Internet Knowledge Builds on Old Knowledge/Traditional Knowledge

The Internet is, of course, the largest repository of information ever created. At any given time though, what is on the Internet is comprised overwhelmingly by information within the last five years. This puts a premium on new knowledge, which is undoubtedly very important, but leaves out the vast majority of information ever created and even most of the knowledge that most of us know from school, life, etc.

These categories can be called Old Knowledge, that which is in books and other materials created in the past. This is the vast majority of knowledge.

There is also Traditional Knowledge, the knowledge that is in people's heads and may not even be published. There is a role for traditional knowledge in many academic and non-academic activities. For example, there is a lot of talk in the career/job hunting world about "building your brand." In terms of information and competitive intelligence, we could think of our brand as knowing something (be it a skill, an idea, a strategy, etc.) that someone else needs/wants to know and then being able to find that person (s) and creating a mutually-beneficial transaction.

Essentially, if we can think of ways of creating something unique -- what we know that can help someone else -- be it a skill, idea, etc.-- and then finding someone that needs that information/skill, then we are in business. For example, if we want to teach English as a Second Language and we have that skill, then we need to find someone or some organization that needs that skill and can pay us.

This is a form of the supply/demand concept, where we become the supplier of information/knowledge or a product that someone else demands. Of course, this can be tricky as sometimes demand is only created when something new and profitable is supplied.

Don't Underestimate the Past

I was teaching a group of traditional students and I mentioned that while the future undoubtedly has a wealth of opportunities for professional opportunities, the past also has its power in terms of its lessons, experiences, and untapped potential (some older technology/non technology items, for example).

One student chimed in that he would use my quote of "don't underestimate the past," so I am thinking that the idea had found some credence. It reminds me of the Talmudic dictum of "remember the past, live the present, and trust the future."

Within culture we often go backwards for our inspiration. There is the jazz ensemble that the Wall Street Journal noted is "modernizing Morton" (Jelly Roll Morton, that is) by updating his classic jazz piano sounds from the early 1900s. There is also the Jack Delano photograph project as shown at the Chicago History, which features a photography update of Delano's classic 1940s photos of railroaders in the Chicago area in which Pablo Delano, Delano's son, takes photographs of the descendants of those in the original photos. 

I think we all need to be forward thinking in all aspects of our lives, however, the most powerful lessons integrate the future with the other elements of our reality.

We might take the issue of climate change as an example. According to Mark Bittman's "The Aliens Have Landed" we have already missed our chance to stop many of the negative effects of climate change, as many of the results are already here. He leads his article with a reference to how France felt they could contain Germany in World War 2 with their Maginot line built for World War 1.

And, then there is the more poetic response, as with Prout's "Remembrance of Things Past," where much of the book highlights how a certain action or event can bring us back in time and reveal many thoughts, feelings, and ideas, that might otherwise lay fallow.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's book "Plato at the Googleplex" is a testament to integrating the new with the old. Her premise of Plato applying his philosophy to our current tools is revealed as he compares niche websites in relationship to the Myth of the Cave, insofar as a fragmented society only listens to its own experts.  

The past might also be a powerful learning device in our use of counterfactuals. For example, I read a book review of Joseph Raskin's The Routes Not Taken that discussed how much of the development of the city of New York (and its surrounding areas) were directly influenced in terms of density and economic success by the subway system. What would have happened, the book muses, if different routes had been built, such as between suburbs rather than to Manhattan? How would economic development have been affected, etc.?

Within the field of education there are many examples of past being prologue. There was the 1919 Winnekta Plan (Crow Island school) that emphasized progressive tenants of learning through individualized learning plans, project based learning, student-friendly classroom design (color on walls, design innovation). These are all movements today as well, as we look to technology to promote individualized learning, for example. 

Using Culture in the Curriculum -- Blended Learning as Artifact

In addition to being very accessible, blended learning is capable of great poetry and melding of expressions. For example, Charlotte Salomon, the Holocaust artist and victim, created an illustrated biography that was stunning in its intensity and poetry. The work, titled "Life? or Theater?" featured over 1,000 paneled illustrations that discussed her life before and during the Holocaust, during which she fled from her native Berlin to a small town in France, from which she was deported and murdered in a Nazi death camp. She was only 26 years old when she was killed.

Her illustrations are so very remarkable -- the work is a graphic novel on a grand scale, but what makes it especially poignant to me and brings out the blended nature of Salomon's talent is that there are notes that refer to musical scores that she wants the reader to visualize and listen to (if only in their minds) while reading the text. The text refers to these musical scores, but one can imagine if Salomon would have lived in our day and age, she might have provided links to these musical scores.

For a glimpse at a remarkable woman and a remarkable artistic achievement, take a look at the webpage dedicated to "Life? or Theatre"/"Leben? oder Theater?".  Blended  certainly is a poetic means of expression.

