Serendipity35

"Playing the glass bead game, so-called scholars reduce their own teaching commitments to negligible proportions, exploit graduates as teaching assistants, sacrifice the search for knowledge in favor of mindless publications, and indulge themselves in unchecked intellectual arrogance, lust for power, and professional, political, and personal corruption--all of which have brought their institutions into general disrepute."

~ Charles K.Rowley

Leaving Joseph Knecht's future century gaming prowess, and Professor Rowley's 20th century published kvetching behind, we've splashed our way into the shallow end of the 21st century and discovered our own glasperlenspiel.

Or maybe, it has discovered us.

The landscape of the virtual classroom has, while still in its infancy, stretched beyond our control and our tactical ability to apply our own expanding teaching methods in this dynamic environment. The virtual classroom has left the school building and, given access to this new pedagogic province, outside the classroom each student is equal no matter what their background or educational goals might be.

The contemporary Trivium and its virtual curriculum has been embraced by the participants of the universal classroom. The grammar of the interconnected language is used to produce a collective logic and from that logic new critical thinking skills emerge. These new skills help produce the new rhetoric of our time.

We've combined music and geometry, astronomy and arithmetic by virtue of our new technologies. Apart from some intellectual seeding done by our traditional educational institutions, the combination of these fields of interest has been both accidental and intended by its participants. The independent creation of personal video content, music content, combined and cooperative astronomical and pure math endeavors on the internet have produced a collective instrument on which the entire intellectual content we possess can be played.

Learning to play this instrument has been the longstanding stated goal of traditional educational institutions. But, the investment of time and money in the traditional experience has left many who have overcome those hurdles without any incentive to make that traditional experience more open to to others who want to play.

Open ended learning has become the collective metaphor of our time. There are, and have been, initiatives taken at traditional schools to foster inter-disciplinary studies, but those initiatives exist within a closed system of learning. While there is great benefit in having guidance along the path to knowledge, those guides must be more than a handful of the select who point out volumes of selected knowledge from the entire stock of human experience.

Our new learning opportunity hinges on the open exposition that is presented to us, our evaluation of that expository content, the interchangeability of that content between an individual and groups of individuals, and our personal and public investment in the product of the learning experience.

Our challenge will be to reconcile ourselves to the end of permanent knowledge that dynamic and continuous learning will bring. And if knowledge, itself, is no longer an end, what goal will learning have? Perhaps we will just train masters of our new glass bead game.