Getting Ready for Marshall McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan is arguably the most important University of Manitoba alumnus. He spent his formative years in Winnipeg, attending elementary, secondary and post-secondary schools. He received both his Master's and has PhD here at the U of M.

And yet, we seem to ignore him. Or, at the very least he has been forgotten. Too bad.

McLuhan's contribution to curriculum design and curriculum theory is tenuous at best. Or is it? What a wonderful topic for a thesis, or practicum topic!

What McLuhan said was that there are four laws the govern how media/technology influence us. They happen all at once in a kind of a tetrad. In order to understand our global world, we need to ask these four questions simultaneously. They are:

• What does the technology enhance?
• What does the technology obsolesce?
• What does the technology retrieve (that we have lost)?
• When pushed to the extreme, what does the technology reverse into?

We are going to explore McLuhan's real or virtual or imagined contribution to curriculum. It will take us on a journey (Remember Kliebard?). At the very least it will be a challenging journey, perhaps even "going where no one has gone before. (Those lines come from Star Trek)" The original narration of that 1966 series was

Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its 5-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.

Later, when it was determiend that the phrase was sexist, the final line was changed to "where no one has gone before.

Our purpose here is to set the stage for an analysis of McLuhan and curriculum. our mission will not be a five year one, only three months. And perhaps we are not exploring the final frontier. On the other hand, we could be breaking new ground, as we explore...Curriculum and McLuhan.

The following excerpt, found on an online blog relates mcLuhan to curriculum:

Eric McLuhan, “The new media won’t fit into the classroom”
I had the pleasure of sitting down and reading the Walrus Magazine this evening. There was a rather unflattering article on The McLuhan International Festival of the Future held recently in Toronto. This piece at the end of the article really caught my attention:

As the last few intellectual thrusts of "Probing McLuhan" wound down, a figure rose from the crowd and said a few words. The voice was eerily reminiscent of the Master, as was the rhetoric. It was Eric McLuhan. "The new media won’t fit into the classroom", he told the audience. "It already surrounds it. Perhaps that is the challenge of the counterculture. The problem is to know what questions to ask."
For the first time that afternoon there was silence, and it spoke volumes.

All of the action is outside the classroom - blogs, wikis, IM, podcasting - you name it. Soon, the only place to get away from media will be inside the classroom. Hey, they don’t even have a telephone (c. 1876) in every classroom yet.
( found at http://www.jarche.com/node/view/475).

As they say on TV, stay tuned for more...