Not just to access information.
We come to class for the same reason we come to the ELI Focus Session on Mobile Learning.
1. Face-to-face is another way to set up a serendipity field, with very rich (though often fragile and difficult to capture) channels of communication.
2. There’s a sense of occasion: dearly beloved, we are gathered together….
3. We demonstrate a shared commitment to an ideal, to a set of core values, and think about both that commitment and those values. That demonstration and that thinking yield astonishing benefits. It’s what Bruner speaks of when he describes school as always an exercise in consciousness-raising about the possibilities of communal intellectual effort.
4. To be in the physical presence of a highly-trained cognition working through complex and rich ideas and experiences is to have a gestalt experience of the life of the mind as it is located in individual identities. That gestalt conveys will, purpose, direction, interiority in ways that may elude language, but perhaps not the explaining voice….
Face-to-face as another way to set up a serendipity field… Quite a change from a time when face-to-face was pretty much the only way to have those kinds of interactions. It interests me that now we look at face-to-face meetings as special and different, providing as you say a sense of occasion. We’re actually HERE in PERSON, how novel! When time is one of our most precious commodities, we make a statement just by dedicating some of it to actually BE somewhere.