writing. He is uncomfortable with words on a page. He wants to use graphics and other media to make his points. He is more comfortable with the fragment, with the poetic than he is with the whole sentence.

He is prepared to communicate, but only on his own terms.

It is my own feeling that the ubiquity of computers and digital technologies means that all cultural phenomena are now available for use by Anthony and his generation and they are producing a new framework of communications within which writing is only a piece and not the whole.

Some may view this as a disaster. I see Anthony as a harbinger of the future. He will not take traditional composition classes to learn how to write. Instead, he will communicate with the tools that he finds comfortable to use and he will persist in making himself heard or read. But, reading will not only be text-based. Text on a page is as much design as it is media. The elliptical nature of the verbal will have to be accommodated within the traditions of writing, but writing and even grammar will have to change.

I have been talking about a new world of writing that our culture is experimenting with in which conventional notions of texts, literacy and coherence are being replaced with multiples, many media used as much for experience as expression. Within this world, a camera, or mobile phone becomes a vehicle for writing. It is not enough to say that this means the end of literacy as we know it. It simply means that language is evolving to meet the needs of far more complex expectations around communications.

So, the use of a short form like Twitter hints at the importance of the poetic. And the poetic is more connected to Rap music than it is to conventional notions of discursive exchange. In other words, bursts of communications, fragments and sounds combined with images constitute more than just another phase of cultural activity. They are at the heart of something far richer, a phantasmagoria of intersecting modes of communications that in part or in sum will lead to connectivity and interaction and to new forms of learning and knowledge acquisition.

Part 1

Part 2

Virtual/Real/Virtual (1)

(This is a written version of a speech given in Toronto in October at DIGIFEST)

Prologue

The age of virtualization is changing. When the digital adventure began in the early 1980’s, the future of computers and hence the digital age was unclear, even fuzzy. Today, after 30 years of experimentation it is pretty clear that there have been some tremendous successes and also some clear failures.

I want to approach the issue of virtualization with great care. And, my approach will be framed by a deep concern for what is happening to our learning environments.

So, let me start by talking about space, that is, architectural and public space. The recent and continuing protests that began in New York and have spread worldwide are important indicators of what is happening to the generation that has been most influenced by the technologies we now take for granted.

Keep in mind, that technologies that virtualize break down as many barriers as they build up. So, when protestors get together in a park and create a variety of methodologies to develop consensus, to manage their affairs, to provide services, they are engaging in the type of face to face contact that completely transforms not only their perceptions of each other, but also their perceptions of the world. Virtual encounters inside and through screen based technologies permit exchanges of a similar sort, but these are qualitatively different from what is happening in Zucotti Park or Vancouver or Toronto.

The need to explore embodied relationships suggests that the increasingly complex mix of the virtual and the real will be measured against our experiences of each other in the real world and not vice versa.

The protestors in New York and elsewhere are using what to them is a novel approach to the discussions that they are having with each other. In a version of broken telephone, they are communicating their ideas to each other through individual repetition. People are transmitting the core ideas behind the protests using an oral tradition of storytelling. This is being done to strengthen their resolve and to personalize the relationships that they have with each other, but also to transform each conversation into a memorable one. In a period of history when conversations are fleeting and efforts to hold onto our memories are dictated by reminders, phones and computers, orality is both central and ephemeral to these protests. 

So it is ironic that in the Facebook age when short form communications dominate, that the protestors have turned to oral traditions that are thousands of years old, a mixture of the Greek polis and the Roman square.

Virtual communications have always seemed an efficient way of promoting interactions across numerous boundaries and this has challenged conventional forms of communications. The irony is that the virtual cannot exist without the real. The mistake we have been making has been to celebrate the virtual as an end in itself. For example, we talk about video games without talking enough about video gamers. We discuss Facebook through the interface and restrictions it provides and not about the potential shifts in human relations generated by  virtual interactions.

And, this mistake will not be very easy to overturn. Virtual spaces are just too attractive and the ease of use, the genuine feel and form of interactions, the potential to be a broadcaster with an audience, however small is a very powerful attraction. 

Part Two can be found here.