The CyberArts Curriculum
For Public Education
This is a curriculum developed by Ron O. Cook
|In the past 20 years, Ron O. Cook has been highly involved in public education. He has dedicated much of his time to trying to develop leading-edge concepts that would amplify education for the children of this nation. Below is a curriculum that he developed over those years while serving the Governor's Office, The State Board of Education, the Texas Education Agency, the Mayor's Office of San Antonio and many educational committees.|
The Texas School of CyberArts...
The potential of Virtual Simulation learning is dawning.
Introducing CyberArts to Public Education...
"The graphic power of computers is growing exponentially. Nano-Polygons will eventually emulate the real world...Mirror World."
By Ron O. Cook
In the early 1990s, somewhere in Pasadena California, there were international conferences held on a budding concept called CYBERART. It was the place where America's leading communication scientists, entertainment professionals and media-artists gathered for exploring and exchanging ideas, techniques, and knowledge about cutting-edge technologies, and creativity. These meetings and others like them spelled the future of an idea called Edutainment or the combination of creative learning and entertainment through CyberArts.
Today, the power of cyber art creations represent the frontier of tomorrow's departure into learning that will eventually spell the end of the classic classroom idea. This new mind-set, presently dawning on the minds of our children, urgently suggests to us that now is the time to feed their burgeoning genius before they lose their curiosity forever. As a psychoanalytical-entity (better known as a teacher) that interfaces with the minds of some of the most creative kids in the state, I know they are hungry for the experience of dreaming-up a new tomorrow. As their mentor, I have fought hard to bring their world into focus, so that they may use the newest building blocks, the technology of "their" world, to lab-test the issues that just sit unrecognizable to some of my colleagues who sit on the threshold of the ultimate educational resources.
For any educator to make the trek to the Pasadena Conference Center in those days to truly see the future in the making, it would have been an act of unbelievable courage and farsightedness. To hear Stewart Brand speak the words that will send us beyond MEDIA LAB (MIT) would have been too much for school board members to grasp. It would be like experiencing THE WHOLE EARTH CATALOG via virtual reality, only this time knowledge and wisdom would have quadrupled into an unknown language. A language our future must understand if we are to survive in a turbocharged world.
The simple truth is, we can't wait much longer in installing cyber-art learning into a communications curriculum. Though our school leaders fear creativity because any unknown is always met with trembling and suspicion, action is the demand of our kids. If CyberArt were introduced into our school systems through an act of increased automation and subsequent curriculum expansion to accommodate such technology -- what would the result be?
Schools and their organizations would change radically. Students would find outlets for their creativity -- their wanderlust would once more blaze in intellectual passion toward seeking the unknown. Learning would be locked in a quest for knowledge and wisdom -- and the kids could be doing it on their own with teachers facilitating. That is why your kids are behind the curve of international knowing -- schools cannot compete with the power of today's business and entertainment communications know-how. (Just think what Spielberg's DreamWorks Interactive will do for your grandchildren). The school districts do not have adequate programs or plans, such as a communications curriculum; to interface with the technology purchases that are taking place haphazardly at most schools. They can run with technology but they can't hide from the fact that there is no clear VISION.
Bringing CyberArts to Education
Learning: Granting a Deeper Context to Public Education - The Gestalt Paradigm
"In order to learn, informational data must be presented to a sensually endowed entity for stimulation of a preexisting receiver. One must fire up his afterburners. Interest should then be established that provides the perceptive system a contrast against background and foreground information stored in its instinctual memory. This contrast will cause the focusing of resources upon the interesting data. If the data is sufficiently intriguing to the receptors of information and linkage between existing onboard information occurs, then a matrix of analysis can begin to be established where new informational elements can be extrapolated. If there is enough data to establish creative memory-mapping or the development of "what-if" conceptualization occurs, then the entity can establish an imagination-beachhead and begin to build a new inner universe which leads to understanding the outer universe."
Constant stimulation during wakeful periods, allows the entity to grow mentally in an exponential holo-gestalt fashion. This process must be reinforced both internally and externally during a timely period, from an infinite number of sources. Each source can map upon the holographic memory-matrix in an increasingly complex fashion and in a variety of content/context related configurations. If data does not become too repetitive, the entity may retain a kind of verve for attaining and manufacturing new data. However, if data is presented in a format that is increasingly less-exciting than previous learning experiences, the information-float that produced a sort of learning frenzy, begins to deflate and the entity becomes playful, preoccupied or agitated thus signaling that it needs stimulation or it will suffer a learning shutdown. Boredom is born -- and if the entity perceives it the duty of outside sources to provide it constant adulation, then it pouts and becomes an addicted victim of society's makeup. Selfishness and blame become part of its being in that constant attention from outside sources is expected to keep it on a learning high.
To go beyond this basic process of learning, a human must not hang-up on the pains of self-love to the extent that higher ordered processes are not possible. "Deep knowledge comes to the animated mind." The animated one that is stimulated by ever increasing complexity of a holistic variety built upon the understanding of the Otherworld outside of the self expands. Empowerment of the human is gained when it becomes aware that all outside information from the Otherworld makes the being what he/she is about. We are what we learn. For us to become more we must learn more -- learning more creates the challenge followed by a thirsty response and a new challenge. Mental growth then becomes fractally-geometric or holo-gestalt (universal holographic-like mind processes building one through the many; Scientific American 2003).
During childhood, we are initially on a pathway that will take us to higher ordered knowledge because we are learning our way at our own pace. All things relate. Then little by little our primary-input-parent could begin to tear us away from the natural course of learning and put us on a linear pathway toward systematic, step-by-step processes of input decipherment. Because of our first four years of wrong-oriented indoctrination by a selfishly inclined adult, we could follow in their footsteps and become just like them. Today, our schools continue this linear process after some of our parents initially prepare us for the world of mediocrity.
