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.