A SUMMARY OF MY BOOK: Media Arts Education

 

A SUMMARY OF MY BOOK:

Media Arts Education: Transforming Education Through Multimodal Cognition, Holistic Learning, and Techno-Embodiment, by Dain Olsen, 2025, Routledge

This book explains the emerging field of K-12 media arts education (MAE), including its multimodal understanding of cognition and learning, its interconnective nature and societally formative role, and its potentials for educational transformation. MAE can be understood simply as a “Digital Creativity Studio,” encompassing all digital media arts forms (e.g., photo, graphics, animation, sound, interactive, XR), which is ideally positioned at the center of the educational system. Its diverse forms and processes support students to produce and design any product, message, or simulated experience imaginable. Given this limitless creative and interdisciplinary capacity and its robust implementation, MAE is capable of advancing our current content- and system-centered 'factory model' into a student- and learning-centered, adaptive, and distributed model, which is more effective, engaging, and equitable for all students. 

The book’s first section examines “media arts” as it exists in the world, providing a visceral sense of its dynamic and diverse experiences as a unified field of electrified creativity, which form our society’s “nervous system” across its communications, design, and interactivity. It highlights media arts’ aesthetically synthesizing, cognitive, and socially interconnective properties and their implications for pedagogy. It also introduces the history of media arts in education, including its institutional formalization through national and state standards and initiatives, and its ongoing challenges towards full establishment. 

In the proceeding chapters, relevant neuroscientific, cognitive and educational research fundamentally restructures the orthodox understanding of learning. From MAE's aesthetic and embodied perspective, learning is reconceptualized as a biological process of adaptation, sense-making, and multimodal cognitive development. Higher-order, abstracted cognition is rooted in our sensorimotor neurology as a form of aesthetic synthesis, empathy, and metaphoric conceptualization, which mirror MAE's multimodal production processes. This leads to supporting research on multimodality in learning, education, and AI development. In essence, MAE is understood as the technological externalization of embodied cognition and learning.

On this research-based foundation, the book articulates a comprehensive MAE meta-framework, structuring its theoretical and pedagogical architecture. It examines the major flaws of traditional education and demonstrates how MAE's practices serve as potent antidotes, proposing MAE as an intermediating, holistic solution to systemic challenges. Media arts' versatile, multimodal tools support students to represent, translate and interact creatively with the academic curriculum in real world applications . For example, they can create interactive, 3D animated models that demonstrate science concepts, such as cell division or weather systems. Students are then able to manipulate and play with these models until they tangibly understand those concepts, and then transfer them to varied situations. Media arts’ diverse tools provide flexible means to bring abstract curricula to life for all students.

In conclusion, MAE functions as a multimodal, interdimensional, interactive textbook and makerspace that facilitates deeper and more resilient, adaptable learning for all students. Its "low threshold-limitless potential” design promotes universal student success through intrinsic motivation, self-direction, and metalearning. MAE ultimately advances the conventional educational model into an adaptive and self-improving system that prepares all students with the relevant competencies and multi-literacies necessary to design and manage a complex, sustainable, and vibrant digital society.

Media Arts As Our Society's Nervous System - MAE as an interactive, multidimensional textbook and educational system

It shouldn't be a stretch to acknowledge that media arts is our society's nervous system. We now function collectively as a species through this electronic multimodal cognitive system. To a large degree, we perceive our world and and interactively respond to it through digital media platforms. We learn about our world through audio/visual channels. We share about and discuss it through online social media platforms.

Media arts is primarily a means of presenting, perceiving and learning about things. It is a flexible multimodal (multimedia) system for forming our collective consciousness about our world - our history, our scientific understandings, our political views, our major news events, our thoughts and ideas, our cultural experience across the arts, cuisine, fashion, popular media, etc. etc.

Schools are places where we present, view and learn about all of these things, but primarily through textbooks.

Why wouldn't we now integrate digital media into our schools? In a manner that mirrors our current society? Where students could interactively and multimodally experience and demonstrate their learning, in an active manner that is aligned with their natural, multisensory cognition, and with society's interactive communications and design systems?

We assume that textbooks are the only means of formal, 'rigorous' learning. Why? We believe that traditional reading and writing in English texts are the sole, superior means of educational communication and interaction. And yet, YouTube has demonstrated that the majority of people find it to be an effective place for learning just about anything. Young people have been raised within a multimodal society. In this sense, we are teaching Digital Communications rather than traditional English Literature.

