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!

AI and Media Arts Education: Holistic Educational Transformation

By Dain Olsen

Media arts is defined as the "creative, machine-based manipulation of aesthetic phenomena for meaning; an aesthetic synthesizer for forming, capturing, processing, simulating, and distributing products and experiences" (Olsen, 2024). AI falls within this category, making it a major, emergent media arts form. AI's exponential development will have manifold impacts on our society, arts, and education, both positive and negative. Efforts are underway to manage and regulate the negative outcomes, but success is not guaranteed. We should aim to be proactive, holistic, and wise in our responses to AI. I will present media arts education’s (MAE) critical role, in conjunction with AI, in forming an educational system that can address these problems.

Understanding AI's Impact

AI's ‘explosive’ development is a radial, 360-degree expansion across all domains and dimensions of society. It's not just a tool we can choose to use or put away, but a systemic, technological force with unpredictable organic characteristics. Like social media, and any other technological leap, AI will likely have both positive and negative effects on society, as well as unintended consequences. Nevertheless, AI is here to stay, so we will need to learn to work with and manage it as it progresses and proliferates.

AI has shown impressive and breakthrough results in various applications across societal sectors, such as accelerating scientific discoveries, advancing industrial efficiencies, and supporting greatly increased individual productivity and capabilities. Yet, it will also eliminate major sectors of employment, can exacerbate criminal activity, and is demonstrated to be unreliable and prone to errors. Artistically, AI can support more students to produce more sophisticated products, for example in verbal prompts to create entire video games. It also can enhance creativity and invention by generating compelling variations that humans might not have considered. On the other hand, its autonomous creative expression tends to be conventional, slick and fairly ‘soulless’. 

Theoretical improvements to AI in Generalized Intelligence and Superintelligence are arguably far off or even infeasible. There is also the possibility that AI will fail to fulfill the hype that usually accompanies new technological breakthroughs.

AI in Education

In education, AI could provide personalized tutoring along with illustrative multimedia graphics, support teachers in lesson preparation and assessment, and help manage bureaucratic processes. However, the overuse of AI might also lead to decreased student motivation and a tendency to skip difficult cognitive processes and critical thinking. In fact, some edtech companies are suggesting that it replace arts and media arts instruction. Furthermore, it raises the question of whether we will use it in innovative new ways to truly advance education, and limit it to improving traditional methods.

Major Concerns

Despite its profound benefits, AI also raises these serious reservations:

• It's an experimental technology with unpredictable consequences

• There's a risk of becoming completely dependent on AI, and even an imperative in every aspect of society, 

• AI may further amplify societal disparities and inequalities

• AI is limited by our own mindsets and habits

• It is an energy hog, which is already challenging our grids and our CO2 reduction goals

• It is unclear whether governmental regulations and educational policies will be fully effective and ahead of the curve in monitoring, preventing and solving AI’s problems

A Media Arts Education (MAE) Perspective

MAE presents a primary means to improve and transform education, particularly in combination with AI, which can ultimately address these larger negatives. Essentially, MAE supports the core content and STEM concepts to become multimodally plastic, flexible, and versatile, so that they come alive with artistic and design capacities. Thus students, through engaging collaborative projects, can apply, represent and simulate the abstract content through combinations of image, sound, story, graphics, interactive and virtual forms (e.g. 3D animated, playful models of physics, mathematics, cell division, weather, etc.; science or history videos; video games, immersive XR environments, etc). Students would manipulate, adjust, and play with these multimedia models until they fully and tangibly understand those concepts, and then transfer them to varied applications and situations. This results in deeper, more resilient learning, aligned with current learning science and cognitive research.

Thus, students gain flexible, diverse inquiry pathways for actively applying, demonstrating, and sharing their academic proficiency, beyond standardized tests. Also, students are in the position of directing their own learning, based on their own interests and needs. No other subject area has the capacity to form such holistic, transdisciplinary, culturally meaningful and community connected forms of creative inquiry and productive interaction. This is the perfect embodied, social, holistic complement to AI’s relatively narrow, intellectual capacities for instructional support.

Consider one example of this MAE-based approach: Students produce a transmedia mental health campaign,  which supports all students to produce, share and interact in socially beneficial and empowering ways. Students produce diverse events, broadcasts, and interactions for varied outputs and audiences. They apply statistical analysis to measure algorithmic processes and their impacts on the school and community. All students gain critical media literacies for verifying, analyzing and evaluating multimedia information and processes, and collaboratively nurturing a civil digital society. 