There is also the work of contemporary Iranian artist Shirin Neshat in his Turbulent, 1998 Black-and-white video installation that combines video and text to stunning effect revealing blended to be a very modern movement, as it combines to create something new. 

We can also use popular culture to teach in a blended fashion. For example,  I was working with an English instructor who uses rock and roll songs/lyrics as a way to get students writing about cause and effect and other descriptive/evaluative responses that help constitute upper-level thinking. He wanted me to introduce websites to the students that might help them with their analysis. I found that Amazon.com has some very detailed and appropriate reviews, many of them written by people with the same demographics as many of the students-- giving them a certain credibility and language that the students could recognize as authentic.

I also introduced the students to how to use Google (certainly a popular culture tool) most effectively to mine other popular websites, such as Rolling Stone (rollingstone.com). Rather than search the rollingstone.com archive for terms, which results in thousands and thousands of hits, I showed them how to use Google advanced search to search rollingstone.com and then specifying the same terms, resulting in fewer yet more relevant citations.

In our drive for academic credibility we might not always recognize the authentic voice as academically legitimate. As long as the voice has an authentic reason for being in a paper/project, it can be considered academically appropriate. Authentic might not be scientific but it is also not false, untrustworthy, or invalid as an academic source.  

Using popular culture references. popular web sites like Amazon.com that incorporate reviews and other material that has an academic use can help reinforce the principle that formal education can build on personal learning. It can bring that important energy component into the classroom, be it face-to-face or online.

Of course, online reviews, so much the vogue in popular culture also lends itself to more academic analysis, thereby providing a bridge between popular and academic cultures. In the New York Times "Online Reviews? Keep This in Mind" writer Kim Severson describes research by Saeideh Bakhshi and Partha Kanuparthy that tied online reviews to the weather when the review was written, the price of the menu (the higher the price, the better the review) and the education of the reviewer all figured in the review. As try as we might, we can't get bias out of what we do. As they say "plus les choses changent"

And, as a Chicago Reader review of a Smart Museum exhibit highlighting "Performing Images: Opera in Chinese Visual Culture" notes how popular culture has a long history: "In the U.S. we tend to think of pop culture as our thing: a recent, Western phenomenon based in rock music, hip-hop, Hollywood film, and maybe the occasional YA novel. The Smart Museum's exhibit "Performing Images: Opera in Chinese Visual Culture" demonstrates just how parochial that view is. The show features a dazzling array of materials, from the 1700s to the present, that surround the stories and pageantry of the widely popular form. This includes production artifacts, such as costumes and instruments, as well as a series of jaw-dropping paintings, some of which served as reference for stage makeup, in which snakes, crabs, scorpions, and birds dramatically drawn on an actor's face obliterate the person's features."

And, then, of course, there is the reality that many subjects can be handled more effectively outside the academic environment-- an environment build on argumentation and facts. Some issues are best explored within the theatrical environment, for example, an environment more suited for nuance and discursive presentation. A review of a play in Chicago "Principal, Principal" shows how the play itself can be a catalyst for so much learning -- the evidence in the play is non-academic, but certainly vital to any classroom experience.

Symphony orchestras can also play a part in the educational use of blended. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, the Philadelphia Orchestra has utilized video images to enhance certain pieces. As the article said: "Mr. Rosner's work—in Philadelphia, performed with Benjamin Britten's "Four Sea Interludes"—shows how symphony orchestras are collaborating with video artists to create immersive, multisensory performances that reimagine the traditional concert-hall experience."

Architecture can also have a blended element. The Bauhaus movement, which sought to combine form and function into a unity was a change (progression) from discrete single pieces and could be seen as an extension of the move that blended makes to a whole environment approach rather then single lectures. 

We might also view curriculum itself as a cultural artifact. The curriculum is a soundtrack at its best, letting all students (artists) imagine/reflect their own ideas onto the core-- the content and activities and interaction unleashing intellectual/cognitive creations. Just as artists often constantly rework their artistic expression, refining it and building on it as they and society grows, so too the curriculum becomes the vehicle for continued growth and development for the instructor and his/her audience. 

And speaking of blended and culture, aspects of blended are generally part of early education, with field trips and plays being a main part of elementary education and some high school programs. It is only as students enter higher education that traditionally we have moved to lectures  to center stage of the curriculum and moved many of the more varied learning environments to extra curricular activities. 

This movement of video and other blended aspects into higher education might be one way to get other blended strategies into higher ed.

The Thermodynamics of Learning-- Before, During, and After

There are three temporal conditions to engaging/encountering a content-rich event (a possible learning experience): before, during, and after. This is of course, somewhat prosaic because this is the way we experience all events. From an educational standpoint, we don't always have the benefit of knowing when we will have a learning experience so the anticipatory aspect might be lost and so sometimes we might not know we have had a learning experience, so the reflection aspect might be lost and then, of course, we might not know we are in a learning event, so the participatory/awareness aspect might be lost. 

