Clay Knowledge

Jake describes an elaborate form of information triage as his learning practice. Personally, while I know we all do these things in different ways (though not that different, the general cognitive styles we have as people are quite a small set), this is a model for capturing and so the blog can be good for the last step, the ‘synthesis’. Until this moment, learning has not happened, as learning involves and requires the transformation of information into knowledge. They are two different things (census data is information, using it to make an argument about demographics and culture, is knowledge) and one imagined role of the unlecture is to perform that, to show it happening, rather than just presenting the stability and faux security of expertise as if it isn’t a multi headed wriggly octopus of a thing. Lectures pretend that academics think knowledge is linear, all neatly bundled up. What we do as academics is anything but this, knowledge is stuff, like clay. So, as I write this too early on a Sunday morning, let’s settle on the speculative idea that the unlecture is for sculpting in clay. Spin it, pound it, fire it, paint it. Use tools, fingers, hands, palms, fire, water, colour. It is thickly messy. That is knowledge. Information? That’s the clay, as a lump and not anything yet. The potter, well, there’s knowledge there, and in the hands, and in the clay.