What’s the point of reviewing a design book that is over 40 years old, long out of print and tied to the style and technology of 1968? Well, S. Neil Fujita’s Aim for a Job in Graphic Design/Art (Richards Rosen...
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One of the most often repeated refrains on design blogs, in the critique of a new logo, is “Any design student could do a better job.” This ubiquitous comment is especially amusing to me because, well, it’s mostly true. If...
by Henry Jenkins, Professor at USC. An important and timely discussion that explores the growing interdependence of learners with digital media and the need to examine how these media are working, what their influence is and how to teach in...
A superb TED talk on the spread of American Idol and the many ways in which the show is being transformed to suit the demands and needs of different cultures. Talk by Cynthia Schneider....
Ceramics is an extraordinary craft-based discipline. It is also an art and a science. The materials that ceramicists use have changed over the last century, but many of the core creative methods remain the same. None of what I have...
In 1992 a major statue of one of the founders of Canadian confederation, Sir John A. Macdonald was decapitated in a local park in Montreal. Although poorly maintained up until that time, rusty and neglected, the decapitation provoked a major...
These are difficult and challenging days for education. We are in the midst of a sea change which will affect many of the assumptions which we have about how students learn and how teachers, teach. Read on in the following...
I will call him Anthony. He arrived in Vancouver with a trunk full of DVD’s. He uses SMS and a variety of social networking tools to communicate with friends and family. He uses a small video camera to record his...
Reference: Learners in a Changing Learning Landscape Reflections from a Dialogue on New Roles and Expectations Series: Lifelong Learning Book Series , Vol. 12 Visser, Jan; Visser-Valfrey, Muriel (Eds.) Springer, 2008, XII, 304 p., Hardcover There are numerous books...
This short piece is adapted from a lecture I gave some years ago about the way disciplines, in particular film studies, develop into departments within universities. How do disciplines stay alive and remain current and connected to the social and...
In my previous post, I talked about the new world of writing that our culture is experimenting with in which conventional notions of texts, literacy and coherence are being replaced with multiples, many media used as much for experience as...
Albert Einstein and Rabindranath Tagore Rabindranath Tagore’s work on education and learning (He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913.) is of great significance and is not as well known as it should be in the West. In...
I began my career as a teacher in a two year college in Montreal. Vanier College was the second English language institution created as part of the CEGEP system in Quebec after Dawson College. (CEGEP means, College of General &...
The Sunday New York Times Magazine of August 27th has a poignant and profoundly disturbing article and photo essay on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina with particular emphasis on what happened to the children of the families that were displaced...
(Please refer to the previous four entries for this article.) My point here is that although computers are designed by humans, programmed by humans and then used by humans, this tells us only part of the story. The various dimensions...
(Please refer to Part 3 on June 19th for previous installments of this article.) So why explore the intersections of human thought and computer programming? My tentative answer would be that we have not understood the breadth and depth...
(Please refer to the June 18th entry for the second part of this article) This initial creativity was soon lost in the final version of “Understanding Media published in the 1964. In the book the medium becomes the message...
(Please refer to the June 17th entry for the first part of this article) Let me begin by quoting the head of IBM, Lou Gerstner in reference to Deep Blue, the computer developed to play chess at the grandmaster...
The context for learning, education and the arts has altered dramatically over the last few years as has the cultural environment for educators and artists/creators. Part of what I would like to do here is examine the intersection of a number of crucial developments that I think have transformed the terrain of technology, education, art and culture.
There is another term that I would like to introduce into this discussion and that is, counter-publics. Daniel Brouwer in a recent issue of Critical Studies in Media Communications uses the term to describe the impact of two “zines”? on...
1st Colloquium on the Law of Transhuman Persons in Florida
Honoured guests, Dr. George Pederson, Chair of the Board of Governors, members of the Board, Graduates, Faculty, Staff, Families and Friends, today I will speak to you about some of the challenges that we will all face in the near future and the crucial role that the graduates from this institution will play in the future well-being of our society and of Emily Carr Institute.
Learning is a complex and challenging subject. The learning experience both within schools and outside of them has been an area of debate and contention for centuries and we still do not know that much about the optimum conditions for learning or even how humans internalize information and process knowledge. In this context, post-secondary and K-12 institutions are struggling to respond to sometimes-excessive expectations on the part of students and their communities, trying at one and the same time to create value and be valuable.
There is a simple definition of learning community that says, “This phrase describes a vision and model where a community’s stakeholders come together and share resources? Another definition is, “A “learning community? is a deliberate restructuring of the curriculum to...
Jan responds to the previous entry: I think it is important not to limit the idea of learning community to that of ‘a community that cares for the institutions - such as schools - through which people learn,’ which seems...
The phrase “learning community? is suggestive of many things. It has become a catch-all for a variety of initiatives that link the learning experience to different notions of community. What are those notions? And why has it become so crucial...
Although this report was written in 1999, it still has many elements that are very important to present day debates about digital culture....
I recently held an information session for over 70 students at Emily Carr Institute to discuss Intellectual Property and its impact on artists and designers. IP is a confusing and troubling topic. I created a Powerpoint presentation which can be...
40.5 M for Canada’s first Digital Media graduate program
I liked your idea regarding the obliteration of
classrooms as we know them today
Jan's comment
For those of you that may not know about the Web Site run by John Brockman, connect here to THE EDGE, which, as its title suggests is about "edgy" thinking. At the beginning of each year, Brockman invites readers to contribute to a debate through a question that he poses. This year's question goes as follows:
I have been an educator, administrator, writer and creative artist for over thirty-five years. During that time, most of the disciplines with which I have been involved have changed. For better or for worse, the very nature of disciplines (of...
Last week I contributed the following video presentation to a meeting in Berlin
In an essay written in 1982, Shoshana Felman described some paradoxical statements made by Socrates and Freud on education and learning.
Richard Posner, who is a Federal Appeals court Judge as well as Senior Lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School and an active Blogger, is one of the most prolific writers in the United States. He has a lengthy article in the New York Times Book Review, Sunday, July 31, 2005.
Chris makes the following point:
"What strikes me about these debates is that the center seems so western and middle class. I don't think the phrase "popular culture" has any meaning at all and by extraction maybe popular culture itself is meaningless."
Steven Johnson's new book Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter popularizes an argument that has been at the core of debates in communication's and cultural theory for over thirty years.
Ronny Siebes of the Free University of Amsterdam continues the debate * I think that we are both convinced about the limitations of the current way of doing science and especially the reductionistic approach. * Also I agree with...
Quoting Ron Burnett One of the metaphors we have been discussin is that the brain is like a computer and that human memory stores information much like a hard disk. There is simply not enough evidence to suggest that...
Quoting Ron Burnett, Emily Carr Institute Imaging of the brain can provides pictures of the connections between different parts, but imaging cannot provide details of what Gregory Bateson has so aptly described as the set of differences that make...
I recently attended a meeting in the Netherlands on learning in the Arts and Sciences entitled Building the Scientific Mind with the following aims: identify important dimensions and attributes of the scientific mind, from the holistic perspective; determine the conditions...
Imagine the following. There is a sudden change in your body temperature. Your heart starts to beat more quickly. You begin to sweat. You have read about the symptoms of a heart attack. You beging to think that you are...
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