RSA Animate - 21st century enlightenment

Rethinking Education

Intermezzio Part II: "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century"

Using an "Ecological Approach" to Thinking about Communication Technologies, Social Networks, and the Activities They Foster

"Rather that dealing with each technology in isolation, we would do better to take an ecological approach, thinking about the interrelationsp among all of these different communication technologies, the cultural communitites that grow up around them, and the activities they support.  Media systems consist of communication technologies and the social, cultural, legal, political, and economic institutions, practices, and protocols that shape and surround them" (8).

Definition of Participatory Culture

For the moment,let’s define participatory culture as one:
1.With relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement
2.With strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations with others
3.With some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced ispassed along to novices
4.Where members believe that their contributions matter
5.Where members feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least theycare what other people think about what they have created).

Not every member must contribute,but all must believe they are free to contribute whenready and that what they contribute will be appropriately valued. (7)

Educational Goals Directly Tied to Rhet/Comp

"Our goals should be to encourage youth to develop the skills, knowledge, ethical frameworks, and self-confidence needed to be full participants in contemporary culture" (8).

Jenkins, Henry, et al. Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. MacArthur Foundation white paper. (PDF - 1.8 MB)

Intermezzio: Excerpt from "A Pedagogy of Original Synners"

Their imaginations are structured and shaped through encounters in different kinds of mediated worlds: RL and online games, institutional and familial, peer-based and anonymous. They move easily through different kinds of networks: social, technological, material, and virtual. Consequently, their identities are a hybrid of multiple personae performed and shaped through their participation in dispersed (mixed reality) social networks as well as within simulated virtual (gaming) worlds. In this they are the quintessential decentered postmodern subjects marked by differing intensity flows and shifting affinities. Remix is their cultural vernacular. (244)

To assist us in these efforts, we might think of these students as “Original Synners,” a title borrowed from science fiction author Pat Cadigan’s cosmology, which identifies them as “original synthesizers” whose most important literacy will be the ability to create knowledge by harvesting information from diverse sources. (245)

Anderson, Steve, and Anne Balsamo. “A Pedagogy for Original Synners." Tara McPherson. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008. 241–259.

Cy Twombly at The Black Mountain College (Part 1)

As early as 1964, the writer and artist Roy Ascott recognized that new technology would change not only kinds of artistic artifacts but also the process of artistic creation, the process of making, though I can't imagine he would have conceived of the new iPad drawings and paintings of David Hockney recently exhibited in Paris.  Specifically, Ascott was interested in what he called in the 1960's as "cybernetics," which as a field of science Ascott understood as limited to territories of communication, connection, and information infrastructure--the information sciences--and built a course for the Ealing School of Art in London to use as a kind of core curriculum for art education.  The course though is a more general exercise in creative thinking.  The exercise meant to elicit questions about the nature of drawing, for example, asked students to perform seemingly illogical tasks:

1. Draw the room in reverse perspective.  What information is lost?  If any, find a way of adding it to your drawing.
2. Time-drawing of the model.  Draw her hair in three seconds, face in three minutes, left hand thumb nail in three hours, legs in six seconds, right ankle in two days.
3. Draw her with acute earache.
4. Draw the room using only rubbings from surfaces in it.  Copy the drawing precisely with line and tone.

To delimit students' thinking about volume and perspective, the following exercises are given:

1.  Imagine you wake up one morning to find that you are a sponge.  describe visually your adventures during the day.
2. List the sense-data of an umbrella or a hot water bottle.  Visually restructure the parts to form a new entity.  Ask your neighbor to identify it.  
3. If fifteen ragged criss-cross lines stand for a cough, how would you draw the BBC time signal?
4. Use only solid shapes to discuss your perception of: a bottle of ink; fish and chips; a police siren; ice hockey.
5. Show how zebras disguise themselves.
6. Invent a typewriter bird and show the kind of tree within which it could most successfully hide.

