Through extreme media devices and environments, people are becoming DIY (do it yourself) teachers, researchers, knowledge-creators, and knowledge communities.
What counts as "official knowledge"? Whose knowledge "counts" as “correct” or worth believing? How will we foster children's innate passions for learning? These questions are some of the most consequential ones a society faces at any moment in its history.
Today, extreme media phenomena allow us to make and share knowledge in ways that throw many long held presumptions about teaching and learning into crisis.
This experience capsule starts with Edward Tufte's eloquent "proof" of the idea that is at the heart of the Sharing Differently capsule: the experience of learning is crucial to what is learned.
In a step by step analysis of a NASA PowerPoint presentation that had life-or-death stakes, Tufte shows how the forms and styles of knowledge-sharing that are embedded in PowerPoint "weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis."
Tufte brings us full circle, back to this edge's entry point by encouraging us to consider how the Mars Rover's stunning success might be attributed to media that allowed for knowledge-sharing in ways radically different from PowerPoint.
Enter this capsule and confront other experiences that raise questions at the heart of the Extreme Media Studies site: Is scanning web ates or textbooks for big ideas in the form of sound bites "studying?" Is cutting and pasting ideas from a variety of eclectic sources into a collage that feeds you ideosyncratic passions and obsessions "learning? Is a blog a form of "knowledge?" Is the Wikipedia "authoritative" and what does that mean anymore?
Create your own route of reading through this capsule's experiences of sharing differently.
Map and navigate the questions they raise about "knowing," "learning," and "teaching."
Imagine media designed so that the experience of learning becomes crucial to WHAT is learned and understood.
Begin yourr route of reading at Henry Jenkin's keynote address on sharing knowledge differently. In it, he challenges us to use media to re-think what teaching, learning, and knowledge-making.
JENKINS: WHAT WIKIPEDIA CAN TEACH US (PART ONE)
JENKINS: WHAT WIKIPEDIA CAN TEACH US (PART TWO)
"In corporate and government bureaucracies, the standard method for making a presentation is to talk about a list of points organized onto slides projected up on the wall. For many years, overhead projectors lit up transparencies, and slide projectors showed high-resolution 35mm slides. Now 'slideware' computer programs for presentations are nearly everywhere. Early in the 21st century, several hundred million copies of Microsoft PowerPoint were turning out trillions of slides each year.
Alas, slideware often reduces the analytical quality of presentations. In particular, the popular PowerPoint templates (ready-made designs) usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis. What is the problem with PowerPoint? And how can we improve our presentations?"
About smARThistory’s web-book:
"This web-booksite is being developed by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker as a dynamic enhancement (or even substitute) for the static traditional art history textbook. By using the strengths of podcasting, video, and other web 2.0 technologies, we think we can better meet the needs of students, faculty, and the interested public. Once this site is better established, we intend to invite the user community to add and edit content.
Why we made this site:
For years we have been dissatisfied with the large expensive art history textbook. We found that they were difficult for many students, contained too many images, and just were not all that engaging. In addition, we had found the web resources developed by publishers to be woefully uncreative...."
"Too often the debate over creative control tends to the extremes. At one pole is a vision of total control — a world in which every last use of a work is regulated and in which “all rights reserved” (and then some) is the norm. At the other end is a vision of anarchy — a world in which creators enjoy a wide range of freedom but are left vulnerable to exploitation. Balance, compromise, and moderation — once the driving forces of a copyright system that valued innovation and protection equally — have become endangered species.
Creative Commons is working to revive them. We use private rights to create public goods: creative works set free for certain uses. Like the free software and open-source movements, our ends are cooperative and community-minded, but our means are voluntary and libertarian. We work to offer creators a best-of-both-worlds way to protect their works while encouraging certain uses of them — to declare “some rights reserved.”
"[Make] your own audio broadcast, where you can easily record voice messages, mix in your favorite music, and share it all for the world to hear...Our goal with GarageBand is to redefine how music is discovered and promoted. Our goal with Gcast is to make personal broadcasting simple. In pursuing these goals we hope to democratize both music and media."
"Everyone can watch videos on YouTube. People can see first-hand accounts of current events, find videos about their hobbies and interests, and discover the quirky and unusual. As more people capture special moments on video, YouTube is empowering them to become the broadcasters of tomorrow."
"A blog is your easy-to-use web site, where you can quickly post thoughts, interact with people, and more. All for FREE... [Blogger] isa small team in Google focusing on helping people have their own voice on the web and organizing the world's information from the personal perspective. Which has pretty much always been our whole deal."