Education, Media, and Love

Many of you probably want an update on how things are going in Ethiopia.  That will come soon.  Let me get past the initial banalities of setting up shop.  In the mean time, some gushy hopes for education, media, and love:

The written version of Ian Bogost’s keynote for the 2008 GDA Educational Summit just moved me to tears.  I was totally convinced by his aspirations to make videogame studies more like the rich uncertainty of love and less like the “cold industrialism of interdisciplinarity.”

In addition to stoking my high hopes for videogame studies, Bogost’s speech outlines an approach to education that might make sense of my sprawling undergraduate career, if only in retrospect.  Both Bogost (and Katherine Hayles) imagine a higher education system organized around problems, rather than academic disciplines.  Students would choose a problem to work on and a mentor to assist them in pursuing an answer.  This approach would actively embrace uncertainty in educational pursuits rather than purport mastery guarded by various disciplines.  And inherent uncertainty would allow educators to bring together otherwise disparate fields with all the heartfelt and fragile potential of a “love affair between unlikely mates.”

Is there a problem I have consistently been trying to answer in studying history, photography, and design technology?  I think so.  Taking history to be a medium between us and the past, the problem I am always addressing is: “How can media facilitate identification and empathy?”

No wonder I was so moved by Bogost’s speech, what with all his analogies to dissimilar things forming loving relationships.  My question contains a hope that media can help make uncertainty just navigable enough to sustain love.