To challenge students' tactile adeptness, these exercises are suggested:

1. Make a sculpture in plaster of interlocking units, such that when a key piece is removed, the rest falls apart.  Allot colours to the separate pieces, (a) to indicate the key, (b) to facilitate reassembly.
2. Using only wood, sheet aluminium, string and panel pins, construct analogues of: a high pitched scream, the taste of ice cream; a football match.  

To thicken students' idea of growth and scale, the following:

1. Analyze and dissect a section of a pomegranate.  Discuss with precise drawing its three-dimensional cellular structure.  
2. Examine a plant in minute detail; design a new plant based upon the principles of growth you have observed.
3. Discuss visually the movements of a hungry, caged line; a frightened squirrel.

To develop a sense of artistic identity, students are asked to do these things:

1. Draw a man, machine or animal.  Cut up the drawing into seven sections (e.g. arm, head, wheel, handle, etc.).  Put the pieces with every one else's in a box.  Pull out another seven at random; construct logically a new entity.  Draw the environment in which you might expect to encounter it.
2.  Show, with line and color, the potential function of: the studio door, a water tap, an elephant, the window blind.  Attempt to describe what they might have in common.
3. Invent two distinctly different animals; imagine them to mate and draw the offispring. 
4. Make the illusion of, say, a bun or sausage, in three dimensions on paper.  Show it being submitted to various events: run over, squeezed dry, soaked in acid, minced, pierced by a shot gun.  Measure the real against the metaphoric.
5. Create a world on paper with major and minor structural systems.  Show a fault occurring in the minor one; design a repair center to put it right. 
6. Entropy may be described as a constant drift in the universe towards a state of total undifferentiation; pockets of resistance are organizing continuously.  Discuss this proposition, limiting yourself to six visual elements.

During the second year of study, a more profoundly bizarre experiment in creativity commences.  Here's Ascott's description:

Students are est the task of acquiring and acting out for a limited period (ten weeks) a totally new personality, which is to be narrowly limited and largely the converse of what is considered to be their normal "selves."  They design "calibrators" to read off their responses to situations, materials, tools and people.  The equip themselves with handy "mind-maps" for immediate reference to their behavior pattern as changes in the limitations of space, substance and state occur.

They form groups of six.  These sexa gonal organisms, whose members are of necessit interdependent and highly conscious of each other's capabilities and limitations, are set the goal of producing out of substances and space in their environment, an ordered entity.

The limitations on individual behavior are severe and unfamiliar.  The student who thinks himself "useless" with, say, colour, machine tolls, objective drawing, may find himself with the sole responsibility for these things in his group.  The shy girl must act out an easy sociability; the aggressive youth must become cooperative.  One student may be limited to transporting himself about the school on a trolley; another may not use paper, numbers or adhesive substances.

The subsequent "ordered entities" are as diverse as the composite personalities of the organisms they reflect.  Totems, time machines, sense boxes, films, sexagonal cabinets, cages have been produced out of the flux of discussion an activity.

Students are then invited to return to their former personalities.  They must make a total visual documentation of the whole process in which they have been engaged.  They must search for relationships and ideas unfamiliar to art (i.e. spatial relationships are familiar).  They use, at first, every possible expressive means: film, collage, graphic processes, wood, plaster, metal, cloth, glass, readymades, rubber, paint and so one.  They work on a huge scale at one point, and in miniature at another, sometimes with kinetic structure, sometimes with static relationships.

In the process, and reflecting upon their previously contrived limitations of behavior, they become aware of the flexibility of their responses, their resourcefulness and ingenuity in the face of difficulties.  What they assumed to be ingrained in their personalities, they now tend to see a controllable.  An sense of creativity viability is being acquired.

Gordon Parks Portrait of Langston Hughes

http://www.gordonparksfoundation.org/pdfs/Hermes_GPF.pdf

Making is Connecting by David Gauntlett

Participation culture, creativity, and social change by David Gauntlett

The History of Social Networking

Via: Online Schools