Preparation for an event, the event, and the aftermath of the event. Yet, from an educational standpoint, we put so much pressure on the event itself. All expectations are placed on attending the lecture, viewing the painting, etc. Yes, without preparation so many angles might be missed and without reflection (the aftermath), there are also a lot of concepts and ideas that might not be developed.  

There is, also, the added element of learning as activism, that we essentially construct our own learning experiences, with the prerequisite before, during, and after. Every possible event (both physical and otherwise) is a content rich experiences for somebody or something. The learning process is not simply a matter of structuring possible learning experiences but can also be seen as recognizing possible learning experiences. Rather than trying to hit a target with an arrow, we might think of putting the target where the arrow has already landed. We don't just wander around looking for possible content rich experiences -- as with a course catalog -- but rather engage the environment with a set of principles that activate possible scenarios of content. 

And, then we have the added ingredient that the content rich experience has both "student" and "teacher" or any collection thereof. Do we need a "teacher" for learning to take place? Perhaps we need a teacher to set the parameters but for the anticipation, participation, and reflection to occur we probably do not need a teacher, except to somehow guide or evaluate the process. And, I wonder, if we need a student for learning to take place or is there this giant collection of content rich experiences ongoing there for the discovery, so are processed and the majority are not?  

There is also the question of what is the best combination of student/teacher for learning to take place? Are groups often the best way to construct meaning? Sometimes yes and sometimes no, just with individual encounters bringing out meaning most effectively in many instances. 

And, events are experienced (or not experienced) in much different ways. We can think of this as the antecedents of now-- our actions/learning are responding to something in the past and future through the present (or not). We view events through antecedents and that is how the past becomes prologue, but not perfectly. This is where the learning comes in when we see alternatives or reasons that our alternatives are blocked in our response. It is the teacher's responsibility to set up the right scenario to challenge antecedents and recognize when transformation has occurred? 

As instructors we sometimes think that knowledge is patently obvious. That students should recognize what is important and how to integrate it. But, this is not how learning works. In art, images don't show us how to process images; data can not tell us how to process itself. Knowledge does not announce itself. Learning does not come with instructions on how and what is important and how to organize it. That is why constructivism reflects reality much more effectively than instructivism.  

Learning/teaching is a complex system, with the teacher being the learner-in-chief. In a constructivist environment, the teacher does control the learning from the top down but rather facilitates it through instructional design, interactive assignments, and cognitive presence and responses. There should be a process by which the collective builds knowledge before, during, and after a content rich event and that collective is built and shared within the instructional design and interactive assignments towards additional cognitive presence and responses. The local discovery of the individual student is turned into systematic discovery on the part of other participants. 

The constructivist principals change the focus of the creation from the one to the many. It is much more democratic, not in undermining the relevance and importance of the teacher in providing content and context but in recognizing the participants as more equal partners, as citizens more than subjects.  

One way that an instructor can undermine his/her authority in a positive way is through instructional design. Instructional design is a form of social engineering around content.  Often, it seems, the instructional design is what people are responding to as they go looking for the content and their relationship to it. It is odd, sometimes, to get confused by learning when we want so much to get liberated by it or at least we want clarity from it. The role of instructional design, setting the parameters for learning but also setting the parameters for the way people set up affinities and relate to each other and the content. Successful classes have a mechanism for participants to relate to the content as designers, as information/knowledge is often not something you directly see but you only indirectly see because it influences us in the way we behave. Participants want to have some of the control and this control of adding content is vital to the integrity and evolution of the class content. 

In a traditional sense, learning and teaching require the transfer of energy in various formats, from the instructor developing the lesson plan to the delivery of the content to the completion of assignments, etc. You might even include the transportation necessary for attending lectures or the electricity necessary to power computers and the Internet.

Another way we might view learning as an energy exchange is that we are transferring abstract concepts/lessons from the past.  An abstract lesson on the American Civil War might be said to make the energy expended during that time unnecessary because we are able to transfer and build on that process that comprised the use of many resources (created by energy). 

Sometimes we might view the knowledge itself as the content, but I prefer to think of the activities as containing the content. For example, during a visit to Turkey many will view Turkey itself as the content, but the activities that I take to learn about Turkey and the assignments (formal or informal) that I undertake are really the content. This is what they mean, I suppose, by the expression "the music is not in the piano." The music (content) comes from the interplay between the activity and the subject/object of the activity.

Are there methods that are most efficient in this energy transfer, not only from a reduction in the amount of energy used in the process of creating and sharing knowledge, but also in the ability to create new processes and strategies in others and ourselves; measurable results, we might call learning/energy, because learning/energy are equivalent in that they use energy to create potential or kinetic change.

