Week 10 - Connecting to the Text

In terms of presenting on an idea from one of the texts that is relevant to your project, I don't have to go any further than the introduction of McLuhan.

If you apply the concept of hot and cool mediums to education, which environment do you think you would learn more?

The hot medium might provide detailed and accurate information, but where is the application of that information? When do you get to ask questions and truly determine that you or your students understand it? If you believe that a hot classroom is where you learn the most, just tell science teachers to turn on the Discovery Channel and leave the room. Tell your English teachers to play a Royal Shakespeare Theater Production of Hamlet. Surely, the information is there and accurate. If students can learn in a hot medium, there it is. You've just saved local governments millions by eliminating the need for teachers.

The cool medium is participatory and thereby organic. Outcomes are not necessarily established. The teacher would facilitate student problem solving.

Mc Luhan said of education: "We are entering the new age of education that is programmed for discovery rather than instruction" (McLuhan 14). Unfortunately, this is not the case. At some charter schools and other progressive schools, maybe. Overall, the public education system is outdated and follows the 'sage on stage' model. This is where the teacher lectures and is seen as the disseminator of information. Students are seen as nothing more than receptive sponges, eagerly awaiting this knowledge.

Rich, just cruising around the wiki and found this connection you made to Mchulan and your project.  I can clearly see your teaching analagy, and your interpretation of teachers as "disseminators"  gives me a new angle to think about my project, and children's exposure to media.  The new idea you have me pondering is that in this outdated classroom setting could be viewed as "training"  (in a bad way) for children to learn how to zone out instead of participate.  This unfortunately, could create yet another generation of people reliant on a higher authority for an "absolute" interpretation as opposed to engagement, mutual participation, and  guidance.  I think that there are other contributers that enable a media addicted society other than simply exposure, like our behavior and learning patterns taught early in school.  Brian 11/19

This has a larger context and could be a study of itself, but it warrants being mentioned briefly.

Here's the premise: creativity develops a more critical mind.

A cool medium requires participation. Participation is organic and unpredictable. Unpredictable situations by definition have numerous possible outcomes. Having to consider numerous possible outcomes requires you predict, plan and project. Predicting, planning and projecting are examples of critical and creative thinking. Because answers are not provided, this critical and creative thinking forces you to develop a more reflective and abstract mind. An abstract mind can more easily process abstractions (obviously), representations, suggestions and nuance.

In McLuhan's chapter about numbers, he talks about positional numbers and discovery of the concept of zero. To us, the concept of zero is obvious. "It was not until the thirteenth century that sifr, the Arab word for 'gap' or 'empty,' was Latinized and added to out culture as 'cipher' and finally became the Italian zero. Zero really meant a positional gap" (McLuhan 156-157). He uses the ambiguities between 32 and 302 as an example. How did Egypt build the pyramids without zero? How did Rome conquer Europe without zero? The thirteenth century! That's a long time to not know about zero. Then again, the world kept spinning even though everyone thought it was flat. Having a space that represents emptiness is creative thinking. It's a concept. It's an abstraction. There's a space between. It's not necessarily this or that. It could be neither or both.

Think of the games of checkers and chess. In checkers, you see that someone left themselves open, you take them. There's not a whole lot of strategy. There's not a whole lot of forethought. A situation presents itself, and you act on it. This is the "checkers" mind. In chess, you must consider more than your next move. You must consider two to three moves ahead with constantly changing variables. This is the "chess" mind. I will stop short of saying the "chess" mind is smarter than the "checkers" mind, but I think I can safely say the "chess" mind can handle more complex operations.

Even though I used McLuhan's example of zero, the world doesn't have to be binary. Creative thinking allows for this nuance and depth. Perhaps three dimensional - trinary?. Three dimensional objects are much more realistic and lifelike than two dimensional representations. Instead of going to three, what about going to one? The one is universality. Perhaps the duality we see is of our own creation. This idea was explored in "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance."

I don't know if I'm making much sense. The point I was trying to get across was developing creativity develops a more complex mind with the ability to problem solve over memorize. Teaching critical and creative thinking more important than anything else. If we can develop and foster this by doing art, let's do art!

SInce that last part was completely abstract, I will make it more concrete. Here is part of my philosophy of education. After all this rambling, the connections between creativity and participatory education should be obvious.

Theoretically speaking, my philosophy of education can be summed up in one word: experience. How does one really learn until they try for themselves? I am not saying there is no value to studying a text or listening to a lecture, but it is in the practical application of what was studied or heard that the true learning takes place. Although it is thought to be a Chinese proverb, most of us are familiar with Ben Franklin’s wisdom: “Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” Henry David Thoreau mocked the lecture-style method of learning favored in colleges: “To my astonishment I was informed on leaving college that I had studied navigation!--why, if I had taken one turn down the harbor I should have known more about it.” And the example I use for my students: “One cannot learn how to swim without getting wet!” Examples of this are everywhere. A student may be able to tell you how to write a five-paragraph essay, yet it is in the execution that will determine his/her grade. I taught English in Japan and Thailand. Even though my students had been studying English for over 10 years, they were unable to have even simple conversations. This is because there is too much emphasis on text book learning and not enough on the application of that learning.

Link back to Rich's World