Category Archives: Epistemology

What the Maya Did

The first part of the mural shows the establishment of order to the world.

The world is propped up by trees with roots leading to the underworld and branches holding up the sky, Saturno said.

Four deities, who are representations of the maize god’s son, provide a blood sacrifice and a unique offering before each tree.

“The story starts with this deity, who is patron of kings, standing in water. He’s running a large spear through his own penis, letting blood. Blood is squirting all over the place,” Saturno said.

See photo and story here.

What I find interesting here isn’t the visual sophistication of the Mayan mural but the time/space gap between it and the Dresden Codex (13th Century), which should open a significant path of research in history and archaeology. What does the mural invite not about what happened between it and the codex date but prior to its own time. What can we infer about the context of kingly rule for the Maya? It’s development of comology and expression, its mythology? The mural displays written expression, as well. So much more to think about.

Compass Achievements

I’ve nearly completed my British Literature I finals and have been looking at journals and revisions of earlier writing by students. I think the final, a series of short answer questions, pin-pointed pretty well what I want students to know at the end (after lots of writing and reading), given the expectations and requirements of this mode of demonstration. The students pretty much got the prosody elements, showed more confidence in their responses, and knew where cited support was necessary.

But I’m thinking about something else: the knowledge structure of our British Literature sequence in relation to the college as a whole. Ideally, a student will enter the intro surveys with background in Composition and an additional semester of writing work in Composition II or Literature and Composition. Ideally, a student will have a pretty good grasp of textual analysis and critique, the fundamentals of argumentation, documentation styles for academic work, essay organizational structures, and the modern library. Ideally, the student will have followed this course of north to south/south to north study semester to semester so that the knowledge and practice is fresh upon entering the survey.

But what other elements form an ideal if we see the entrance into the course as a circle rather than a line of knowledge. A student might enter the survey with some degree of knowledge of historical analysis and some coverage of western history. Other elements could be mathematics and quantitative anlysis, an understanding of the analysis of instructions in a social, human context, psychology frameworks.

Case in point. Students in Brit Lit may also be enjoying Professor Timmons’ film course. In that course John covers elements of the hero’s journey and does so through viewings and lots of written analyses. These objectives compliment the study of Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; they also compliment a student’s practice with styles of writing. Likewise, the study of the journey elements in British Literature compliment the study of film. In both courses, the journey constitutes a study of morphology, narrative, genre, character, history, social dynamics, and human culture and cognition. Beyond specific courses and their objectives, students in both courses should come out with a good sense of the journey as a big idea across the spectrum of human experience and in doing so learn something about film and literature.

It takes a lot of practice amd much thinking about it just to grasp the connections and significance of similar morphological elements in Star Wars and Sir Gawain. Mucho time spanned between the synoptics and Milton, and time can be deceptive. Milton had no ‘lectricity, right. If we are different and distinct from those who came before, then what could the similarities possibly be? Other discipline connections help to bust down this powerful barrier to creativity.

The Self and the Stone

It may be that there is a rather large stone on the horizon, a small black thumbs-up against glazing sun-down purple and orange (those southwestern sunsets never leave you). Perhaps there are runes on what may be a monostone, some message that points to secrets, but about what? The quest would be to cross the space between and check it out. In Alaska, a crew and I seeking a shortcut out from somewhere tore into the thorns and extended our packing time by perhaps a few hours more than necessary. No birds that day, just some odd stomping behind some high trees.

“Make sure you hit him in the chest,” one of my partners said, handing me the rifle brought for protection against grizzly bears. “Just in case. We’re counting on you.”

That’s the way shortcuts workout sometimes. Not always, but sometimes.

Reading this post by Daniel Green got me thinking about the horizon and other metaphors for knowing or wanting to know. Susan Gibb at the moment is all over The Body Artist on her quest. In an unrelated post (maybe), she writes:

Down by the river, trees naked gray their hair fell out with autumn chemotherapy, revival and survival. Leaves in golden curls on grass no longer green. Centuries of mowings, leaves, and people turned to earth.

Topology and Abstraction

One of the most difficult elements of learning (and teaching) is abstraction. The real down and dirty knowledge stuff is typically abstract material, whether it be related to numbers or relations. I’ve noticed this in children. Ask five year olds to think back to the year 1976 and typically they wont know what you’re after because they haven’t yet objectified the notion of time, not to mention the idea of relating time to someone else in symbolic terms where time T is related to an already abstracted set of notions such as pi times the square root of string length L divided by gravity as represented by G.

Abstraction then. A map is an abstracted view of a complex set of relations. I’ve noticed that S (my son Sam) is much taken by the old Cole and Degan magic school bus books, where a bus takes children into a hurricane and other assorted tough messes for the sake of hands on learning. These are not easy books to read to children because of the numerous topological elements in the texts. There’s typically a brief narrative element that forms the core adventure story as well as a collection of lists, dialogue bubbles, illustrative graphics, and other sundries.

But what has helped my son to read magic school-bus like books–books with complex layouts and cognitive demands–is his experience fiddling with digital games whose topological elements demand some amount of abstract thinking and spatial analysis. For example, Kya, Dark Lineage provides the player with multiple way of figuring the space of the game: a 3-D environment, a one-dimensional map, and a two-dimensional representation of Kya’s world. In other words, to figure out where you are in the game, you can access the map. Reading the digital space serves to reinforce all kinds of neat skills in children.