Contrary to popular belief, school is not a place for effectively mastering content. It is actually where we are all supposed to master formal learning itself, as a scholarly, 18th Century, book-based and teacher-centered system. And now this is organized through an industrial era factory-like model, where all students are implanted with all the same information in an identical manner. Read my book to fully understand this model.

In truth, students in schools learn primarily how to "do school", rather than holistically engage with the content and its actual application. They learn to listen, take notes, read and highlight, study and memorize, translate their own understanding into their own metaphors, language and imaginative images. And finally how to comply with a complex system of various teachers and subjects, tests and learning activities, towards supposedly remembering large quantities of content. 

Traditional education is more about mastering this very peculiar factory system itself, than it is about applying the content in authentic, real world situations. It is not primarily about the student's natural learning process and whether they value that content enough to want to remember and build on what they know. All the content is presented in the same manner, as an indirect presentation of abstract ideas, which is dependent on the student's mental projection, rather than active, living, tangible, meaningful and purposeful knowledge.

In contrast, MAE, across all of its forms, is an interactive, interdimensional, immersive form of textbook and workbook, that can incorporate the totality of literacy and numeracy, as well as history and science, in ways that are much more dimensional, real world, flexible, engaging, effective, collaborative, active, as well as meaningful and purposeful. Students ultimately build a more robust and interconnective system of understandings that are more adaptive and resilient, because they are student-owned and developed. This results in 'metalearning', or mastering the learning process itself.

MAE's educational system is a dynamic, interactive, adaptable and open-ended learning ecosystem that flexibly accommodates and supports each unique learner to their capacity and ultimate potential. This system comes alive with the vibrancy and collaborative enthusiasm of the students themselves, as they realize the joy and fulfillment of learning itself. This is the "Culture of Learning" that propels collective learning and education to new heights of success for all students. At last, learning is liberated into its limitless possibilities!

Media Arts Education vs. Traditional Education: What does MAE deliver that TE does not?

 

Another Conversation with AI (Gemini Pro 2.5; Notebook LM) with the primary resource: Olsen, D. (2024). Media arts education: Transforming education through multimodal cognition, holistic learning, and techno-embodiment. Routledge.

Prompt: What would a fully developed MAE program deliver for K-12 student learning and lifelong preparation that the current educational institution is not?

A fully developed Media Arts Education (MAE) program would deliver a transformative and human-centric approach to K-12 student learning and lifelong preparation, addressing significant shortcomings inherent in the current traditional educational institution.

1. A Natural, Embodied, and Holistic Learning Process:

• Student-Directed and Engaged Learning: MAE supports students to direct their own creating processes, allowing them to determine what and how they are learning, which fosters full engagement. This contrasts with traditional education's (TE) top-down, teacher-centered, and often disengaging methods. MAE ignites intrinsic motivation by connecting learning to students' interests and creative expression, making learning a joyful and rewarding experience.

• Deeper Content Mastery through Multimodal Production: Instead of passively receiving information from textbooks or teacher explanations (an indirect and monomodal method), MAE empowers students to actively analyze, construct, and present meaning in their own terms by producing educational multimedia such as documentaries, animations, or interactive simulations. This process, referred to as "multimodal translation of academic content into aesthetic cultural artifacts," allows students to "empathize" with content through various senses and aesthetic processes, leading to deeper and more lasting understanding. This is a "holistic process of learning that is deep and resilient".

• Development of "Webs of Knowledge" (WOKs): MAE fosters the growth of "holistic networks of associated understandings" (WOKs) that are resilient, interconnective, and adaptive, enabling students to apply knowledge flexibly in diverse contexts and build upon their understanding over time. This is in stark contrast to TE's focus on the "retention of discrete, disconnected pieces of information", which often results in superficial and short-term knowledge that is quickly shed if unused.

• "Content Retention As Necessary" (CRAN) vs. "Total Content Retention" (TCR): MAE shifts the focus from TE's "Total Content Retention" (TCR)—the traditional emphasis on memorizing all curriculum content—to "Content Retention As Necessary" (CRAN). CRAN strategically delivers abstract, technical content just when needed for immediate application in meaningful, project-based contexts, ensuring relevance and deeper integration into students' WOKs. This is a key departure from TE's "simplistic and underperforming" approach to learning, which often results in isolated knowledge.

• Holistasis and Embodied Cognition: MAE is founded on the concept of "holistasis," Olsen's term for "a state of thriving, or surplus of energy toward future perpetuation for individuals and collectives". It aligns with embodied cognition, recognizing that learning is natural, pervasive, intrinsic, and emerges from students' direct interactions with their environment. TE, conversely, is often seen as controlling and forcing a passive process of content retention, constraining the full, biological learning process.

