The Trumpet Sound, à la Française

An Insightful Blog from Renaissance

Michel de Montaigne writes in his Essays, a real thoughtful blog from Renaissance (one could say):

“I can see that these writings of mine are no more than the ravings of a man who has never done more than taste the outer crust of knowledge (…) and who has retained only an ill-formed generic notion of it: a little about everything and nothing about anything, in the French style.”

He then provides us with some information on his background:

“(…) I do also know how the sciences in general claim to serve us in our lives. But what I have definitely not done is to delve deeply into them (…) I have fashioned no sustained intercourse with any solid book except Plutarch and Seneca (…). My game-bag is made of history, rather, or poetry, which I love, being particularly inclined towards it;”

And here follows a vivid depiction of poetry effectiveness:

“For (as Cleanthes said) just as the voice of the trumpet rings out clearer and stronger for being forced through a narrow tube so too a saying leaps forth much more vigorously when compressed into the rhythms of poetry, striking me then with a livelier shock.”

(I am using the Penguin Classics edition, 2003, I:26, with its outstanding translation by M. A. Screech)

Good old Montaigne, writing openly and honestly about everything regarding life and man, from small trivia and anecdotes to truly deep meditations. His words are simple yet profound and personal. I love to browse randomly into his pages where one can read thousands of insightful passages, like the ones above that hit me yesterday.

Dear old Montaigne, a true magister for meditation (and consolation). A man of the street of the French Renaissance (well, I am exaggerating, he was cultured, well-off and retired to his castle lol). A French country intellectual in some way (he was not a Paris man) and his essays so damn close to a Renaissance blog which was continuously rewritten and constantly in progress. He in fact always gets back to his writings: why a blog, from the Renaissance or from today, should be thrown down instinctively? (I know many readers will not agree; I am also wavering between these two approaches).

He makes use 1) of French as the general medium and neutral language (French is sometimes a bit neutral, I’ll admit), 2) of the Guascon dialect for the most colourful passages, and finally 3) of Latin (mainly quotes) for the most noble themes.

Of course what also attracts us is his good choice of the ancient, classical Western philosophers, he being in fact such a gold mine of information about the Stoic, Skeptic and Epicurean thoughts, the ones we have some preference for (among the rest).

But he is not only that. Since he is a little about everything and nothing about anything: à la française.

Man of Roma

Books, Multimedia and E-learning

In our post Guess what is better than Prozac we had stressed how reading can be a deep and relaxing experience and provide sometimes a full antidepressant trip, while, if we are in a bad mood and we switch on our TV set, “at each zap of our remote control the consciousness of our unhappiness may increase exponentially.”

This reflection had stimulated some discussion with readers on the differences between books, movies and multimedia. These readers belong to the new generation of Indians and Chinese: Ashish, Poonam and Falcon from India; plus AutumnSnow from China. In our blog and in Poonam’s we have also discussed a bit about movies and books. Poonam is also presenting a nice list of the top movies of 2007 (part 1 and 2), in case you are interested in getting to know India’s cinema better, plus an extensive list of books as well.

Regarding multimedia and its educational effectiveness, I had said that I am not automatically in favour of books, being convinced that in some cases multimedia education can provide better results. The problem is to understand when and why multimedia is more effective than traditional media. By multimedia we mean here a type of communication that combines text, audio, still images, animation, video, and interactivity, at various degrees.

I will thus refer to some research I did in 2000 when I was requested to deliver some courses on Web education basics to some eastern-European teachers who were skilled in book-based education mainly. On that occasion I wrote a little booklet with the intent of providing them with some information about e-learning system basics. The intent was also that of convincing them (and myself) that multimedia was an excellent tool if inserted here and there judiciously.

KS and CS.
When Learning is Smoothed Away

How can we effectively communicate our ideas to students? - I argued. Which are the best models for linking web pages (and ideas in them) to one another and how can multimedia help? In order to understand this we need some concepts of the instructional communication theory so as cognitive psychologists conceive it.

According to cognitive theory, there is a relationship between what you have to say (content) and the mode of your communication; i.e. between the knowledge structure (KS) of content and the communication structure (CS) you choose to (re)present this content to others (Antinucci F., 1993, Summa Hypermedialis - Per una teoria dell’ipermedia, in SISTEMI INTELLIGENTI / anno V, n. 2).

I. KNOWLEDGE STRUCTURE

Examples of KSs can be the teacher’s mental representation of:

• a biological organism
• a story or facts in a sequence
• a computer operating system
• the functioning of a car engine.

