Actually this one is somewhat better... But is 50 pages long...
March 3 class:
This class began with Slattery. Marc set the stage nicely, setting a postmodern perspective. Garry followed with what was arguably the most complex and least reachable paper in the entire set. I have a feeling that I did not do as good a job as I might have in preparing you to read Baudrillard. Some of you got it; others are more uncertain. I am looking very closely at your blog comments to gauge your reactions.
The key question has to be "Where is the curriculum in this." And, even more specifically, what has this to do with curriculum design. After all, Baudrillard is not an educator, nor a curriculum designer. He is a philosopher. He is the only non-curriculum person in our readings for this course. So what he has to say needs to be looped back into education, curriculum, and curriculum design.
It is easy of course to "cop out" by reminding you of McLuhan's view that everything is tied to everything, somehow and that you can find connections in the strangest places, if you only look. That was the philosophic position behind Douglas Adams' wildly popular "Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy" novels ... that is, the "interrelationship of all things."
So we need to revisit this basic question. I might add that Dr. Ralph Mason and myself are wrestling with the same idea, with hopes of writing a paper looking at Baudrillard as a fundamental way of looking at 21st century curriculum. But that is for another time.
There was more to the class. I tried to build on some of the ideas of Baudrillard such as reversability, and his relationship to McLuhan.
I presented three other examples of artists and scholars doing similar things.
First, Lewis Carroll, in The hunting of the snark wrote three verses that resembled Baudrillard's map:
He bought a large map representing the sea
Without the least vestige of land...
And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be
A map they could all understand...
The idea of an empty piece of paper representing something real is at least a little frightening.
Then I turned to artist Mark Tansey and his work "The Innocent Eye Test." It shows a cow looking at a painting of a cow, and the cow itself being observed by experts and critics. We, in turn are looking at the critics looking at the cow looking at the picture of the cow.
To me, Tansey's philosophy of painting can easily be changed to my philosophy of curriculum, by merely replacing a few words. Is that plagiarism? Or is it a new idea?
Finally, I tried to demonstrate through music that the medium really is the message. I presented a message in the form of a song text. Then we heard two versions. The first was by Gordon MacRae, a broadway singer of the 40s. He sang that traditional version of the song, which was essentially about building an army. Then we heard a version by Barbra Streisand. Not a word was changed but when we moved from male to female; from MacRae to Streisand, from March to cool jazz, from the 40s to the 70s, from a Broadway musical to a cabaret ... the entire message seemed to change. You decide for yourself whether it worked.
As usual, I had more to cover than time permitted. Perhaps next Monday...
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