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!
