Technopaideia in Literary Education

COMPUTERS IN THE SCHOOLS https://doi.org/10.1080/07380569.2023.2244940 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 Technopaideia in Literary Education Sebastian Borowicz Q6 Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland ABSTRACT KEYWORDS The article deals with the role and impact of advanced technologies on literary education. In the beginning, the author emphasizes fundamentally different cognitive objectives of empirical science and humanities. In the authors’ opinion, the current scientification of the humanities leads to the domination of a single type of truth based on empiricism promoted in schools as a part of the so-called STEM education. A visible manifestation of this process is the labification of school learning methods. The laboratory metaphor may, however, be destructive for the humanities. Thereafter, the author outlines how advanced technologies can be used to teach literature according to the specificity of the cognitive model of philological studies. Through the example of an ongoing research project he shows how using cultural heritage sites and embedded education can enhance the process of studying literature, and thus help students develop new interpretative pathways and cognitive skills based on elements typical for digital environments and augmented reality. Advanced technologies; literature; cognitive models; STEM education; heritage sites; transversal mind; embedded education The scientification of humanities Q1 We live in times for which the turbulent age of Aristotle makes a good analogy. We have already faced the world of innovative technologies as Plato did with writing. Also, different ontologies have been established to explain the status of new new media (Paul Levinson’s term). Medienphilosophie has also taken its place in the hierarchy of rapidly developing fields of contemporary science. We are now at the stage of profound explanation, analysis, and search for the humanistic dimension of technology, like Aristotle, rather than merely becoming accustomed to the possibilities offered by the state of permanent technological breakthrough. The Web, virtual reality, metaverse, apps, and social networks are now becoming embedded in our lives almost simultaneously with acquisition of language skills. We live in augmented reality without fully realizing the uniqueness of this state of technological endowment and its consequences for CONTACT Sebastian Borowicz [email protected] Cultural Research, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland © 2023 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC Center for Multimodal Educational and 2 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 S. BOROWICZ our cognitive functions. Therefore, aside from the technological breakthrough, which is worth emphasizing, we are living in a time of intellectual breakthrough. However, the permanence of both states makes it difficult to perceive them as a distinctive momentum. A continuing stream of new technologies makes the number of scientific discoveries so great that we do not pay much attention to them. The present paper constitutes a diagnosis of impact of advanced technologies on teaching of literature at school that is further joined with a proposal of their application in compliance with cognitive characteristics of the humanities. Since the time of the Natural Philosophers and the Sophists the way we define ourselves has been spanned between cultural periphrases like myths, literature, art, and the positivist approach of our species based on rationalized and falsifiable evidence, which has become more and more pronounced over time. Over quarks and gluons, however, we still seem to prefer myths and other archaic stories in which anthropomorphized forces, acting in our image and likeness, establish the order of things, shape our subjectivity and commonality while guaranteeing the meaning and stability of the world of the Anthropocene. For the past three thousand years at least, the commonsense or folk assumption has been that stories can and do change us. Religious traditions, for example, are predicated on the idea that by reading or hearing about exemplary lives— divinities, patriarchs, prophets, saints, heroes, and heroines, whom we are invited to emulate—our moral and social identities can be shaped and transformed for the better. Repeated exposure to such narratives through scriptures, commentaries, spiritual exercises and handbooks, biographies and autobiographies, rituals, sermons, etc. have been used to transmit and form individual and group subjectivities through the medium of stories (Wojciehowski & Gallese, 2022, p. 68). However, unlike the literature, quarks are not in our measure. As a species, we like familiarity and simplicity. We like being in a story. The story, on the other hand, or rather the technology of creating fictional worlds, has occupied a special place in the case of humans since Homer’s time, or perhaps even much earlier. Various oral, written or printed stories about heroes presuppose the possibility (or, in fact, the necessity) of a collective or an individual identification, simulation and emphatic projection. Prior to the twentieth century, the perception of words also relied on various forms of corporeal engagement, gestures and simulation strategies (including, for example, musicality). Nowadays, the technology for creating fictional worlds has significantly moved beyond