DET/CHE: The Art & Science of Education

Town plan of Imola (Wikipedia)

I am at the Directors of Education Technology and California Higher Education conference in San Jose this week (DET/CHE). This is my first time here and I am presenting on MOOCs, eLearning, and Instructional Design. I am excited about the location. We are in downtown San Jose which has the Tech Museum right across from the San Jose Museum of Art. Interestingly enough, the Tech Museum is looking more like an art museum (Fritjof Capra spoke there recently on Leonardo Da Vinci) and the art museum is running an exhibit called "The Genius of Everyday Things." And this is how it should be. There is a long history of art and science working and playing together. It is only in the last few centuries when specializations and their theoretical baggage seem to have separated the two in academia. I like the Merriam-Webster definition of Art: "something that is created with imagination and skill and that is beautiful or that expresses important ideas or feelings." That should at least also be the definition of instructional design if not education itself. I have a number of postings to this blog on art because art talks about how we see and experience the world and is about expressing our connection to it. Education is an opportunity to erase those artificial boundaries and to acknowledge that we experience the world with all of our senses and not just the ones for writing papers. Like Art (with a capital "a") education is also an opportunity think about how we see and experience the world and navigating our connections to the people and ideas around us. It is not an accident that George Siemens sees the role of the teacher to be a curator and "sense-maker" rather than a subject matter expert or funnel. (See p.15 of Siemens' "Learning and Knowing in Networks.")

The Tech Museum of Innovation in downtown San Jose; the white line in the sky is an airliner on approach to San Jose International Airport during the exposure time (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Tech Museum is running a program on the movie Star Wars which really has nothing to do with actual technology. It has everything to do with how artists imagine technology. And if Star Wars was not a great story, no one would care. You would never see a tech museum do a presentation on "Plan 9 from Outer Space." It was the art of Star Wars that fired the imagination.

Lets tear down those walls. If you are here at this conference, I think it would be worthwhile to take the time to visit the art museum. I would love to see the three organizations (DET/CHE, Tech Museum, and the Art Museum) coordinate a presentation someday!

Related articles

• San Jose Museum of Art (purplehouseblog.wordpress.com)
• Behind the Headline: Art Makes You Smart (educationnext.org)

A Treatise on the Astrolabe

I have attempted in a few postings here to talk about art and science. I have been asked more than once about the connection between instructional design and art (other kinds of design) or how I find the time to create when I am writing and working so much for others. There are a couple of answers to those kinds of questions and I think the real trick is to understand that there is no difference between the art we create and the work that we do (another answer is "I never have enough time!"). It is all fine and good to be a poet and an artist, but the real genius is to see the poetry and art in all that we do; to give ourselves to our work in such a way that our creativity or playfulness is found even in the most serious of things. I am only sometimes successful in doing this. This is why I love people like Da Vinci, Chaucer, Dante, and Cheng Man-Ch'ing - the polymathic autodidacts of the world. It is a stunning thing to find out that a favorite poet worked in a bank or was a family physician. Or to read the complete works of Chaucer and run across "A Treatise on the Astrolabe." This would not be too far off from reading a GPS handbook by Umberto Eco. The astrolabe is really an early astronomical computer. It has programmed data (the star positions on the rete) and an input (the alidade or rule). With that, you can find our information about where you are, what time it is, how fast you are going; vital information for both navigating or practicing Islam. Writing something like this was all in a day's work for Chaucer because he was interested and enthusiastic about so many things and was interested in bringing those ideas to others. His "Treatise on the Astrolabe" is a fine example of early technical writing. It is written in very clear, direct prose. The economy of style would fit right in with standard guidelines at NASA. This treatise was written by Chaucer for his son, Louis: "Lyte Lowys my sone, I aperceyve wel by certeyne evydences thyn abilite to lerne sciences touching nombres and proporciouns; and as wel considre I thy besy praier in special to lerne the tretys of the Astrelabie." What is interesting here is that he is writing the treatise for someone he knows to already have a gift for science and math. In other words, he is shaping the document for his audience. He also had the astrolabe calibrated for Oxford because unlike a sextant, an astrolabe is only accurate for one line of latitude. The treatise is unfinished (at least according the latest textual evidence) but it looks finished enough to actually get a working knowledge of the astrolabe. My point here is that this text was used for teaching. It was the second most published of Chaucer's text apart from the "Canterbury Tales" and it is not just a manual for a scientific insturment but a record of an early form of technical writing, teaching, and translation (from Latin sources) from a major poet.
Note: Yes, my father was an English teacher and named me for Chaucer.

Better Living Through Chemistry

Mind and machine merge in the 1822 invention of the espresso machine. The machine age motorcycle of the mind. Is it a coincidence that from the belles lettres age of tea and lace that "Realism" bursts onto the scene at the same time with novelists like Balzac? Coffee is the lubricating oil of music, art, and other revolutions. The world was asleep and Balzac drank the blackest of coffee he could find and woke up. He saw the world for the first time with all of its many surfaces shining and reflecting into one another. Its darknesses darker, its light, a scintillating patina dancing over all. The City now breathes with life, every stone once a palace and now a future barricade; each man pushing a cart intertwined by history and economy into the lives of the least and the greatest.
Balzac would rise in the late afternoon like a tide, eat a light dinner, sleep until midnight, and then write and work for fourteen hours. His life, work, passions, and person were all colossal. I don't understand why critics call a man who believed in ghosts, the monarchy, and failed at every business venture a Realist. He reminds me at times of a child who won't go to bed when there is company over for fear that they will miss something. What did it mean when we could not put that book down when we were children? We knew that the book was not going to change over night, it would still be there, we could still continue it but we would rather spend the next day tired than put the book down. Balzac saw the world as a book he couldn't put down and set out to write about the whole thing. For this, he would need to stay awake. He wrote, published, and edited in all the media of his day: newspapers, magazines, books, plays, and an opera.
The history of coffee in the West follows the rise of industrialism. The early machines are still used and made today - things of steam, pistons, and springs that are works of art in themselves, The semi-automatic espresso machine was developed after World War II and the fully automatic espresso machine invented in the 1960s - coincidentally another time of social, political, and artistic revolutions.
I was asked a few weeks ago about how I reconcile work and art. How can we work in a college, write and research in education, teach and also write fiction or produce any art? I began to think about all the ways that my work informs my art and vice-versa. Balzac was in on the multimedia boom of his time, the modern printing press. He was a newpaper, magazine, and book publisher. He was not successful at any of these because he still had a huge foot in the previous century. We see ventures like this all the time today - internet ventures that act like paid subscription libraries in an age of open content. And I love the derision that is directed towards blogging in the "traditional" academic media (Chronicle of Higher Ed and New York Review of Books); they can't stand uncontrolled, non-tenured, non-vetted, non-peer-reviewed amateur scholars daring to publish. They should celebrate the return of the penny pamphlet - it is even cheaper now! The pamphleteers fed the imaginations of Shakespeare and Thomas Paine. Many of the world's greatest ideas came from the chemically-altered imaginations of the self-published. I like blogging because I can start a piece in the third person and end in the first and there is no one here to stop me.

I am no Balzac but his huge embrace of all media and forms of writing, his enormously polymathic output, is an inspiration. So my answer to the question about work and art in the Age of the 60 Hour Work Week is to love the world, live passionately, and be prepared to drink lots of coffee!