XplanaZine

It’s a funny thing to try and trace back a single thread of object memory through the years. Something as simple as “rock” or “shoe” can call up stirring and surprisingly connected experiences.I was reminded of this last Friday night while attending a party for my nephew in Austin. He’s 17 now, a junior in high school, and he had planned entertainment for fifteen of his friends. The scene of the party was my brother Rick’s place in Austin, Texas. He lives on some nice acreage south of town which makes it easy not to disturb the neighbors.

I don’t know where my nephew and Rick’s two son-in-laws got the idea, but they decided sometime after Christmas that it would be really cool to build an enormous bonfire. I think the original idea was to burn it around the new year but there was a fire ban and gradually it became something that would be used to celebrate my nephew’s birthday.

What I can tell you is that the three boys pulled off an impressive engineering feat. The bonfire structure was solid, about the size of a tow-story house, and it burned high and mightily into the heavens. Of course, it was too hot for anyone to take part in the hotdog and marshmallow roasting events but, heck, that’s just a small detail.

The fire also served as a thread that connected many events in my own life related to the object “fire.” When I was 3, my pajamas caught on fire (with me in them) and I was burned severely. At age 14, my friend Chuck and I almost burned down the storage shed behind my house while trying to re-enact a WWII battle with gunpowder, plastic army men, and a slat-map beach scene created on top of a sheet of plywood (yeah, we were really thinking on that one). Two years later, a good friend’s father was severely burned at our school spirit bonfire. Another fire, one I helped make when I was 17, served as a beacon for two lost campers in the Rockies (thankfully, they eventually found their way home). When I was 25 I saw protest fires light the skies in Buenos Aires.

As I stood there, looking at the beauty and force of my nephew’s bonfire, I was overwhelmed by memories of camp fires and trash fires, burning houses and burning rubber. One by one, a multitude of fires cascaded before me, all separate memories yet each, inexplicably, connected and more meaningful because it was part of a larger story. I was aware that individual memories with seemingly little importance gained significance in the context of other memories of a similar theme.

As I explored these memories, I also examined their importance in another context — learning. What, after all, is one of the higher goals of teaching and learning if not to put separate information packets into context, to connect them to other information packets and personal experience. By doing so, we eventually create sufficient complexity to cause an evolution of awareness, a growth of understanding — knowledge.

If I were to reduce all of the excitement about new Web tools for education to a single benefit it would be this — connecting information, experience, and memory. As all of the blogevangelists have pointed out, the tools for connectivity are already here. Between blogs, podcasting, wikis, flickr, and tagging, we lack nothing really when it comes to physically connecting the dots.

But there is a challenge and it is significant. What stands in our way, what prevents us from stoking the flames of learning with these obvious tools, is the same thing that has always stood in our way — separation. Whether it is in the classroom of my youth or via online classes in the present, there remains a persistent process in traditional education that tends to separate one discipline from another, separate one student from another, and separate one fact from another. By focusing on the importance of isolated and packaged information we have lost much of our awareness that the real process of learning is through connection. We have thwarted the natural process of learning and replaced it with an awkward and poor substitute.

There is resistance to new technologies and teaching paradigms in education but the resistance is fueled as much by a mind set of separation as it is by a fear of technology. The reality is that many simply can’t see the need for connecting students and information in the way that is being proposed. It seems counterintuitive to those for whom separation has been a way of life. In addition, the thought of mixing everything together seems messy and untidy. How will we ever “measure” the results if we don’t keep everything nice and neat — separate?

The beauty of learning is that, like a flame, it will find a way to grow. Whether we help it or put obstacles in its way, a fire will fins a path, will find oxygen and flammable materials to fuel its expansion. I’ve heard sufficient complaining of late with regards to Myspace.com, Facebook.com , and other social networking sites. They are dangerous, they are sucking up valuable time from our children’s lives, and they are promoting the wrong kind of thinking. In reality, these sites are simply oxygen and flammable materials for the fire that won’t be quenched. We can create educational paradigms that are antithetical to real learning but they won’t actually stop the process.

Learning will find a way. There’s a lot of hope in that. A fire that won’t stop burning.