Media Arts + AI = Holistic Educational Transformation

We need to prepare youth for a rapidly changing world, supporting them to ensure that AI is designed and utilized effectively and strategically to address a convergence of global challenges, including AI itself. AI’s support for individualized skills mastery and teacher efficiency means that schools can begin to shift to higher-orders of instructional implementation, such as MAE can offer, which foster student-centered initiative, ownership and motivation. It is important to appreciate that the human, embodied mind, and our collective minds, are tremendously more powerful and potentiated than AI is, and perhaps ever will be. An advanced educational system can begin to fulfill that potential, ultimately benefiting society in extraordinary ways.

Factory Model: regimented, assembly-line, one-size-fits-all, top-down, cognitively narrow, no-context

MAE Model: flexible, adaptive, inclusive, student-centered, cognitively expansive, enriched contexts 

In conclusion, this results in a flexible and interconnective educational system which actuates students’ personal inquiry process into boundless possibilities, and infuses the system as a whole with a collective drive towards continual adaptive improvement and learning about learning.  It allows students to actually practice management of their digital society, including AI and other literacies (e.g. media, digital) towards ethical, equitable and holistically grounded objectives. This transformed model provides the means by which our society learns to manage AI and address our converging global challenges. 

Olsen, D. (2024). Media Arts Education: Transforming Education Through Multimodal Cognition, Holistic Learning, and Techno-Embodiment. Taylor & Francis.

CONVERSATIONS WITH AI: Media Arts (Education) and Artificial Intelligence (AI): A Symbiotic Relationship (AI Generated Notes)

CONVERSATIONS WITH AI

Media Arts (Education) and Artificial Intelligence (AI):

A Symbiotic Relationship

Dain Olsen:

Media Arts is the machine-based, multimodal, aesthetic synthesis of meaning. Media Arts Education is the embodied enactment and understanding of media arts production and design processes.

AI:

Media arts and artificial intelligence are inextricably linked, sharing a common ground in their manipulation of aesthetic meaning and experience through machine-based processes.

Here's a breakdown of their relationship:

1. Tool for Creation:

• Automation: AI can automate repetitive tasks, freeing artists to focus on creative concepts.

• Generative Art: AI can generate new artistic content, expanding the possibilities of expression.

2. New Mediums:

• Interactive Art: AI enables the creation of interactive experiences that respond to user input.

• Virtual and Augmented Reality: AI plays a crucial role in creating immersive virtual and augmented reality environments.

3. Challenging Definitions of Art:

• Computational Creativity: AI raises questions about what constitutes art and who can be considered an artist.

• Human-Machine Collaboration: The collaboration between humans and AI blurs the lines between creator and tool.

4. Ethical Considerations:

• Bias and Fairness: AI algorithms can perpetuate biases present in the data they are trained on.

• Ownership and Authenticity: Questions arise about who owns AI-generated art and whether it can be considered authentic.

In essence, media arts and artificial intelligence are mutually beneficial. AI provides new tools and possibilities for artistic expression, while media arts pushes the boundaries of AI and challenges our understanding of creativity and technology. As these fields continue to evolve, we can expect even more innovative and thought-provoking works to emerge.

Digital Literacy as Creative Empowerment Through Media Arts Education

In a media arts-centered culture, we are all dependent on multimedia texts and experiences for our understanding of and ability to participate in and contribute to our culture and society. The importance of educating all students in forming, analyzing and negotiating digital environments is crucial to their wellbeing, as well as for our culture and democratic society.

Media arts standards-based education serves a proactive, leading role in developing all students’ capacity for critical independence. Critical independence is defined here as the autonomous ability to discern the value, veracity, methods, and intentions of multimedia experiences. A significant aspect of this quality is conveyed through media arts production processes and the student's resulting cultural agency. The creatively empowered student knows her way around the digital environment, is grounded in her own culture and is confident in being able to assert her own perspectives. This creative empowerment of all students would alleviate many of the negative aspects of digitally immersive environments that younger generations will increasingly encounter, including media misinformation, propaganda and influence, as well as digital abuse, addictions, and social misconduct.

