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.
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