BOOKS
Video by the Snarkmarket crew
The liberal arts are supposed to teach you things like critical thinking, language, logic. You know, things that prepare you for the real world. But more and more, the real world happens online. As Michigan Radio's Jennifer Guerra reports, some want the study of liberal arts to get an update.
Robin Sloan pretty much lives online. He twitters, he uploads videos, he blogs. He's one of the main bloggers at Snarkmarket.com, a daily blog filled with links and big ideas.
Lately, the Snarkmarket crew has been blogging a lot about the liberal arts. Now, before we go any further, Sloan wants you to know that there there's nothing wrong with the old liberal arts. Well, except that they're old:
"Because it's a pretty ancient tradition, they concerned themselves with knowledge you get from books, the kind of knowledge you get in school. And that's kind of it because that's the only kind of knowledge that existed for a really long time."
But now with the web and digital media, Sloan says it's time the liberal arts got a 21st century facelift. So he and the rest of the Snarkmarket crew are putting together a new book about Liberal Arts 2.0.
There are two strains to Liberal Arts 2.0. The online part and the curriculum part. Gavin Craig is an academic adviser at Michigan State University and a Snarkmarket contributer. He wants to make "food" a new liberal art subject.
"I could imagine," says Craig, "a small liberal arts school that used food as an organizing principle. Where you looked at dishes described in literature, you looked at dinner parties where you talked about the culture and background of food, where you had an economic course that was organized around food issues."
Mapping is another one. When you think of maps, you probably think of street names and bodies of water. In a Liberal Arts 2.0 world, you'd map things like community gardens, environmental erosion, economic data. You'd upload it on Google Earth, zoom in for a street by street, neighborhood look, and zoom out to look for world-wide patterns.
Even the old liberal arts can get the 2.0 treatment. Emily Zinnemann teaches creative writing at the University of Michigan. For one of her assignments, she had students come up with a character and then create a fake profile for the character on the social networking site, Facebook.
"So much of creative writing - especially stories - is about character," explains Zinnemann. "And that's something that the students have a hard time understanding sometimes. But Facebook is a really familiar language that all the students speak. I feel like students are familiar in reading character and picking up on real subtle clues the way that grad students in English might read Shakespeare. They read Facebook in the same sort of way."
Carolyn Racine is in Zinnemann's class and a fan of Facebook. But that doesn't mean she wants her entire creative writing class or poetry class to happen via Facebook or Twitter or whatever is the next big online tool.
"I think," says Racine, that "students now shouldn't be completely into current processes like Facebook and forget about Shakespeare and the formalities. I think that's dangerous to forget about formalities."
When asked why, Racine hesitates and says, "Uh. I don't know. I'm still figuring it out as a student."
"That's a good question," says Robin Sloan, the guy behind the Liberal Arts 2.0 project. "In pursuing the new liberal arts enthusiastically, do you necessarily have to sacrifice some of the old liberal arts? Even if the answer is yes, even if there's only so much time in the day and you have to pick and choose, I think there's enough similarity at the core. These things are about being literate, being a critical thinker. I like some of this old stuff as much as anyone else, but at the same time I don't think our affection for old formats should hold us back and stop us from really aggressively exploring all this cool new stuff out there."
Like Game Design. There's a public middle and high school in New York that plans to use game design and game theory to teach kids things like literacy, critical thinking and math. So good bye text book, hello Nintendo DS? Maybe.
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