Humans come into this world from the holomovement of a generative order that science is only now beginning to see. Its foundations originate from a universe of cognitive processes that know and are reflected (manifested) into our being. As we begin to perceive the miniscule level from where we issue forth, we become more amazed at the immensity of understanding the mystery from which we are crystallized into being. This world of the unknown dwells within and outside of the dreamscape of our own imagination for our own creative needs. Exploration of this point-of-departure for creative expression is a portion that has been, for the most part, withheld from our learning patterns during public education. In our past, great philosophers and artisans came from the dreamscape where an understanding of responsibility to the Otherworld produced selfless humans. Love was at the core of reinforcement for existence.
Learning of our existence has been replaced with the evolutional (school of:) misunderstanding that has no capacity for love, or for a universe that is alive. We are given a linear system that values our contributions as insignificant. If man is a mere ape, then life is a mere accident according to the evolutionist's criteria. Higher ordered knowledge gained on a deeper more gestalt level shows this is not true by itself. There is much more to this powerful existence. If our children were to learn of selfless love and holistic perception, our society would reflect the morality we need to make the jump to a more advanced civilization. We must begin a deeper investigation of the philosophies of the past intertwined with the discoveries on the frontiers of Science (Physics).
More precisely, we must learn from our own invention...high technology. At present, we are looking at a dawning singularity of technology being built by the industry of human imagination. CyberArts concepts are rising in the business world that will give us an opportunity to create a Mirror World where we can simulate existence. Here in this Mirror World, we can slow down the learning experience and practice each and every human endeavor over and over at our own pace. The Grid is coming to give us this great tool. This network will be beyond the Internet and the next generation Internet. The Grid will give us a new wave of learning that each individual will be able to amplify upon.
The implications of a "constancy such as the GRID," in the realm of information communications is far reaching and awe inspiring, when one contemplates the reality of current technological advances contrasted against the future's anticipated speed and need factors. Our world will soon be "ultra-linked" to such a vast degree that the creation of information (products and services) will be almost instantaneous on every level and happen on a constant basis. Nations are already linked to nations on many interconnecting levels...governments to governments, businesses to businesses, people to people and, someday in the far future...a universe to a super-universe - what some call Mirror Worlds.
Through the amplification of information, humankind finally has the opportunity to dissolve the lines of nationality, racism, misinformation, propaganda, and misunderstanding. We can become a world community. Because of this expanded networking of info, all intelligence on Earth could soon know when one segment is LEVERAGING (processes of power and control) at the other's expense. Perhaps mans next great step will be to come to grips with those who overstep the bounds of lusting for empires and conquest. A deeper knowing is spreading across all dimensions, and its geometric growth affects the developmental nuances of everything and everybody. The world is now fully engulfed in the "proto-info-politics" of the human intellectual utility (our knowledge reservoir). What will this saturation of necessary communicative "noise" bring to us?
Rapid informational constancy is the catalyst to unbridled change. Nations that are not onboard the turbo-technological trends that are electrifying the hearts of industry and the minds of businesspersons may find themselves close to catastrophe through revolt. When the people of other nations observe the quality-of-life experiences for the materially and information rich populations, the desire to move quickly toward the enriched lifestyles will become overpowering. A world amplified through access to potency is indeed a very volatile place to be if one important aspect is ignored...equality. Equality of access to perceived power must be maintained in balance no matter what the complexity. Unless equality is kept, dislocation and rebellion will polarize and explode to tear down a civilization.
Earth will soon begin approaching the 6.8 billion-population mark set to exist in the first decade of 2000 -2010. What will the impact of the variables of socioeconomics, technology, overpopulation and other issues be on our children and grandchildren? The mixture and results will be more than chicken soup. It will be turbulence personified unless we seek to prepare our collective minds for the challenge. A super-charged educational experience is the only answer to survival in tomorrow's agglomeration. Without an exacting, constantly improving system-of-learning, (a system that takes into consideration the second by second change factors affecting our lives) the polarization of society will certainly occur. Constantly updated Informational-education will be the common bond that allows a hyper-civilization to flow uninterrupted toward higher-ordered levels.
Presently, the institution of education seems to be the most important segment of American and Western society that is not dynamically in sync with the projected future of our expanding civilization. Educational identity is rapidly being pulled and mashed out of shape...driven from any real-world relevance and cohesion by a political and administrative preoccupation with outdated methods and antique systems. They (educators and their patrons) pile old "taxing" solutions on overburdened structures. Because the business sector is looking for an edge over foreign economic creativity, the incongruity of the above must be aliened through innovation and vision. Unless our system of teaching and learning changes drastically, It is possible that education will at some point be rendered totally useless or obsolete by the forces of rampaging change perpetrated by breakthroughs or sudden chaos that is punctuated by overnight developments not yet perceived.
In order to survive, educators must quickly react to the trends and conditions of the info-structure (condition of info to life) that is currently wrapping its tentacles about the ancient linearity that permeates the educational system's "old bones," and install a new animated hyper-communications curriculum built on leading-edge/real-time concepts of creativity and technological power. A relevant system of learning will be the only hope for those who believe in equal access and democracy...anything else will continue to breed elitism. Our public schools should change and add supercharged interactive communications media or CyberArts Courseware to amplify and expedite curriculum. This info-media and its technological potential will become the common thread that knits our world together in its constancy.
So, because of informational constancy, the Earth awaits a new breed of humankind...one that is fully awakened to the truth and potential of this new dynamic condition. That truth is tied up in the positive and/or negative aspects of communication events and the repercussions of electromagnetic broadcasting. This informational distribution will be on a scale few of us could imagine today, but all of us, of necessity, will participate in its' world tomorrow. It will become known as the GRID.