2. Enhanced Cognitive Development and Metalearning:

• Beyond Rote Learning: MAE cultivates higher-order thinking skills, including critical analysis, ethical judgment, complex problem-solving, and nuanced creative expression. It promotes "rounded cognitive development" that is deep and lasting, rather than temporary "knowing" or retention of disconnected information. TE's mechanistic approach to learning is prone to negative outcomes such as shallow learning and weak problem-solving skills.

• Metalearning (Learning to Learn): A core objective of MAE is "metalearning"—the ability of students to understand and manage their own learning process, making them independent and self-directed learners. This includes understanding how to leverage external resources and technology as "cognitive extensions". TE generally does not facilitate this level of metacognitive ownership or self-direction.

• Creative Intelligence: MAE aims to cultivate human "creative intelligence". While AI can generate novel combinations, human creativity fostered in MAE involves original ideation, envisioning new possibilities, expressing unique personal perspectives, and the "indomitable intention" described by Olsen. This is distinct from AI's pattern-based generation, which lacks intentionality and lived experience.

3. Preparation for a Digital, Evolving Society:

• Relevant Skills for the 21st Century: MAE updates the educational program to reflect our current digital society and projected workforce needs. It provides diverse competencies and literacies, including deep multimodal content mastery, creativity, adaptability, communication, collaboration, critical thinking, design thinking, computational thinking, and media/tech/digital literacies. TE's methods are seen as simplistic and inadequate for preparing students for current societal conditions and challenges.

• Critical Thinking and Ethical Discernment in the Age of AI: MAE uniquely develops critical thinking by engaging students in analyzing, interpreting, and evaluating diverse media, including AI-generated content. It provides a crucial space to grapple with ethical dimensions, such as misinformation, deepfakes, algorithmic bias, copyright, and authorship. This is indispensable in a world "awash with information, much of it algorithmically curated or synthetically generated". TE, if not adapted, risks using AI merely to amplify its existing flaws in content retention.

• Empowering Students to Direct Technology: Rather than being passively led by technological progress, MAE empowers students to direct AI's and technology's evolution and implementation. It teaches students how to strategically use AI-generated content as resources within larger creative, analytical, and communicative projects, fostering "adaptive experts" who can apply knowledge flexibly. MAE "grounds technology's disembodied nature in aesthetics, culture, learning, and ethical standards".

• Equity and Inclusion: MAE's adaptable nature provides diverse means of instruction and support, accommodating the diversity of learners, including those with socioeconomic, linguistic, or cognitive challenges. This supports the system as a whole to become more student-centered, flexible, and inclusive. TE's "factory model" often fails to educate the majority of students to proficient levels, and achievement gaps for socio-economically disadvantaged students and students of color have remained largely unchanged for decades.

4. A Flexible and Adaptive Educational System:

• Systemic Transformation: MAE is proposed as an "antidote" to TE's mechanistic, objectivist methods, forming an adaptive, interconnective, and flexible educational system aligned with current learning and cognitive science research. It envisions education as a "living, evolving, cognitive network". TE, in contrast, is described as fixed, rigid, and resistant to substantial institutional reform due to its interlocking components and operations.

• Invigorating School and Community: MAE is capable of invigorating the school community through multimedia production (e.g., news broadcasts, yearbook, documentaries) and connects students with the larger community and world. It can foster an "immersive and intensive linguistic experience" for English Language Development learners, making language acquisition engaging and accelerating fluency.

• Emancipatory Education: Ultimately, MAE liberates learning and education from current limitations, enabling self-development and actualization for students. It supports "the true promise and futuristic, boundless potential of education" to become "imaginable and achievable".

In essence, while traditional education largely operates as a "factory model" focused on the mechanical delivery and retention of discrete information for standardized testing, a fully developed MAE program offers an organic, student-centered, and deeply engaging ecosystem that cultivates adaptive expertise, critical thinking, ethical judgment, and creative intelligence, preparing students not just for tests, but for active and meaningful participation in a complex, technologically advanced society.

Media Arts Education: Adaptive, Interconnective, and Flexible Learning

I've been using Google's Notebook LM in order to reflect on and interact with my own book, and to create some engaging podcasts. In this case, I've asked NLM to elaborate on how the educational system can be made more adaptive, interconnective, and flexible through the integration of media arts education (MAE), which is aligned with current learning and cognitive science research:

Media Arts Education: Adaptive, Interconnective, and Flexible Learning

To create a more adaptive, interconnective, and flexible educational system aligned with current learning and cognitive science research, media arts education (MAE) can be positioned at the center of the educational system, integrating with all content areas [1, 2]. This would infuse transformative properties across instruction and the educational system as a whole [2].