KS is a structure of concepts and information, which are interrelated. Micro KSs are encapsulated into larger KSs, so as to shape a person’s world view, or general KS (not far from what German philosophers called Weltanschaung). Thus, the main goal of teaching is not that of having students memorize data. It is that of modifying and enriching students’ knowledge structure or KS, which is the way they represent the world - or sections of it - to themselves.

II. COMMUNICATION STRUCTURE

Examples of CSs can be:

• a book
• a movie
• a multimedia CD-ROM
• a speech
• a video game
• a hyper textual and/or hyper medial Web site.

CS is a medium, like voice or a book, or a combination of media, like text + hyper-text + sound + images + animations + videos. CSs allow communication between the teachers’ and the learners’ Kss.

*Unfortunately, there is no possible direct physical connection between KSs. We have to pass through a CS, that is a communication system*

Scientists are studying ways of connecting human brains to computers and translate the information they contain into bits; after which, from computers, in a reversed process, they are trying ways of transferring everything back into other people’s brains. However weird (or horrifying) this perspective may seem, it can signify that, in the future, learning could be immediate and effortless. At present, we cannot but communicate via a CS, in a process similar to this:

The more encoding and decoding it takes 1) to translate a KS into a CS by the teacher and 2) to re-translate from this CS back into a KS by the learners, the more strenuous is the process of instruction for both the teacher and the learners.

This means that:

*If KS and CS are similar, or isomorphic, the teaching/learning process is smoother, more natural and intuitive*
*If KS and CS on the contrary are dissimilar, or allomorphic, the teaching/learning process is more difficult* (Antinucci F, 1993)

Facts in temporal sequence (history, a narration etc.) are naturally linear and time lined. In this case a book or the human speech, which are also by nature linear and time lined, are very apt CSs, being here KS and CS isomorphic.

On the other hand, writing a book on the functioning of the human organism is a more complex task. A medium like a book (CS) is in fact allomorphic related to a biological organism. A biological organism is a system, non-linear and non-temporal (not considering its development). Thence it requires a lot of work for translating its relative KS into a linear temporal CS.

Everyone who has written a manual or a book knows this. We too, writing this paper – we argued - are experiencing the difficulty of sequencing in linear form a knowledge structure (KS) that is not linear by itself, being made of several non-temporal interrelated elements that make up the distant learning system we are trying to explain. Therefore, since KS (a DL system) and CS (this linear paper) are allomorph, the process of conversion is not without effort.

KS and CS are Tighter with Multimedia

This relationship between KS and CS, usually very loose, since the preferred instructional medium has always been the book (except for the special case of narration), can become tighter with hyper textual and hyper media web sites, with Multimedia CD-ROMs or with educational video-games, since these new media are totally free from a predefined communication structure (CS). This is usually not the case of a book or a lecture delivered by human speech (or by e-mail in a virtual classroom context), which are forcefully linear.

Note 1. The linear approach comes from speech and writing, which are linear by nature and follow a progression in time. The linear approach in human teaching and learning saw its triumph with the revolutionary technology of printing, which permitted an enormous diffusion of books at a low cost. It was the birth of the school we have today, based on books. Before this great innovation, a book cost the equivalent of today 15,000 US $, which totally impeded a learning model based on books on a large scale. Learning and skills were thence handed down from masters to apprentices, in shops, generation after generation, using experience and live example more than logical linear thought (Antinucci, F., 1993; Derry T.K. – Williams T.I., 1960, A Short History of Technology, Clarendon Press, Oxford ; Parisi, D., 2000, Scuol@.it, Mondadori, Milano).

New media instead are not naturally forced into a linear type of communication, which goes from A to Z, into a logical progression. New media can be non-linear. They can manipulate links and ideas, images, symbolic 3D models and can produce interactive simulations so as to express, in intuitive ways, what books and speech can express using hundreds of words.

Note 2. See classic computer games like SimCity, The Sims, Microsoft Flight Simulator etc. They allow new types of non-linear interactive learning not based any more on logical speech or logical writing, but based on interactive experience, similar again to the experience the apprentice had in the medieval shop (Antinucci, F., 1999; Parisi, D., 2000).

Teachers who have to translate a book into an on-line course must consider this cognitive perspective. In the process of adapting a book into an e-learning product many choices are possible, thence a deeper understanding of the mechanisms implied in the learning process can be of help when we plan for example an educational Web site, the structure of its links and pages, the animations and multimedia presentations in it. This will influence the final educational product and will determine its success with the learners.