words. Contemporary stories are often non-verbal, immersive, polysensory and cross-medial. They are a product of increasingly sophisticated technologies. COMPUTERS IN THE SCHOOLS 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 3 They also evoke additional forms of participation and identification with the protagonist that is often non-human.1 New mediality produces a new gaze, hence a different and more active form of engagement with respect to standard novel reading. The enhanced performative quality of engagement with the fictional characters populating the serial narrative ecosystems likely contributes to an increase in viewers’ attachments to those characters, boosting their affective quality and intensity, by means of the increased intensity of the embodied simulation they generate (Wojciehowski & Gallese, 2022, p. 70). Therefore, the issue at hand is how to reconcile science with humanities or advanced technologies with philological or literary education, bringing this problem down to the level of school and academic learning that lies in our interest. The significance of the problem being addressed is illustrated by the example of a particular robot. The Johns Hopkins University website magazine reported in 2022 that artificial intelligence developed by a group of researchers had learned discriminatory and exclusionary behavioral attitudes (Rosen, 2022).2 Its learning algorithms were based on free, nonhierarchical data from the Web, facts that were devoid of cultural feedback indicating what is right and wrong, and, therefore, one might say, devoid of the “ethical factor,” i.e. based on raw, objective and unbiased information that is, after all, the ideal of empirical science.3 Artificial intelligence “learned” or perhaps it would be better to say it recalculated behavior, adapting these statistically significant and not socially desirable. The tendency to separate interpretation from the fact that is revealed here is a drive to dehumanize the world, which currently has the status of a paradigm in the exact sciences. It is worth noting that the human world as manifested in language, literature, art, or philosophy is essentially a special type of interpretation, often empirically untestable. To research a human being, therefore, involves not only studying the cells of his body (measurable and observable facts), but also mental constructs, interpretations and perceptions of reality contained in such special forms of activity as, for example, poetry. For some time now, however, we have been witnessing the growing problem of scientification of the existential experience of man. Thus, high-tech school students, based on educational models developed in STEM education, usually answer the famous Aristotelian question “What is a human being” as follows: a chain of DNA packed in cells by histone proteins. This is a “simple” and obvious definition that is 1 The strategies of identification with non-human subjects through traditional media were employed by El Lissitzky in a suprematist children’s book from the early 1920s titled The story of two squares. 2 https://hub.jhu.edu/magazine/2022/fall/racist-artificial-intelligence-robots/ (12.11.2022). 3 Since the learning algorithms were based on data downloaded from the network, the choices made by the robot can be seen as a reflection of the state of our own culture, the negative forms of expression, attitudes and behavior operating in it. 4 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 S. BOROWICZ hard to deny, since it is based on a fully falsifiable and currently preferred model of truth, based on science. However, the truth about a man from a cultural studies or philological perspective seems completely different, and the answer to the question posed by the ancient philosopher is infinitely more complicated. This problem was approached by the poet Adam Zagajewski with an anecdote about Raïssie Maritain (1883-1960), who wrote [in her memoirs] about the spiritual desert of the Sorbonne, overrun by adherents of positivism, that is, the belief that the sciences can solve all the problems of mankind. She also wrote about the effort required to walk about two hundred meters […] to the Collège de France, where there was already a different intellectual climate, because one of the professors there […] was Henri Bergson, working on a new synthesis of natural science and philosophy, trying to overcome the spiritual poverty of scientism (Zagajewski, 2007, p. 18). Also, Wystan H. Auden warned against scientification and technicization of the educational model, involving, inter alia, a preference for a particular type of truth based on empiricism. In 1958, he wrote that experimental sciences deliberately try to keep human beings on or reduce them to a sub-personal level at which they can be scientifically controlled, and it is no longer possible to know them in the poetic sense. […] In our age when the practical applications of experimental science have caused such amazing transformations in the conditions of human life that kind of truth sought by science seems to many the only kind, the most important educational role of poetry and other arts is to assert that the verb “to know” can be used in another sense than in which an experimental scientist uses it. […] an organism is more than a cluster of physico-chemical events—and for persons it is not only invalid but also immoral to seek for it. To the degree that it is possible to know a person in the scientific