This energy exchange will look different to different learners. Situated learning, or the knowledge picked up within an event, differs from person to person. What I get out of a particular learning situation, say visiting the Art Institute, is very dependent on what I bring to the lesson; what I focus on during the trip; the effectiveness of any organized teaching that takes place, etc. A big part of what anyone gets out of a situation is influenced by a priori learning, what people bring to the lesson in terms of expectations, focus, prior knowledge, etc. Learning is also heavily influenced by experience. There is a term for knowledge generated by experience and that is  knowledge "a posteriori." 

This is all to say that learning is by nature a blended affair in all cases, as situated learning is heavily influenced by what comes before and after. Experience, exposure, and other factors, all blend together to help create the unique acquisition of new facts, strategies, ideas, etc. 

The basic premise behind blended learning is that there are many viable and important ways of teaching/learning outside of the traditional classroom within the traditional modular time. We can use other elements of time and space and other elements of interaction than teacher/student to facilitate the movement of information and pursue across the spectrum. Sometimes the classroom "space" can be a location of tension and even conflict, as when teachers and students do not see eye to eye in terms of content, motivation and accountability. Sometimes the way to work around that issue is through changing the space -- why be in that particular location when the goal is not geography but learning. There do not have to be physical borders to an intellectual interchange, necessarily, at least not at all times and under all circumstances.

For example, I was visiting a colleague at a public library and he was working with a user who did not have much experience searching for books using the general catalog or Worldcat. I wondered if it might have been possible to have created a screen capture video (using JING or Camtasia) as he searched the catalog and requested the book title through interlibrary loan. Both long term teaching goals and short term service goals might be accomplished with this approach, as the interaction would result in an interlibrary loan request and also a video (with a link to the video emailed to the user) would be created to be used for user generated requests or just a better understanding (authentic learning) on how the interlibrary loan process works.

There are also many learning situations in libraries that might be developed by utilizing the cognitive time before and after the learning event. For example, I went to a technical training program at my public library for a one hour tutorial on how to operate some software.  Perhaps that class could have been enhanced with pre-learning modalities, such as sending a reading or video to prompt us to prepare on certain concepts and then there could have been post-learning scenarios as with the instructor following up with class participants and providing guidance on projects to further develop software skills. There could also have been a user group of sorts so that the participants could have built on the cohesion of the class.

While the subject of non-traditional students (returning adults, military veterans, ESL students, etc.) and blended learning are important to consider within the traditional teaching/learning environment in schools, colleges, and universities,  I have been excited by blended learning opportunities within non-traditional learning environments (such as public libraries).

For example, I was visiting a colleague at a public library and he was working with a user who did not have much experience searching for books using the general catalog or Worldcat. I wondered if it might have been possible to have created a screen capture video (using JING or Camtasia) as he searched the catalog and requested the book title through interlibrary loan. Both long term teaching goals and short term service goals might be accomplished with this approach, as the interaction would result in an interlibrary loan request and also a video (with a link to the video emailed to the user) would be created to be used for user generated requests or just a better understanding (authentic learning) on how the interlibrary loan process works.

There are also many learning situations in libraries that might be developed by utilizing the cognitive time before and after the learning event. For example, I went to a technical training program at my public library for a one hour tutorial on how to operate some software.  Perhaps that class could have been enhanced with pre-learning modalities, such as sending a reading or video to prompt us to prepare on certain concepts and then there could have been post-learning scenarios as with the instructor following up with class participants and providing guidance on projects to further develop software skills. There could also have been a user group of sorts so that the participants could have built on the cohesion of the class.

This is all to say that we can import some of the traditional learning organizational tools into nontraditional learning environments and build more creative and productive learning outcomes, whether participants are being formally evaluated or not.

Just as blended learning in traditional learning environments may have benefits because of increased access/flexibility and/or an increased detriment because of lack of computer access or computer skills, so too blended learning within non-traditional environments should be considered within these lights.

This is all to say that we can import some of the traditional learning organizational tools into nontraditional learning environments and build more creative and productive learning outcomes, whether participants are being formally evaluated or not.

Just as blended learning in traditional learning environments may have benefits because of increased access/flexibility and/or an increased detriment because of lack of computer access or computer skills, so too blended learning within non-traditional environments should be considered within these lights.

This is not an argument against formal learning -- schools, degrees, accreditation, etc., but a discussion of a set of principles that might illustrate how and why learning occurs. Are there communities, such as communities of inquiries, that are more effective in transferring energy and creating change and teaching?

In many ways, classroom teaching was, is, and will be inefficient. We have to develop techniques to reach so many different types of students with so many learning styles. Why should be expect it to work?  Is the best teaching wordless and the best learning affirmation?