Learning

The context for learning and education has altered dramatically over the last few years. We are witnessing shifts that will have a profound effect not only on the social and political orientation of nation states, but also on the ways in which we see ourselves and act upon and within the communities of which we are a part. These shifts will affect how we create meanings, messages and information for the proliferating electronic networks that now surround us. We will also have to reexamine how ideas circulate and how learning and knowledge can be acquired within a digital context.

Ron Burnett - President, Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design

Which texts are given as required reading of students greatly effects how reality is perceived (not to mention the economics of the whole process). If knowledge is taught in a hypertextual fashion, life will start being perceived that way. We will start sampling bits of life and stop seeing it as a linear, sequential series of events. This puts knowledge on a vertical axis, that is, knowledge will be perceived as a power of depth, rather than cause and effect. This depth , of course, is circular, and so within itself it is infinite and growing.