Serendipity35

Did you ever watch Connections on TV in the late 1970's? It was a great ten-episode documentary television series created and narrated by science historian James Burke.

The subtitle of the series was an "Alternative View of Change" because he chucked the usual linear and teleological view of historical progress, and viewed an event as the result of a series of interconnected events that connected more like the Internet or your brain than the pages in a history book.

Call it connective thinking or network thinking. It's not a new idea. I believe it's what teachers have valued most in their students forever. It's not what we assess or grade students on usually, but it is what we value. Employers value it too. It's also interdisciplinary studies. It's all the new majors I see coming into being at NJIT (like computational biology that officially mixes biology with math).

I try very hard in the classroom to make connections to prior learning, other classes, the news, and things my students are interested in already. I hopefully encourage them (if not by my modeling, then by assignments) to make connections themselves.

The series would be a good way to kickstart some thinking about teaching in this way. Each episode of the series focused on a person or group's work done without any idea of the modern result of what they had done. The idea for the series was that you shouldn't (couldn't really) look at the development of any part of our current world without viewing the entire gestalt of things that led to the present event. An episode would start with a particular event or innovation in the past and the follow it through a series of (seemingly unrelated) connections to our modern world.

The shows looked at discoveries, scientific achievements, and historical world events and how they came to be using his witty narration, reenactments, working models, and frequent location video. The original series had two sequels (Connections² in 1994, and Connections³ in 1997) that were on The Learning Channel.

Now, he has the James Burke Institute for Innovation in Education and its flagship project is called the Knowledge Web. The K-Web is a site (or rather, "an activity", he suggests) "through time, space, and technology to map the interior landscape of human thought and experience." Largely using volunteers, he hopes that it will become "an interactive space on the web where students, teachers, and other knowledge seekers can explore information in a highly interconnected, holistic way that allows for an almost infinite number of paths of exploration among people, places, things, and events."

Watch the news, and every day you see proof that the world is increasingly interlinked. Nowhere is too far away to matter, now. More than ever, we need to understand how other people and events across the world affect the way we live. Take a journey on the Knowledge Web and you see how this has always been true. The modern world was shaped because of the way people and things in the past were connected. Thanks to information technology and easier access, today’s global interactivity is also beginning to involve many more people. For the first time, everybody makes an impact. The Knowledge Web provides an opportunity for users of all kinds and ages and interests to learn about how interactivity works. It offers the chance to experience history the way the players at the time did: full of surprise twists and turns, accidents, discoveries, friends and foes. Above all, the K-Web reveals how they never knew what was coming next. Just like you. The Knowledge Web also shows how all knowledge is interlinked, and how applying K-Web techniques to your own situation can help you to second-guess your own future as an individual, or a community, or a company.

The Institute exists to encourage innovative uses of educational technology. I know there are still teachers using the original series in classes (probably just in science or social studies - that's a box that we need to get rid of too.) Here's a chance to do more with connective thinking.

You could look at a Connections episode and say, "Well, sure, he can see those connection NOW. No one sees those things while it's happening to them." True? Do we need to keep an eye on the rear-view mirror?

The Knowledge Web was also a book that came out in 2000 that shows the interactive and sometimes serendipitous connections among ideas, events, people and innovations.

Burke's writing style follows the series style - though this isn't typical for print. He skips from one topic to another, including hyperlink-style footnotes to other parts of the book. A chapter on feedback systems moves from neural networks to computers that simulate the human brain's workings to studies of the physiology of animal emotion, then the transatlantic telephone cable, Napoleon, James Watt, and theosophist Annie Besant.

It might be worth looking at the series or the book as a way to trigger your own alternative view of teaching.

About Burke's work:

Watch Burke's video introduction to the K-Web.

Video from Re-Connections, the 25th anniversary piece about the series and K-Web and others clips collected by a James Burke fan on YouTube

"Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world."    Albert Einstein