So there was no actual lecture this week due to the strike. But in lieu of the actual lecture we were assigned 3 videos to watch on youtube. I found all 3 really captivating for different reasons and I intend to watch more similar videos when I’ve finished writing this post 🙂

I will explain the Hypertext one first because it was the shortest, and least abstract (now that I think about it… it was VERY abstract, particularly its ideas… but for the point of my sentence, lets just go with it 🙂 ) I found this video really helpful to my understanding of what all the little letters and numbers and codes mean in web page development. I haven’t studied IT since year 7 and this was a great memory jogger! I’m still no website technician or computer whizz, but if you want to learn the basics, and how we can embrace them to do amazing things, you should definitely watch this!

The other videos, Sir Ken Robinson, ‘Do schools kill creativity?’ and Michael Wesch, ‘From knowledgable to knowledge-able’ were immensely inspiring and thoroughly engaging.  The ideas expressed in these two presentations could have books written about them, and I know I have a habbit of writing really long blog posts, so I’m going to “do my best” (see the videos 😉 ) to summarise and highlight what I thought were key ideas.

Robinson makes a bold but interesting statement at the beginning of his presentation; that in education, creativity should be harnessed and recognised as just as important as the learning of literacy. He uses Picasso’s quote that “all children are born artists” and explains that we don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it. And this is because society is institutionalised and children are educated out of being creative in order to conform to this industrialised state.

He suggests we think about the idea that in every education around the world, subjects are organised in a hierarchy; maths and language at the top, then humanities, and the arts always sit at the bottom end of the spectrum, and even then, fine arts and music are ‘respected’ more so than drama and dance. Robinson asks ‘Why’? He proposes the current system sets up all students to be university professors. But they, in honesty, are just the same as any other human being. They are no better than a dancer for example. His example of choreographer Gillian Lynne who choreographed the stage productions of Cats and The Phantom of the Opera. As a child she couldn’t sit still, and today would probably diagnose her with ADHD, but her doctor said ‘there is nothing wrong with her, she is a dancer’. So Gillian Lynne was sent to a dance school where her passion could be embraced and she became a successful multi-million dollar choreographer.

It makes me wonder why such skills aren’t respected as greatly as writing essays or speaking more than one language or being able to calculate the density of the sun (or something mathsy like that). My passions as a child, and still today are singing and fashion. I was advised by teachers, family, friends etc, that because I am also good at writing and other highly respected academic subjects, that I should focus on them instead and go to university and become a ‘professional’. ‘I would never get a job as a singer’ and ‘fashion isn’t a good enough career’… This is what Robinson says is wrong with the world.

In other words, intelligence is looked upon the wrong way. Yes, I understand that we need a certain amount of people to do certain jobs to keep the economy running blah blah blah…. but intelligence is diverse, dynamic and distinct. Shouldn’t our generation of children have time to build their identity before they are construed into institutional conveyer belts? This leads me to the ideas of Michael Wesch…

Using the Dove ‘Talk to your daughter before the beauty industry does’ ad (see video link), Wesch talks about how the constant evolution of media can be damaging to young people who are still trying to find their own identity. He shows his lecture theatre, full of disengaged students, all conforming to the institutionalised expectations as was explained by Robinson. These students had done all the right things; they had achieived good grades at school and made it into university. But now they are sitting in a room looking less than satisfied. Why? Because we are restricting their knowledge-ability to 4 walls and 1 person standing at the front of the room. Everything they could ever possibly need to know is “in the air”… they all have devices which give them access to the web which contains 2 billion people’s minds worth of information so why do they need to sit in a room and be taught stuff? (And pay for it I might add).

He makes a point that current technology makes it really easy to connect, organise, share, collaborate, publish etc… but without it, these skills are really, really hard. Much like Adrian’s unlectures earlier in the semester, he explains the importance of breaking these bounds in order to create knowledge-able students, ‘experience makers’, ‘inventors’, ‘knowledge producers’. Our ideas are the most valuable thing that we possess- we need to take more time to appreciate this.