e-Clippings gets a partial name change - Learning as Art

Now give me some room here - this is a fairly new train of thought for me so #1 I apologize if everyone has already had this idea (I'm sure they have and I am just plodding along, figuring things out for myself) and I am just being perpetually late to the intellectual dinner table and #2 I am still noodling this all out in my head so there are bound to be dead-ends, misfires and tr affic accidents as I proceed. Additionaly, this post is also a plea for help - point me toward resources, authors, blog posts, sites - whatever you can think of that might intersect with this idea - my promise is to make sure that I collect and make those resources available back to you all as a set.

All that being said, something occurred to me during a recent foray into Second Life. I was at a demo by NETg of their virtual campus they had built in-world and some of the things that they were doing with it (pictures on flickr here). I was in there with Brent Schlenker (the old guy) and Alan Levine (the anthropomorphic dog) and the person from NETg was showing how they had created all these audio tracks and this whole room with comfy chairs for your avatar and you sat in the chair and clicked on the ball to hear the audio. Then we started having this discussion about what good is this? Is it better than a podcast or even a transcript? The typical kind of ROI discussion - and that is when I really started to think that maybe the value is just in doing it - that right now, it isn't any better but the fact that we can do it leads to the idea that maybe we have to do it in order to get to that next step. So I started looking around for a way to explain to me bosses that we need to do stuff that may well have no value. Got a little help from Aristotle.

First I went to Wikipedia...looked up art (there is actually a longer train of thought here that partially involves Jay Cross's new book on Informal Learning and the great poster that goes with it)...a couple of things struck me there. First this quote (ironically drawn from Britannica Online) "the use of skill and imagination in the creation of aesthetic objects, environments, or experiences that can be shared with others." What a great design quote right? Looking further I found that one definition of art or fine art is drawn from a portion of Aristotle's philosophy that deals with the reasons or "Causes" for a thing's existence. Found some online lecture notes from PHIL 320 that gave me an intro in the "causes" - and lo and behold, I found this "there is something internal to it which will have the result that the outcome of the sequence of changes it is undergoing - if it runs true to form - will be another entity of the same kind." Art for art's sake. No value but that the process, more or less, has produced value before. So there is the answer to the value of what NETg is doing - it is valuable because it will lead to an exploration of "environments, or experiences that can be shared with others" - and wouldn't that be a nice goal of design for learning?

So this is just a start but I feel this current running through this idea - at least for me anyway - is strong enough that I needed to change the parenthetical I have used after the main title e-Clippings - for a long time it was "The Application Becomes the Platform" but that idea is so well-ingrained now that the motto seemed a bit dated - then along came this idea that maybe we need to pay more attention to things like design and aesthetics than our current factory/production model of designing for learning allows us - maybe we need a new frame of reference - maybe we need to think about "Learning As Art."

Resource Section (looking for more!)

Art in Wikipedia
Aesthetics in Wikipedia
Value Theory in Wikipedia
Lecture Notes from PHIL 320
InfoCanvas Project from GATech
Information Interaction Design: A Unified Field Theory of Design by Nathan Shedroff
Art as Experience by Dewey
Experience and Education by Dewey
How We Think by Dewey
The Arts and the Creation of the Mind by Eisner

Comments

[jaycross]

Mark, I like the change. For one thing, it gives lots of room for fresh thinking -- virtually everything is game. In Canada's National Gallery in Ottawa last month, I happened upon a room of "found art" by Marcel Duchamps. It included the porcelain urinal marked "R. Mutt" which is now accepted as high art. Art is a frame of mind that transcends our narrow categorizations and lust for immediate payback.

My article on Envisioning Information http://tinyurl.com/zn9xd touches on a few of these issues.

Learning as art takes courage. "I do this because I'm moved to do it." ROI? Ha! Timeless things have no ROI.

[David Wilson]

Mark - "Learning As Art" seems a perfectly reasonable subline to me, and one that both carries meaning and allows ideas from many creative directions to be explored. That seems to be consistent with what you've been doing with the blog. Continue the good work!

David