Just some thoughts about the “un-lectures”.

I must say the first day I walked into the lecture theater I wasn’t sure what to expect, but the speech that Adrian gave felt pretty epic and definitely made me look  forward to more of whatever this class could hold, but if time has taught me anything, its to be weary of everything and that I can’t always take things in for their face value. He pretty much talked about what we can sort of expect from the subject,  which seems to be something that defines itself over time, and is in a constant flux of change. What I’ve managed to pull out of it thus far is that we need to be more productive. -biglol- naw I kid, obviously there’s more to it than that. What I’ve managed to get from this Media course so far, is this idea of self driven and self directed work, and learning how to learn, or how to figure out how to figure out how to figure out things. I’ve recently taken a liking to Ken Robinson who is some sort of professional creative, I’m still reading into it, but watching his RSA lecture really got me thinking, what exactly am I capable of? The un-lectures seems to reinforce this idea of being able to appropriately utilize our minds according to the situation, which if I’m honest, has been a bizarre experience for me.

Growing up in Malaysia, we were pretty much brought up in the whole “factory” style that Ken Robinson talks about, where the book is the ultimate law, to go against the book is to go against everything we hold dear in this world. We were divided into two main streams in our final years which were the Science and Arts streams. If you were in the Science stream, you were looked upon greatly because you undertook difficult subjects which required a lot of reading into like biology, physics and chemistry. All the qualified teachers who knew their shit, were assigned to these classes, and the Arts stream is pretty much where everyone else got to go, and that’s where they sent most of their unqualified teaching staff who were not properly trained and were certainly not prepared. I can remember clearly one day in history class, our teacher walked in and immediately yelled at the class “You’re all stupid!”.

Arts students were pretty much left for dead and were assumed to be of no real value to society. I was in the Arts stream myself and I can say that I met some of the most extraordinary people there. Simply because they didn’t have a specific interest in math and science, they ended up spending most of their time at school getting demoralized and getting reminded of what they couldn’t do or achieve. Its sad to say that this is still pretty much the way things happen back home, and I’d very much like to contribute to changing that. I can honestly say it feels like I’ve learnt more in the past half a year in RMIT than in my entire life back in Malaysia.

I digress

So yeah, this whole.. unlecture thing certainly helps strengthen what I’ve already been learning here. I think they were meant to be more of an open sort of discussion, but first of all, its a little too soon for something like that as nobody really has any context to work with yet, so when it came to the second unlecture, it was sort of still just Adrian talking to us,  and second, maybe an hour is kind of a tight space to squeeze something like this into as its a big class and there may be many ideas that want to be thrown around.. so maybe we need to find our bearings a little quicker. We talked about being a boat in the midst of an infinite sea, and learning how to navigate our way through which reminded of something I heard somewhere once that went something like “If you throw a fish in the middle of the sea, its going to wonder what its doing there eventually”, however it seems more that the boat here is the entire classroom [which is a different ball game] and someone needs to be helping navigate this boat full of people. Or is that just the old me being used to having a hierarchy talking. Maybe we could be like a school of fish working synaptic-ally together with some sort of.. hive mind -haha- (or isn’t that what the internet already is?).

I guess its still a little early to say anything for sure, the pretext was good, so I’m gonna stick with it and see where it takes me.

Peace out.

Show the people that we can
Make our magic inescapable
Rewrite the master plan