sense, he is not a person, that is to say, a freeman, but a slave, and our moral duty is to try to educate him to the point where such knowledge is no longer possible (Auden, 2010, p. 150). There is a beautiful paradox of knowledge here, in which only cognition through poetry or, more broadly, through literature completes the work of educating a person and allows him or her to fully exist in the community as a free individual. However, it is no longer possible to escape technology, digital humanities, robotics or digital thinking; nor is it possible to maintain the traditional mono-medial model of literature and previous culture of reading. Therefore, the effort that both poets make to go beyond the “poverty of scientism” is also ours. The Technopaideia proposed herein is, in part, an attempt at such a Bergsonian-in-spirit synthesis of advanced technologies and literary education. Schools of advanced technologies High-tech schools are units based on the STEM education approach, equipped with so-called labs where a single model of truth is cultivated COMPUTERS IN THE SCHOOLS 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 5 and developed. However, the presence of advanced technologies therein is not limited to teaching aids. Digital lab tools, robots, cloud labs, VR goggles, programming zones, interactive whiteboards or visualizers and internal e-learning platforms are not only integrated into the learning process itself (modification and redefinition levels in Ruben Puentedura’s model), but also combined with the design of educational spaces.4 It is worth to mention the PlayMaker School in Santa Monica, the ALT School (San Francisco) or the Quest2learn school network (New York), Kastelli School in Oulu and Scuola Centro Civico (SCC) in Turin functioning within The Educational Lab.5 In Poland, high-tech schools have been established, inter alia, owing to the Laboratories of the Future program in cooperation with the GovTech Center. The Zone of Discovery, Imagination and Activity program (Polish: SOWA) also plays an important role in this area.6 It consists of a network of independent units cooperating with the Copernicus Science Center. These units are equipped, inter alia, with workshop spaces called Masterspaces, special rooms designed to conduct experiments on science or technical subjects, which are the same as so-called maker labs known in American schools. However, we rarely hear of analogous spaces for humanities subjects. If they do exist, they are based on the idea of a laboratory. For example, on the laboratoriaszkolne.com website, in addition to the possibility of equipping biology or chemistry labs within the Laboratories of the Future program, one can find “ideas for history and language labs,” the latter, however, being concerned with the study of foreign languages.7 Additionally, the Lesser Poland Education Cloud program for years 2016-2023 envisages “a new model of teaching, implemented in a partnership formula in cooperation with eight universities” focusing on science subjects with the use of advanced technologies. There are, however, no humanities institutions on the list of cooperating entities (except those related to foreign language learning). In addition, the new performative pedagogy has redefined literary education in many countries along the lines of exact sciences. Examples include transformative pedagogies and cultural making, innovative solutions developed by Paulo Blikstein and his TLTL (Transformative Learning Technologies Lab) team at Columbia University. While it is necessary to develop a 4 The division of student workspace at the Scuola Centro Civico in Turin, https://torinocitylab.it/images/ documents/EduLab/EDU_LAB-2019-Layout.pdf; whereas the organization of the educational space at the PlayMaker School involves a division into a Dream Lab, a Maker Lab, and an Adventure Room, https:// gensler.com/projects/playmaker-school (13.07.2022). 5 https://torinocitylab.it/en/submit-to/challenge/educational-lab (13.07.2022). It is a part of the Torino City Lab (TCL) and Learning Technologies Accelerator (LEA) project. The unit is an experimental space in which innovative educational solutions are tested (Educational Living Lab). 6 https://kopernik.org.pl/projekty-dofinansowane/sowa (18.07.2022). 7 https://dofinansowanielaboratoria.pl (18.07.2022). 6 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240 241 242 243 244 245 246 247 248 249 250 251 252 253 254 S. BOROWICZ theoretical basis for innovative forms of education in humanities that would be adapted to conditions of a highly mediatized information society and compatible with well-developed educational methods for science, humanities should not undergo excessive scientification. By posing frequently the same questions (such as this question about a man), humanities are beginning to provide answers in the manner known from empirical sciences and, therefore, with respect to their own cognitive specificity, shallow. The model of humanities as a “prosthesis” of the exact sciences develops and profiles cognitive functions of students in a single-track manner, orienting them toward one, absolutized, and thus dangerous kind of truth, which Auden described many years ago. Technopaideia: toward a transversal subjectivity What about literature, then? How can high-tech schools be used to form free people rather than slaves for whom everything becomes a lab, including literature; people capable of going beyond thinking