Some good suggestions from Kylie about doing question and answer in the lecture slot. We are going to follow up some of these, and we will probably try a couple of online experiments around this too. Isabella recognises that we need to bring things (the teaching staff and students), as I wrote earlier, absolutely. The issue I wanted foregrounded was that if you think there is a set lot of ‘things’ to be learned as sort of discrete bits of information, then you really aren’t going to get what you should be from your degree.

Gabrielle has a good question about how to gain knowledge and its relation to information. Information is important, and useful, and to turn it into knowledge we use it. Information by itself is quite dumb, so it becomes what we apply it to, or for. Most of us can do this – I want to know the population of Australia because I am comparing it to France – but the thing we are beginning here is using knowledge as knowledge. Knowledge is always knowledge in its use, so to gain knowledge you need to make things that use it and in using it create it. Blog posts. Essays. Films. The information so far? How to blog, some readings about why to blog, some conversations, provocations, and prompts about learning, providing a specific sort of disruptive experience to model what the network is.

Courtney thinks education is a financial transaction, let’s cut that off right there. University education in Australia has been free since the early 1970s. Today, while there is a HECs contribution of around $6,000 per year the cost to educate you is at least twice that (not including capital works like buildings, internet costs, and equipment), so the balance is paid for by, well, international students and the Australian public through their taxes. Now, it is subsidised because it is thought worthwhile to educate the bright ones, at the expense of everybody else. If you recognise that, then not only is it not the case that you’ve paid the full cost, but that others are paying for your place, so there is an obligation there, too, isn’t there?

Now, the reason the lecture has survived, mainly, is that it was the most efficient way to deliver a chunk of stuff to an audience. That moment is gone. If I wanted lectures to do that I would record them, put them online, and invite you to look at them at your leisure (this is rapidly becoming the dominant model of the ‘lecture’). That’s easy to do, if you just want to talk at people. But what if we wanted to do other things? It isn’t about how many questions, or even questions in the lecture. It is to show how to be something else. To try to make more visible ideas, and more importantly what they can do. Learning is not about transferring knowledge and skills, and educators who sell that are snake oil sales people. How can I ‘transfer’ my know how, to you? I can show you and help you with ways of doing, and being, for instance how to ask better questions, but each time that happens it must always begin from what you have done. Not me. Can’t read that? Let’s help. This is not transfer from the teacher precisely because it needs to begin with the student. This is also why the traditional lecture we ain’t doing, because by definition that begins from the lecturer, not the student. Now, in relation to us being peers. Those last two sentences are ideas I’ve never had before. They’re good ideas. They happen because we are discussing some ideas together, and they have arisen in response to you. The ‘transfer’ is which way now?

By the way, the single best indicator of academic and professional success at Harvard University, independent of previous education, income, entry score, and so on, is a student’s ability to form and participate in a study group. So, actually “just meet up as a group of students and discuss and share information” is the most important thing you can do to learn – explaining things to each other.

Victoria recognises the hypodermic theory of communication that was also woven in my comments about learning and retail therapy. This is the language that advertising used to sell itself when it first rose as a major industry. It’s rubbish as any communications book from post World War Two acknowledges. It’s also known as the “golden bullet” theory. If you get the message right, it will work instantly and perfectly. Never does, never will, except in regimes of extraordinary control (North Korea, Nazi Germany).

Sian picks her way through, though the theory of knowledge is not mine, it’s constructivism, and is premised on experiential learning. So far we’ve provided quite specific experiences so the content of the subject is how you have experienced these, and your reaction to them. And if you want a network media specific angle, how you are feeling in this sea is the same way that old media is feeling (on the day that Rupert’s Australian empire just changed captains, again, after two years of their biggest decline in value ever). Chantelle, meanwhile, got a lot from it (and I am probably surprised at how few in the blogs have gone near to the assumption of privilege I was critiquing). Dylan joins those who saw it a reversion (it was, deliberately so). Twitter, maybe, what we are working on carefully is tech overkill. About ten percent have a twitter account, and I’m not going to get everyone to get twitter to tweet the lecture as that turns twitter into teacher time. If you don’t have it yet, then the first semester of this intensive stuff is not the time to force it. Plus it doesn’t solve anything. 100 people tweeting can’t be responded to, so by all means tweet, use a hashtag for the subject (that’d be great) but I’m more, just do it. Blog it, share it. Let it grow. In other words you are now the media, so be the media, you don’t need the teachers to make that happen.