Several elements can contribute to a more adaptive, interconnective, and flexible educational system:

• Updating the educational program and curriculum to reflect current societal conditions and projected workforce needs [3].
• Engaging and empowering diverse students with relevant skills, knowledge, and multiliteracies, which enables their capacities for creative inquiry and cultural agency [3].
• Fostering active, multimodal, and flexible instructional approaches to promote all students’ rounded cognitive development, self-direction, and contextualized interaction [4].
• Advancing the educational institution’s mission of student-centered academic achievement, inclusion, and equity for all learners [4].
• Forming an adaptive, interconnective, and flexible educational system that is aligned with current learning and cognitive science research [4].

MAE can function as a multimodal translator across core academic subjects, allowing students to interact and diversify the learning and assessment process [5, 6]. This supports the system as a whole to become more student-centered, flexible, and inclusive, providing more means of achieving and demonstrating content mastery for all students, including those with socioeconomic, linguistic, or cognitive challenges [6].

By inverting the traditional system, holistic, experiential properties become the primary methodology, while the technical utilities of direct instruction, numeracy, formulas, and facts, are peripheral utilities and references [7]. The primary pedagogical principle is rounded cognitive development, which results from a deep understanding of content’s usage within actual and varying circumstances [7].

Additionally, the educational system can be infused with MAE holistic properties, allowing for systemic forms of cognitive development and metacognitive understanding, making metalearning a practical reality [8]. The direct, physical student-to-student, and student and environment interaction are the dominant locus of cognition and learning, with MAE as the background facilitator and intermediator [9].

The educational implications of MAE’s embodied approach include:

• Learning as adaptation is natural, pervasive, systemic, incessant, intrinsic, and embodied [10].
• The system should allow and foster that intrinsic, emotionally driven force to thrive towards holistasis, and the well-being of self and others – via engagement, purpose, interest, relevance [10].
• Cognition and learning are embodied, situational, and emergent from direct interactions of students with the environment in the application of knowledge and skill (enaction) [10].
• Holistic learning is facilitated through aesthetic perception and synthesis, which can be modeled, intermediated, and facilitated through MAE multimodal forms and processes [10].
• The educational system is a holistic (interconnective, etc.) system of convergent cognition [10].

With MAE, a world of possibilities is available to students to explore, enact and learn about, which motivates them to master the basics to reach their personal goals and visions [11]. The true promise and futuristic, boundless potential of education becomes imaginable and achievable [11].

AI's Summary of My Book on Media Arts Education and Holistic Learning

I've been using Google's Notebook LM in order to reflect on and interact with my own book, and to create some engaging podcasts. In this case, I've asked NLM to summarize and introduce the book:

Dain Olsen's book, "Media Arts Education," explores the emerging discipline of media arts education and its potential to transform the educational landscape. Here's a breakdown of the book's key components:

Central Argument:

Olsen argues that media arts education can revolutionize traditional education by fostering a more student-centered, interdisciplinary, and effective learning model. He posits that by integrating media arts into the core curriculum, education can become more relevant, engaging, and equitable for all students in today's rapidly evolving digital society.

Key Conclusions:

• Relevance of Media Arts: The book emphasizes the growing importance of media arts in today's tech-driven world. It highlights how media arts education equips students with essential skills and literacies for navigating and contributing to the digital age.
• Student-Centered Learning: Olsen advocates for a constructivist approach where students actively participate in their learning process. He showcases how media arts projects empower students to become self-directed learners, fostering creativity, collaboration, and critical thinking.
• Holistic Development: The book underscores the holistic benefits of media arts education, encompassing cognitive, social, and emotional growth. It demonstrates how engaging in media arts activities enhances students' communication skills, problem-solving abilities, and cultural awareness.
• Educational Transformation: Olsen envisions media arts education as a catalyst for systemic change in education. He argues that by embracing media arts, educational institutions can create more adaptive, inclusive, and effective learning environments that cater to the diverse needs of 21st-century learners.

Supporting Arguments:

• Theoretical Framework: The book provides a comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding media arts education, drawing from cognitive science, learning theories, and educational research. It explores the biological foundations of learning and how media arts can tap into students' multimodal cognition and embodied experiences.
• Pedagogical Principles: Olsen outlines pedagogical principles for media arts education, emphasizing active learning, inquiry-based approaches, and transdisciplinary integration. He offers practical examples of instructional strategies and project-based learning experiences that promote student engagement and meaningful learning outcomes.
• Real-World Examples: Throughout the book, Olsen shares real-world examples of media arts projects and educational initiatives. These case studies illustrate the transformative potential of media arts education in various contexts, showcasing its impact on student learning and community engagement.