about the world in purely empirical terms? Technopaideia may be the answer here. One should understand it as: a. the practice of creative use of innovative technologies (e.g. interactive virtual reality experience) when interpreting literary texts, while adhering to the cognitive specificity of humanities; technologies cannot have an appropriating or destructive effect on the non-empirical model of truth on which literary studies, among others, are founded; b. a part of a philosophy of education in which technologies and digital environments behind them become a starting point for thinking about how they shape, profile, and expand students’ cognitive skills. In the case of literary studies, the technopaideia would involve integrating advanced technologies into the educational processes, in such a way that allows students to expand their interpretive competence that is essential in contemporary literature, including multimodality, multisensoriality, agency, embodied thinking associated with acts of kinesthesia and sense of space (e.g. the use of VR motion sensors). Technopaideia is thus an attempt to incorporate an inherent humanistic, philological nucleus into the empirically-oriented education model, a factor that makes it possible to maintain Auden’s paradox of knowledge. It is also important to emphasize that paideia itself is currently more than just a learning process. It consists of bringing a person into a community of a brand new type, interacting with one another in solidarity, skillfully sharing and using knowledge from different disciplines and subjects (Borowicz, 2021). This, in turn, implies a kind of a transversal mindset capable of shifting smoothly between different modalities, disciplines, COMPUTERS IN THE SCHOOLS 255 256 257 258 259 260 261 262 263 264 265 266 267 268 269 270 271 272 273 274 275 276 277 278 279 280 281 282 283 284 285 286 287 288 289 290 291 292 293 294 295 296 297 7 discourses and ultimately tearing down barriers between science and art or between science and humanities; a mindset capable of acting consciously and critically between and in different worlds.8 The most valuable offering currently coming from high-tech-based digital environments is a new type of hybrid subjectivity and communality shaped by digital participation, embodied simulation and empathetic projection, neo-tribality, transversality, immersivity, augmented being, extended models of subjectivity and even multi-subjectivity and metaversality. In other words, it is, to some extent, the “equipment” with which a student comes to school. Meanwhile, in many cases, traditional methods of teaching literature force students to adopt and develop a cognitive model that is unfamiliar to them and quite anachronistic, based on media environments of the twentieth or even nineteenth century. This dissonance ultimately negatively affects a young person’s ability and willingness to assimilate and develop a sensibility based on the literariness of the world (Xu et al., 2022). Contemporary culture offers an immersive, hypertextual, multimodal or even polytopic experience and not necessarily a human-centered model of being in the world. Immersivity is not merely intellectual or textual here, but immediate and corporeally engaging in a way that is far more appealing than a traditional book. A brief review of London exhibitions from the past few months that are offering VR experience shows the power of the message mediated by advanced technologies as well as the scale of the problem (see “transversale Vernunft,” Welsch, 1997).9 For example, the description of the exhibition We live in an ocean of air is as follows: [it is] a multi-sensory immersive installation by London-based immersive art collective Marshmallow Laser Feast. The work unveils the invisible yet symbiotic connections that bind the animal, plant, human and natural worlds into one enchanting tapestry of wonder, all in stunning virtual reality.10 Visual-audial-corporeal bewilderment is a type of experience that mono-medial literature in its classic Greenbergian frames can hardly compete with in the twenty first century. Besides, advanced technologies are already not only an inalienable part of modern art but also of physics or biology classes, i.e. subjects dynamically responding to the new type of mediatization and technicization of life. “We are very near to the time when virtually no essential human function, physical or mental, will lack an artificial counterpart” (Moravec, 1988, p. 2). Are humanities, however, 8 “Transversale Vernunft” is a postmodern state of mind and a mode of thinking which analyzes different configurations of rationality and focuses on connections between them. 9 https://feverup.com/london (02.07.2022), see also https://marshmallowlaserfeast.com/ (02.07.2022). 10 https://marinabaysands.com/museum/exhibitions/we-live-in-an-ocean-of-air.html (02.07.2022). 