I’m a bit late on this one, however, now that I (on some minor level) understand the basics of blogging and of the course outline, I’m going to do some catching up.
First off, I was really impressed by the lecture. I kept telling people it was “the best, if not most unrelated lecture we’ve had so far.” Thinking back though, it really wasn’t all that unrelated, and the fact that I was so engaged with it must say something about not just my receptiveness to that single lecture, but to the course itself.
That said, what really sparked my interest was not how Adrian attempted to relate the various points back to uni life and specifically to our course (which honestly, was a lacking part of the lecture), but how what he said prompted us to challenge how we viewed uni as a whole and by extension, society’s relationship with technology and learning ‘norms’.
He questioned why we were at university, considering that we have the technology and hence the ability to learn and create away from institutions, and to be fair this is a question I could not confidently answer at this point. He challenged the rote learning structure we take for granted, and identified the difference between know-what and know-how, and how this will play an important role in our learning. He talked about ‘light-bulb moments,’ one of which occurred to me when he suggested that a movie is not a story, but a collection of clips and sounds carefully placed together (i.e. the material aspects which then serve to tell a story) and that nothing in a story is accidental. The real world and the ‘story world’ aren’t as related as we like to think, as expressed through the example of spilling coffee on to a person at a cafe. In the case of a romantic comedy, this would be the catalyst to a love story. In the real world, this would be an offensive yet forgettable and unimportant occurrence. As a wannabe writer, this was something I found interesting.
