Gardner Campbell - Yearning, A Sense of Wonder & How to Invent the Future

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“Ecologies of Yearning and the Future of Open Education”




My initial reaction after watching this keynote posted on the #edcmooc google+ stream:

"Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love; close enough on the surface but, to the nonsucker, not exactly the same thing."
Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Don't miss listening to Gardner Campbell! As described on the #edcmooc resource page:

"(This lecture)...serves as a warning that what we really want - our utopia - is not necessarily to be found in the structures we are putting in place (or finding ourselves within)."

Love it.

"At what point do we become like the global open access brothel of non learning?"

Also love the part where he talks about how teachers now specify how students have to interact with their blogs and how many comments to write to get through class. It's just crazy how these "old ways" creep up everywhere. Really don't miss this lecture!


So do I need to repeat it? Don't miss this lecture! :)
After watching, I wanted to read more so I googled and found his twitter @GardnerCampbell and his website (subscribe why don't you!). There I found a seven part series named:
The Road to Digital Citizenship, which I highly recommend reading.
I put the links of all the parts here, so it's easier to find them all:


Gardner Campbell - The Road to Digital Citizenship


The Road to Digital Citizenship I: Invent the Future

The Road to Digital Citizenship II: The Case for Change

The Road to Digital Citizenship III: Awakening the Digital Imagination

The Road to Digital Citizenship IV: Fluency, Curriculum, Development

The Road to Digital Citizenship V: The Case for Digital Citizenship

The Road to Digital Citizenship VI: Organization: Small Pieces Loosely Joined

The Road to Digital Citizenship VII: Patterns and Understanding


Quotes from The Road to Digital Citizenship:

"What used to be supplemental devices are becoming as fluid and essential as language itself. Indeed, it is not too fanciful to say that we are witnessing the emergence of a new language, metaphorically speaking, a new meta-mode of representation as important as the emergence of the phonetic alphabet."

"The promise is that we can build a future together. We are not simply the victims of technological determinism. The warning is that the future we get is only as good as the future we invent. The warning is that the future we get is only as good as the future we invent. In other words, we must nurture our powers of invention, powers that depend on the depth and strength of our imaginations."

I never heard this quote before, but Gardner mentions it a couple times, and it's incredibly beautiful:

“A Computer is an Instrument Whose Music is Ideas.” Alan Kay

"We should learn from the Internet itself what a learning community can be like. When a small dialogue box inviting 140 characters of commentary, an affordance introduced in 2006 called “Twitter,” can play an integral role in global events ranging from a U.S. President’s State of the Union Address (Twitter hashtag #sotu) to ongoing revolutions in the Middle East beginning with Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt, we are witnessing a symbiosis of creation and learning that far outstrips any vision of academic transformation based on quadrupling class sizes and outsourcing grading and instruction to poorly-compensated adjuncts and paraprofessionals."

"To quote Clay Shirky, it’s as if every book came with a free printing press. Just as in the days of the printing press, there are many worries about authority, authenticity, intellectual property, and sheer volume of information. These complaints emerged within a few decades of Gutenberg’s invention. Yet we do not rely on a National Committee To Screen And Filter Books for our self-directed learning within this abundance of conversation. We educate our youth and ourselves to read and write with facility and discernment. Likewise, we must empower our students as digital citizens to make their contributions to the global conversations, and to establish the corner of the global network that will be their “Speaker’s Corner,” just like the corner in London’s Hyde Park where by tradition anyone can have their turn to speak—and thus to lead the next phase of the conversation."

" The best, most prescient, most effective inventions will likely not be completely understood or even understandable when they are begun. The true innovators among our digital citizens who invent the future will need the patronage and courage of leaders who are not afraid to confront their own lack of understanding and who can live with the paradoxical certainty that the “unknown unknown” is where the richest innovations will come from."

"As a thought experiment, imagine explaining to a medieval king who prides himself on not needing to know how to read that a day will come when mass literacy empowers citizens worldwide. Imagine explaining to an alpha-male executive in the early 1960s that a day will come when not knowing at least the rudiments of typing will likely disqualify an applicant from obtaining an executive position. Imagine explaining Twitter, or YouTube, or blogging, to the world of 1995, a time when many people loudly insisted that no one would ever do something as foolish as enter a credit card number in a form on a Web page."

"As for my confidence that higher education can rise with these challenges–well, it depends on the day you ask me."

"MIT’s Seymour Papert devoted his career to the idea that interactive computing offered a new mode of experiential learning. In 1993, he published a book titled The Children’s Machine: Rethinking School In The Age Of The Computer. In this magisterial and also deeply personal work, Papert distinguishes “Schoolers” from “Yearners.” “Schoolers” are surprised and even indignant about the need for “megachange.” By contrast, Papert writes, Yearners “do not say, ‘I can’t imagine what you could possibly be looking for,’ because they have themselves felt the yearning for something different.”


In II: The Case for Change he mentions Norman Doidge “The Brain That Changes Itself”
You can watch a lecture by Norman Doidge over here:
https://vimeo.com/14551296

and the whole documentary “The Brain That Changes Itself” is up for watching too:
https://vimeo.com/37154819

I saw the documentary a couple weeks ago and it's great!
Plus here are some more of Gardner Campbell's videos he recommends on his page:


“No Digital Facelifts: Thinking the Unthinkable about Open Educational Experiences”



 
A serious topic but a very funny talk!
The name of the lecture is a reference to the movie Brazil.

"We are living in the middle of the largest increase in expressive capability 

in the history of the human race."

Clay Shirky

Higher education is the place where we train people to be able to take advantage of this to the fullest and surprise us with the things we haven't discovered, about what this can mean. But whatever it means and we may disagree over what it means look at that. I believe that that is true. It makes me do what I do and yet everyday I say, I have a bag of gold would you like to have a bag of gold?

And people say: "Where do you find time for bags of gold? Oh no another currency to master! Gold? Is that sustainable?" No, you spend it. "What would you spend it on?" What would you like to spend it on?

"I don't have time for your philosophical questions Gardner."

“Teaching, Learning, and the Digital Imagination”



In this one Campbell finds some more analogies in how we falsely think about the internet and the movie Brazil. He also shows some great examples of internet collaboration.

"The internet…is not tubes, it's not a document delivery system. This is actually one of the most exciting and intriguing global learning systems that I have seen."

Seems this virtual choir mentioned by Campbell now has 3746 members singing, but the #!x#!! GEMA wants me to put my VPN on for listening and I am just too tired right now. So just go to youtube and find it yourself.



The Symphony of Science is a musical project created by John D Boswell, designed to deliver scientific knowledge and philosophy in musical form.
http://www.symphonyofscience.com/


http://www.gardnercampbell.net/


#edcmooc, #medialabcourse, #documentary, #GardnerCampbell, #openedu, #SeymourPapert, #talks


Work by Céline Keller is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, Files, Pictures and Videos might not be.