Why Hypertextuality Matters

Without cutting to deeply into definitions, let’s stiupulate that hypertextuality is about making connections, linking one thing to another thing. How can be left to the creative problem solver.

Let’s also stipulate that good teaching is at heart a creative act. Good teaching is about creating the opportunity for learning to happen. Lot’s of people can learn how to work with layers in Photoshop. Lots of people can learn how to create a link from one space to another in Storyspace. I submit that how and what to link can’t be taught, but it can be learned. It may be a good thing to provide examples of excellence with Photoshop and Storyspace; but what I can’t do is teach a person what to do with those examples in terms of their own decision making. Provide a poet with Donne’s Valediction Forbidding Mourning and the poet will have experienced an example. But I can’t teach someone to write a poem with similar aesthetic and technical virtuosity. They have to do that themselves. What I can do is provide an environment for a peoson to work through their own decisions. The teacher, whatever teacher, cannot “think for” another person. The boss can’t write the program for the programmer; nor can the boss solve the problem that got things started in the first place. That’s the programmer’s job.

Why Literary Study Matters

Thinking by analogy, I come up with this:

Spock and Bones are seated at a park bench. They are joined by the city planner, a thin, clicking guy who gestures like a puppet hopping on stage.

We’ll have roads, he says. They’ll be 30 feet wide. A yellow line will separate them into lanes and on them vehicles, some tons in weight, will go north and south at 45 miles per hour.

Spock observes, That means the cars passing abreast will be spaced some 6 feet apart at average. It’s a brilliant idea.

Bones says, Are you fucking nuts!

Monsters and Others

Perhaps you all have seen the proliferation of monster/alien shows on television, a noticable trend away from the superhero amidst us, to the alien amidst us, which is not unique but going through revival. From Buffy and Smallville to the 4400 and Alien Invasion. The idea of the monster and the alien are related in many ways. In Beowulf, the decendant of Cain is a foul creature who can eat you whole and rip you apart. In The Invasion of the Body Snatchers you are “eaten whole,” likewise in The Thing, but the attack is subtle, infiltrative, and creepy (with lots ooze and gell), unlike the War of the Worlds where the attack has marked borders. Either way, the alien is a monster. In both Beowulf and Invasion, the monster or the alien is NOT US.

The monster always surprises. It approaches from the periphery, from inside us even. The monster is that “other” who is always unexpected, sneaky or not. The world outside the circle of order teems with the agents of chance and aggression. Such is the devil in The Exorcist and the terror agents who killed us and knocked down our buildings. Such is the Green Knight who penetrates from without. Such is Sauron, who sneaks back into Mordor until openly challenging the heros of the day.

Who are the others, what is the other, and how to deal with them, or it, is still a fundamental question. It can be a complicated question of masks, identity, affiliation, affinity, or the design of barriers meant to keep the storm waters out. The clubs children form. The institutions governments make. The images of the artists.

In Battlestar Galactica there are no overt aliens as “aliens.” But the program still confronts the question in that the identity of the enemy is unsure. Who among us, the program asks, will open themselves up as the sudden and unlikely enemy: in a card game, a firefight, a computer system. The robotic army is obviously monstrous, but they are the easy target–openly antagonistic. However, the beautiful but passionate clones are the real danger behind them and the question goes even deeper because there must be a cause behind them as well–guess who? The problem is to flesh the immediate enemy out. As in Gawain and the implications of the pentangle, the skill comes in seeing past the mirage and the agents of bewilderment.

The Meaning of History

Chris Coonce-Ewing asks a juicy question: what is history?

This is a test of many things: there are discipline answers, philosophical answers, political and phenomenological answers. There are kinds. There are characterizations. The Beowulf and Gawain poets provide answers in their own way, which has been a big subject in our examinations and interrogations of the these works. Both poets need the past. We do too.

The historian wouldn’t like this answer:

History is a sound in another room.
You call and either he, she,
it
goes mouse quiet

Guardfields in eduhypertexts

The fall semester will see me teaching two lit courses online, one straight on and the other as a hybrid course, where students meet with me once a week and make other time for meeting online in the foums of WebCT Vista. This may be my last online course for a while. I’ve taught online courses now going on close to five years and have become fatigued (“Captain, I grow fatigued”) with the environment. The next few years will see a concentration on intensifying the semester by using tech to “grow” the learning space beyond the “arbitrary” classroom. I keep going back to what my friends Larry Johnson and Robert Wren called the 24 hour classroom back in the late eighties.

One approach I want to try is having students talk about a piece of music online and in this way acquaint themselves with the Vista forums and the general geography of the learning space. Once they’ve done some work with the music, considering the lyrics and the phenomenon of music as something to “discuss” and argue about (much as we will do with the literature, then other areas of the course will open using Vista’s release tools.

This got me to thinking about guardfields in Storyspace and their significance to the experience of hypertext. The release tools in Vista behave like guardfields in that they restrict certain kinds of information from appearing in the new media space given a variety of conditions, much like levels in a computer game, which, until certain conditions are met, will open in all their glory. Pedagogically, this is one way of assessing a person’s path through the material of a college course.