About
Italian version

A Novel in the Hands of the Killers

Before getting to the killers let us be patient and consider the concept of literary improvisation. I know I am terribly boring but I promise a lot of blood blood blood in this post - plus the relationship between literature and social life being complex we’ll have to wander a bit before we finally dive into base butchery .

Literary improvisation is not far from musical improvisation, a topic we have talked about in a previous post. We will not define the concept, being it self-explanatory.

(Can James Joyce’s stream of consciousness be in some way related to what we have said above - literary improvisation, not base butchery, in case you don’t get it wrong ? Hard to say. I don’t believe it to be very far from it. It is to be noted though that writers at times cleverly build what seems spontaneous, and in literature what counts is the final result: things do work or they do not).

Connecting literary improvisation with digression we will mention again that nice passage by J. D. Salinger where Holden, the adolescent protagonist in The Catcher in the Rye, narrates how he had to undergo the oral expression lesson which consisted in letting a student speak of any topic, and each time the student didn’t stick to the point all the boys in class had to yell “Digression!!” at him (you can read this passage in a previous post of ours). Holden instead liked speeches full of digressions and the novel itself, if not very similar in its structure to the above said stream of consciousness, is nonetheless so rich with digressions, facts within facts, ideas within ideas, that it creates an overall effect of chaotic freshness memorably depicting an adolescent mind definitely undisciplined and even disturbed (Holden is disturbed in some way) although so vivacious and sparkling.

(Here again everything seems spontaneous and improvised but I am sure Salinger’s text resulted from a good mixture of intuition and clever construction).

Salinger’s novel has been a classic not only of the American literature (and his language is present in most dictionaries of US slang) but it has inspired the beat generation as well as numerous drop-outs who joined the utopian movements of the 1960s up to the present day.

Personally I read it by mere chance when I was 18 (I had it in inheritance from a boy who was leaving an apartment we shared in Ireland) and I was deeply impressed by it. Coming just out of adolescence I probably recognized in there plenty of the insecurities I was living in those days. But young Holden went beyond, to the extent of almost hating all the surrounding world and it was a bit worrying for people (like me), who enjoyed the book so much, to read on newspapers that David Chapman, the person “who assassinated John Lennon, was carrying the book when he was arrested immediately after the murder and referred to it in his statement to police shortly thereafter.” Also “John Hinckley, Jr., who attempted to assassinate US President Ronald Reagan in 1981, was also reported to have been obsessed with the book.” (From Wikipedia: The Catcher in the Rye).

Well, that doesn’t mean that the novel is murder inspiring though certainly by effectively describing the difficulties of a tormented adolescence it is not illogical that some disturbed individual identified himself with the Holden character, finding comfort and inspiration in it and thus feeding his vision against everything and everybody (and refusing to stick to the point naturally becomes a symbol of anarchic revolt against order and self-discipline).

However, also the non psychopath teenager identified himself/herself with Salinger’s character. So the novel became a classic for an entire generation, whether protesting against order and law or not, since adolescence is a more or less difficult period for everyone.

There is, we repeat, a subtle link between digression and the previously mentioned themes of utopia & musical improvisation. Digression as well, going against rationality, can in fact lead to inconclusiveness, i.e. to nowhere, thus unstructuring the logic of discourse - utopia is a Greek word made of ‘ou’(= no) and ‘τόπος’ (= place), so its meaning is actually ‘in no place’.

Summarizing, improvisation is the thin link among the present post and these earlier ones, Digression vs Sticking to the Point and Why Musical Improvisation is Utopian.

Improvisation has been a myth of the counterculture of my generation and of the generations who followed. The idea of improvisation in art (music, literature, theatre etc.) is somewhat connected to social behaviours appeared in the counterculture of the last 50 years. A relationship, in fact, between mental and social anarchy cannot in my view be denied (like I guess it cannot be denied that there is some relationship between the crystalline clarity of Julius Caesar’s writings and his rational conduct and self-control, of which you can read something in this post of ours as well).

It is simple, after all. Facts (and history) are created by people. And people have a mind. Thence there are connections between what we think, read, write and do, whether in our social environment or in art.

(We are not anarchic and we do not belong to the counterculture - although for a couple of years we did, but that was a very long time ago. It can somehow be proven by the fact that we try to get inspiration from our ancient philosophies, which exalted wisdom, rationality and self control. Only ….

Things are not in black and white,
the hues of grey (and colours)
being infinite …

Forgive my silly English poems, it is one of my manias).

Italian version of this post