from the chapter "Haven, A Collaborative Lifelong Cyber-Learning Community" contributed by Claudia L'Amoreaux to the collaboratively written book, Creating Learning Communities (Solomon Press, July, 2000)


The future

It will be a while before the Web is navigable in networked 3D worlds. But for some, it’s a reality now, especially people under 25. A generation of young people who have grown up with legos, logo, html, vrml, Java, Adobe Photoshop and Premiere, Sonic the hedgehog, Laura Cross, Ultima Online, Asheron’s Call, and personal avatars, are architecting the cyberspace of the future today. What visionary educator Seymour Papert calls megachange is on its way:
The decision to make is not whether we will continue with school or change it. It will collapse. Our question is whether we’ll wait until we’re driven to the wall and the system is collapsed from within from its own internal contradictions before we decide that we’re going to create conditions that will allow a new system where there’ll be diversity of learning paths, diversity of teaching methods, diversity of subjects to be learned.
How can we best prepare ourselves to flow with megachange as it sweeps us up? One very direct way is to practice image-ination or visual thinking. Over 31,000 years ago, our ancestors were painting the most extraordinary images of animals in the Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc cave in the Ardèche region of Southern France. The skill of these artists working with ocher, charcoal and hematite contradicts previous theories of a slow and steady maturing of art through various ages from primitive to more sophisticated style. The Chauvet artists have stunned us with their use of proportion, perspective and depth. The French Ministry of Culture writes that these cave paintings, rediscovered in 1994, "have revolutionized hitherto accepted concepts on the appearance of art and its development, and prove that homo sapiens learned to draw at a very early stage." It seems that image-ination is a defining characteristic of homo sapiens, central to our nature. Today, we’re still working with ocher, charcoal and hematite but we’ve added supercomputers, graphics workstations and elaborate 3 dimensional software to paint the DNA spiral and reoviruses (known to kill cancer cells), and to model tornado vortices and the ozone hole. These visualization tools are quite literally global thinking tools-they let us see our planet in ways never before seen, and in ways absolutely necessary to reverse environmental degradation and create sustainable development.

My daughter started studying photography when she was fourteen. A disenchantment with the toxicity of darkroom chemicals drew her into the digital world and she apprenticed with a master of digital photography. She has grown up using a videocamera for her journal. Recently a friend gave her a video conferencing camera for her birthday. I have one, too. We were excited about connecting with them since we live in two different cities. Software called NetMeeting let us connect via the Internet. She suggested we try the "shared whiteboard" which I had never used. We could each draw and see what the other was drawing. We could even draw together. Then she uploaded a photo of a lizard she’d shot in the desert on her recent camping trip. It came up on the "whiteboard." I quickly uploaded some images I had been collecting, and we were in another world together. A visual world. I can’t come up with the words easily to describe to you what a shift in communication this was. And fun!

We both realize that with these tools one day, we'll be working and creating with friends and colleagues on the other side of the world. If my Portuguese is weak, and my Brazilian collaborator's English is rusty, our image-inations can help us bridge the gaps. We can share photos, video, even animations to illustrate our thoughts and ideas. I will never forget the moment I opened a photo attached to an email sent by my Brazilian collaborator Saulo Petean. We had not yet met in person. Together with another Brazilian, Alexandre Lage, we were assisting a Mebengokré Indian community in creating a website. Saulo sent photos taken with a digital camera of himself, and a child in the village. Those digital images transported me from my desk in San Francisco to the Amazon rainforest.

Some people will question why I put so much emphasis on this. We’re experiencing a profound shift in how we communicate. For those of us raised on penmanship and text-based book-learning, this can be a hard one to see coming. The future online is very VISUAL, and it is 3D (if not 4D). Words won’t go away, but multimedia is more than jargon. Visual thinking is powerful, transformative, life-changing. It can help bridge language barriers. It is essential to understanding and working with the mathematics of complexity, chaos theory, systems modeling. Ralph Abraham is a mathematician and pioneer in the field of dynamical systems theory. In a 1996 interview with Haven facilitator Barbara Vogl, Ralph remarked, "The more complex the system, such as the one we live in, the more chaotic its behavior. Chaos theory provides us with a better understanding of such processes. And if we don't understand chaotic behavior, then we can't understand the complex system we live in well enough to give it guidance and play a part in the creation of our future."

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