This is another beneficial outcome of a distinct and fully established media arts education discipline, combined with the mutually strengthening interrelationships between all of the arts and academics. The entire educational system should be unified in positively supporting students' creative empowerment, critical independence, and cultural agency. Such an emotionally and socially enriched situation, that is also culturally relevant and responsive, would go a long way towards providing the inner creativity, resilience and self-determination that students need to remain healthy in mind and body in the digital environment.

We can describe these core objectives with more detail across their artistic processes:

Creating - Constructing media arts experiences is the means to analytically deconstructing them, in any format or context. As students build multimodal experiences, they gain the vocabulary and cognitive syntax to fully understand their operational conventions and social objectives. The multimedia experience is essentially demystified. The student is empowered with the capacities to effectively create and interpret meaning within culture and contribute to her world.

Producing - Creative empowerment across embodied multimodalities implicitly builds inner resilience to the plethora of intermedia messaging, and a grounding appreciation for aesthetics, the arts and culture. As creative masters of multimedia, technology and systems, students can see themselves as equal participants and contributors in all cultural forums.

Responding - Media literacy is the critical deconstruction of media artworks and the determination of their technical methods, underlying values, intentions and messages. As she can ‘read’ and critique the variety of multimedia experiences, she is fluent in their sources, influences and systems. She is aware of how designed experience intends to manage her experience, which actualizes her power to inform herself and make her own determinations and assertions.

Connecting - With these inner capacities for creative inquiry, acquiring knowledge and designing experience, the student can become proactive and strategic in her relationships to technology, multimedia and virtual environments. She gains cultural agency in this emerging, co-created and interconnective society.

Remedying the Blind Spots in Education

Education is capable of having blind spots, and certainty the area of media arts is one of them. But how does education become aware of, and adapt to the areas of need of which it is unaware?

With the ever increasing influx of technology into schools and in our world, all educators should address and include some digital media in their instruction. Media Arts Education would support that institution-wide transition with standards-based cohesion and coherence towards rounded, rigorous and relevant competencies for career and college.

With this technological shift, it is especially important that Media Arts Teachers begin to be hired in schools in order to teach the aesthetic, cultural, and literacy aspects of media, that connect, inform and persuade us in the 21st Century. This is literally how we make sense of and take action in the world. Students never examine the media arts world that surrounds them, and remain unaware of its influence and power, let alone their own latent capacity for utilizing it effectively.

Surprisingly, even with the pervasiveness of media in our culture, there is no institutional recognition of the need to teach with and about these essential forms of communication in the K12 system. Schools do not have the internal means for recognizing or acting on a need that doesn't already exist as a formal category, such as English Language Arts, or Physical Education. Establishing a whole new content area is a very unusual proposition. And of course, there are not enough Media Arts Teachers or Specialists already existing to point out and push this need. So how does this start?

That is why the inclusion of Media Arts Standards at the state level across the U.S. is such an important first step, and why we then need strong and continuous public demand to bring this to full formal establishment as quickly as possible. This need for external pressure is exemplified by the decades-long battle for the separate dance and theatre credentials that were recently authorized in California. It must not take forty years to include Media Arts and media literacy in the 21st Century curriculum!

This is why we have initiated the Media Arts Education Coalition, in order to galvanize the community around this momentous opportunity to institute a transformative arts discipline for 21st Century education!

All supportive individuals and organizations are urged to sign-on at this website now!

SIGN-ON TO SUPPORT THE FORMAL ESTABLISHMENT OF MEDIA ARTS EDUCATION IN CALIFORNIA K12 SCHOOLS!

Media Arts Education - Learning Amplified

MEDIA ARTS EDUCATION: K12 Arts Education for the 21^st Century

We live in a “media arts” centered world. We know and learn about, and create our contemporary world through media arts tools, forms and processes. Our 21st C global culture has moved from text-based to multimedia-based modes of communication and interaction. Particularly in California, media arts has a long historic and cultural legacy, and accounts for a substantial and increasing portion of our  $375 billion “Creative Economy”.

It is essential that all students become versed in these new modes to become empowered citizens, effective communicators, and to develop innovative solutions to contemporary challenges.

"Media Arts Education" is a relatively new categorization of K12 arts education, alongside of the traditional disciplines of Dance, Music, Theatre, and Visual Arts. It encompasses the digital media arts of imaging, moving image, sound, interactive and virtual design.