Overall, "Media Arts Education" presents a compelling case for integrating media arts into the core curriculum. It offers valuable insights and practical guidance for educators, administrators, and policymakers seeking to create more dynamic, relevant, and equitable learning experiences for students in the digital age.

Reimagining Education: Embracing the Power of Media Arts

As explained in my book and podcasts on Media Arts Education, the current educational paradigm, what I would call traditional education (TE), is based on the flawed assumption that learning is primarily about content retention, as measured through tests. This antiquated, pseudo-factory approach prioritizes passive presentation and consumption, which results in shallow understanding, and is intrinsically biased against students with socioeconomic disadvantages.

Media Arts Education (MAE) reorganizes education as an experiential, student-centered process that mirrors the natural ways our minds learn, with the school system flexibly supporting and accommodating their personal capacities and preferences.

Engagement Through Creation:

• MAE is embodied cognition in action, utilizing multimodal synthesis and aesthetic empathy to engage students in deep, meaningful learning.

• Imagine a media arts laboratory buzzing with creativity. Students are not passively absorbing information but actively constructing knowledge through hands-on projects.

• Exemplary MAE projects highlight this dynamic learning approach:

• Students design their ideal future city using 3D modeling and printing, applying math, engineering, and sustainability principles.

• An augmented reality project brings history to life, with students creating interactive exhibits exploring ancient civilizations.

• A video game based on a sci-fi novel integrates physics simulations, storytelling, and advanced mathematics.

• A transmedia mental health campaign empowers students to address real-world issues through creative media production.

• These projects are not mere add-ons to the curriculum. They are the curriculum, seamlessly weaving together various disciplines and igniting students' intrinsic motivation.

Contrasting Traditional and Media Arts Education:

Feature	Traditional Education (TE)	Media Arts Education (MAE)
Learning Model	Content-centered, passive retention	Experiential, student-driven construction
Instructional Approach	Teacher-directed, textbook-based	Collaborative, project-based
Cognitive Focus	Narrow, linear, abstract	Holistic, multimodal, embodied, environmentally interactive
Assessment	Declarative, competitive, standardized tests	Holistic, informative, process-oriented
Student Engagement	Often low, driven by external rewards	High, fueled by intrinsic motivation
Societal Relevance	Struggles to keep pace with the digital world	Directly reflects and engages with our digital society

MAE combines but flips the balance of MAE 60% & TE 40%, with core content interwoven into experiential, projects. 

Less content, with deeper and adaptive understanding, which catalyzes more learning, by motivating the student’s intrinsic drives for personal, culturally contextual success. The student is engaged directly with the world and accruing relevant skills, knowledge and achievements, rather than focused on performing for an artificial, tangential educational curricula, teacher, and system. TE is peculiar to itself, and does not mirror any other real world system or situation. Students master the TE system, not the content or the learning process itself in their actual, real world application.

Benefits and Potentials of MAE:

• Fosters deeper understanding: MAE supports students in translating abstract concepts into tangible, multimodal forms: videos, podcasts, websites, 3D models

• Enhances critical thinking and problem-solving: MAE projects demand creative solutions, adaptability, and collaboration.

• Cultivates digital and media literacy: Students learn to analyze, evaluate, and responsibly produce media in our digitally saturated world.

• Promotes equity and inclusion: MAE's flexible tools and diverse approaches support learners of all abilities and backgrounds.

• Prepares students for the future workforce: MAE equips students with essential skills for success in the 21st-century economy.

Integrating and Expanding MAE:

• Interdisciplinary projects are the ideal starting point, showcasing the power of MAE to enhance learning across various subjects.

• Success with these projects can pave the way for the development of a dedicated MAE subject area with its own studio/laboratory.

• This dedicated space becomes a hub for multimodal learning and creation, equipped with cutting-edge technology, fostering a vibrant culture of learning.

The Future of Learning:

MAE is not merely an educational reform; it is a profound shift in our understanding of learning and intelligence, recognizing the power of embodied, multimodal cognition.

In a world increasingly shaped by technology, including the rise of AI, MAE offers a vital, embodied counterbalance, ensuring that human creativity, empathy, and ethical judgment remain at the forefront of education and society.

By embracing MAE, we empower students to become active, engaged learners, capable of navigating the complexities of the digital age and shaping a future that reflects our highest aspirations.