8 298 299 300 301 302 303 304 305 306 307 308 309 310 311 312 313 314 315 316 317 318 319 320 321 322 323 324 325 326 327 328 329 330 331 332 333 334 335 336 337 338 339 340 S. BOROWICZ adequately prepared for such a significant change? If a literature teacher wants to creatively develop students’ new competencies and use them to study literary texts created before the era of the so-called new media, he or she needs to be adequately prepared. Such a teacher should not only have a well-equipped “Literature Workspace” at his or her disposal, but also be well-versed in mediatization processes and intermedia theory. Hence, I believe that future literature teachers can no longer be educated without access to classes on new technologies; nor can these classes (as is often the case) focus on knowledge of the tools or applications themselves, since proficiency in their use is not the point, as the objective is to understand how technology affects the learning process and how to make the most of its functions to enhance it. It is also worth realizing that today’s technologies are not new media per se, but platforms that merge existing technologies (electronic media + the Internet + location-based and Augmented Reality technologies) in a new mode of digital composite imaging, data association and socially maintained data exchange and communication (Lapenta, 2011, 15). Therefore, education pathways for future teachers need to be remodeled with the aim of equipping them with knowledge on mediatization and technicization processes, and the impact they have on students’ cognitive and interpretive abilities. Moreover, a literature teacher will find many valuable learning methods and tools in the constructivist-conectivist model of STEM education, such as model-based inquiry, game-based learning, exploration technologies, connected learning or bifocal modeling (see Blikstein, 2014). It is also worth considering how to creatively apply and re-adapt the formula of labs (media labs, mission labs, labs in a cloud) for teaching literature which aims, after all, to sustain specifically human forms of sensitivity rooted in language. The challenge is how to create ideatories, workshops of ideas, spaces of interpretation, or @goras, where students will use such strategies as embodied simulation or startups, i.e. nonpermanent team initiatives made to solve specific problems, such as interpretation of literary texts through performative actions, robot theaters, cyber theaters, or media experiments, among others, rather than “laboratories of literature.” The metaversal theater is already a fact, as can be noticed through the activities of the Dream Adoption Society.11 It should be emphasized that children begin to develop special competencies (including transliteracy) and operate non-linear forms of 11 https://dreamadoptionsociety.com (20.07.2022). COMPUTERS IN THE SCHOOLS 341 342 343 344 345 346 347 348 349 350 351 352 353 354 355 356 357 358 359 360 361 362 363 364 365 366 367 368 369 370 371 372 373 374 375 376 377 378 379 380 381 382 383 9 thinking (hypertextuality, think digital, and performativity) through convergence processes as early as in their childhood. These intellectual activities are very much desired and important in the humanities, however, they do not receive a proper enhancement in literary classes. Although literature functions in new media ecosystems that emanate from fundamental changes at the level of social life, educational pathways are not profiled with new media competencies of students in mind. In addition, teachers use many innovative tools selectively and at the most elementary level. Furthermore, there is an insufficient number of ideas for the application of technologically advanced literature workspaces. Teachers are often required to replace traditional teaching tools with digital ones. Occasionally robots, VR goggles, or gamification models are used.12 In many countries, elements of programming are still regarded as pure fantasy in literary classes. This does not help to prepare students for the multi-modality of contemporary literature, for its inherent polysensoriality, polyphonicity, and spatiality; nor does it build an interpretive skillset tailored to the cultural reality of the twenty first century, and ultimately does not enable finding values in mono-medial literature that are relevant to contemporary man. Therefore, it does not set up conditions for a productive reinterpretation of literary classics, the “great books,” and therefore for active use of cultural heritage. After all, literature is no longer based exclusively on the letter, but also on a kinesthetic, multisensory spatial experience, immersiveness, interactivity, and even agency or so-called secondary orality. Technopaideia in progress Academia Electronica, which is a non-institutionalized educational center operating in Second Life and Spatial.io, may be a good example of implementation of advanced technologies in humanities and their embedment in teaching processes at the university level.13 Currently, experimental solutions are also being sought at Jagiellonian University’s Multimodal Educational and Cultural Research Center, where I am leading the “Educational function of heritage sites in literature teaching” project. It aims to develop new curricular pathways for integrating academic knowledge into the horizon of teaching with living heritage and embedded education. The idea is to use 12 Very well gamified classes in ancient history (I Spy Greece) and English literature (Self on the Stand) for the elementary school level have been developed as a part of a connected learning approach by programmers and educators at the Institute of Play in New York, see https://clalliance.org/institute-of-play (18.07.2022). The CLA (Connected Learning Alliance) was created as an initiative of the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub operating at the Humanities Research Institute, University of California. 