Media Arts Students can:

• Produce and design anything they can imagine, including photos, graphics, animations, movies, special effects, motion graphics, video games, 3D designs, virtual worlds, interactive apps, etc.
• Design 3D models of sustainable communities on Mars, complete with agricultural and energy production, and designs for architecture, transportation, tools and clothing
• Investigate the local community for “hotspots” of interest, history, social engagement, or urban and environmental challenge, and then propose transformational designs, investigations and promotions of these hotspots
• Produce videos that present their vision for school change, submitted to their local school board for the (LCFF) district budget decision-making process
• Create 3D game designs addressing a social or environmental issue that exercise every level of mathematics, code, virtual physics, engineering, and game theory, as well as core content
• Design digital and physical 3D models of cities, mega spaces, and everyday objects, such as kitchen utensils and phones, while studying the omni-presence of design
• Analyze and debate presidential election advertising through media literacy methods  
• Exercise their language skills (especially English Language Learners) through producing videos such as news, cooking, travel, stories, talent, social issues, etc., by developing scripts, rehearsing segments, analyzing media, and collaborating in diverse production activities
• Exhibit their productions in “multimedia events” that integrate all arts disciplines for the school and local community, including: video yearbooks, streaming arts and news broadcasts, multimedia theatre, screen exhibitions, film festivals, video and DJ dance experiences, international cultural exchanges, etc.
• Evaluate and design multimedia tools and products for the enhancement and universal access of learning in English, Mathematics, Science, and History

These actual classroom projects demonstrate Media Arts Education’s capacity to:

• Cultivate 21^st Century Skills in Communication, Collaboration, Creativity and Critical Thinking
• Promote student-centered, inquiry-driven learning that is relevant and self-directed
• Engage students in real world activities and problem solving with purposeful results
• Advance core academic and arts achievement through their effective integration in cultural and community projects
• Empower student voice and civic engagement, and foster essential literacies in arts, media and technology
• Support all students towards academic success, including those with special needs, limited language proficiency, and at risk of academic failure

Media Arts Education in these various forms provides rich and rigorous arts content in the instruction of media production and design, and forms a unique space of innovation and invention for 21st C education. A “Media Arts Lab”, incorporating a variety of digital media and design tools and forms, can serve as a virtual “makerspace” within the school, where students can create any expression, production or design they can imagine.  

This virtual laboratory supports integrated and holistic forms of learning that can "dissolve the walls" of classrooms, supporting students to become the researchers, inventors, entrepreneurs, designers and artists of their own futures. By engaging in a broad range of processes and activities in sequenced study, students can master 21st Century and Media Arts Standards-based competencies that prepare them for both college and career:

Multimedia Communication                                Technical Production

Design Thinking                                                      Innovation and Adaptation

Inquiry/Research                                                    Organization/Development

Media, Tech, Arts Literacies                                  Critical Analysis/Evaluation

Self-agency/Community-Interaction                   Contextual Awareness

Synthesis/Metacognition                                      Learning about Learning

Currently, in California, media arts educators do not have specific standards for their instruction, so they have to turn to other sets of standards in order to meet district and school requirements for “standards-based instruction”. Nor do media arts educators have specific pre-service training, program support, or ongoing professional development. Also, media arts courses and teachers may fall under other categories in their districts and programs, such as computer, technical, visual arts, theatre, etc.

In order to move Media Arts Education towards educational establishment, the adoption of standards by the state allows any interested educators to form commonality in practice and outcome. Then, as the discipline gains recognition and support, districts and the state may begin forming specific courses and a credential for authorized instruction. Only with its complete institutional implementation can the promise of Media Arts Education be fulfilled.

Media Arts Education is endorsed by all national arts organizations and their affiliated partners in the National Coalition for Core Arts Standards, and is endorsed by: the National Association of Media Arts and Culture, the National Association of Media Literacy Education, the National Endowment for the Arts, the College Board, and is included as a core content in the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). National Core Media Arts Standards are currently being adopted or adapted across the U.S. Media Arts is a key recommendation in the CREATE CA “Blueprint for Creative Schools”.

Media Arts Education is now forming a broad-based community of support of educators, parents, industry and community organizations, etc., seeking to formally establish the discipline in U.S. K12 schools. 
See the Media Arts Education Coalition website for more information.
SIGN-ON HERE TO SUPPORT THE FORMAL ESTABLISHMENT OF MEDIA ARTS EDUCATION IN CALIFORNIA K12 SCHOOLS