medialounge at six

As part of the exhibition »Feedback #3: Marshall McLuhan and the Arts« Baruch Gottlieb and Michael Darroch talk about the magazine »Explorations: towards new pedagogies for the electronic age« and its insights into radically new learning and knowledge methods for the electronic age. 

For McLuhan, the contemporary technological condition produced a crisis in the institutions of education which could be best addressed, not by merely integrating new technologies in the classroom, but in understanding what the technologies can offer education which the classroom cannot, while keeping the classroom for those skills which are still fundamental and and best served by that environment. He actively explored new forms of education which attempted to draw best advantage from a dialectic of inside and outside the classroom. One such experimental program produced the journal »Explorations«.

In Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan quotes biologist J. Z. Young

»It is important to realize that great changes in ways of ordinary human speaking and acting are bound up with the adoption of new instruments.«
[YOUNG, J. Z., Doubt and Certainty in Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961) p.111]

, and remarks

»Had we meditated on such a basic fact as that long ago, we might easily have mastered the nature and effects of all our technologies, instead of being pushed around by them.«

What kind of for would that »meditation« take? Do we need new institutional forms or methods to cultivate this meditative praxis, this is one of the considerations driving the experimentation which were initiated with Explorations. This discuss features Michael Darroch who has published widely on the project and with Janine Marchessault has republished the first 8 editions of the groundbreaking journal. Together Baruch Gottlieb and Michael Darroch will explore »Explorations« for insight into radical new modes of learning and knowing for the electronic age.