13 https://academia-electronica.net 10 384 385 386 387 388 389 390 391 392 393 394 395 396 397 398 399 400 401 402 403 404 405 406 407 408 409 410 411 412 413 414 415 416 417 418 419 420 421 422 423 424 425 426 S. BOROWICZ the potential of cultural heritage sites (from antiquity to the twentieth century), as well as cultural and educational institutions, to embed knowledge acquired by students in specific micro-historical frameworks through the direct experience effect, active participation and spatial thinking. This approach uses the educational power of heritage sites, affective practices and spatial embedment (Stolare et al., 2021). It also involves the performative use of heritage sites in the construction of new educational strategies based on the discursivization of spatial activities and locative media. The aim of combining advanced technologies (in the form of sensors and VR goggles), and location-based media with real cultural environments is to go beyond traditional interpretive practices and build new cognitive competencies based on immersivity and the so-called networked art objects. These activities can be executed, among others, through strategies of situationist drift, transurbation, embodied simulation, analysis of documentation/objects in galleries or reconstruction of sites in metaverse (so-calles non-sites) and juxtaposition with heritage sites, cybercartographies of heritage sites, elements of gamification (so-called missions), or essayistic meta-stories and photo-essays about heritage sites typical for land art practices. In the embodied reception of heritage sites, I use cartographic imagination, participatory mapping, bio mapping, emotional landscapes, or neogeography.14 Drifts or walking through sites such as the Pnyx, Lycaeon, Plato’s Academy, or the agora in Athens involve, among other things, combining theoretical knowledge (teachers’ commentary) with knowledge that is produced on site as an effect of emerging questions, discourses, embodied being, digitally mediated, mapped, and embedded. Therefore, such an experimental model of knowledge production is taking place in a hybrid setting consisting of human and non-human actors, the physical world, a communication component, the electromagnetic spectrum and technical objects. As Henri Lefebvre said, it creates a situation or a moment that is new, surprising, and endowed with a creative context (Lefebvre, 1997). The reception strategies emerging during such drifts aim at building a critical apparatus of a new type that may be used later by students in their reinterpretations of conventional literary works. The case of Pnyx – introductory research Pnyx (“pressed one against the other”) is the name of one of the most important hills in Athens, located opposite the western slope of Acropolis and the Areopagus. Pnyx was the site in which popular assembly, so-called ekklesia, were held during the classical period. That is the place where all of the most renowned Athenian speakers, such as Themistokles, 14 See https://biomapping.net/; https://emotionalcartography.net/; https://paris.emotionmap.net/paris.pdf COMPUTERS IN THE SCHOOLS 427 428 429 430 431 432 433 434 435 436 437 438 439 440 441 442 443 444 445 446 447 448 449 450 451 452 453 454 455 456 457 458 459 460 461 462 463 464 465 466 467 468 469 11 Demosthenes and Pericles gave their speeches. The hill’s architectural arrangement was adapted to serve a public purpose and comprises a lectern (bema) and a semicircle auditorium for assembly members in the form of a terrace that was carved in a rock. In case of Pnyx, the situational drift strategy enables project participants to play the role of a polis citizen, a speaker, a member of the audience and the assembly, in particular whenever such action comprises a part of gamified classes, such as the I spy Greece project developed within the Institute of Play.15 The drift’s basis comprises bodily and sensory-motor, mainly visual, sensations, the ability to situate oneself against other humans, objects and elements of landscape, including recognizing their scale and placement (body cognition). Studies that I conducted in situ during the fall of 2022 on a group of 15 anonymous volunteers enabled me to create a map of density patterns of biosensory activity. After a walk along a designated route with stops in pre-determined places, participants were supposed to indicate on digital maps places or objects on which they focused, starting with those that aroused most interest. The result showed that over 90% of respondents focused on three places: Acropolis, Agora and Areopagus, which comprise a “scenic triangle” consistent with the site’s specular policy. Pnyx’s significance during the classical period is remarkable exactly due to its topographic location with regard to Acropolis, Areopagus and Agora, i.e. the political and religious heart of Athens. Everyone speaking in front of the assembly had these sites in front of them and perceived them as a kind of a monumental, “theatrical set” for the ekklesia. The topic of Athens’ citizens’ discussion, i.e. polis’ best interest, was thus made visible and materialized through that view from the above, from a perspective adequate for an all-knowing narrator-observer (third-person narration). Athenians had the subject of their debate literally in front of their eyes, which constituted a playing field for a visual, rhetorical and bodily game between the speaker, participants and their surroundings. The city landscape’s panoramic view enabling a distanced and full outlook can also be treated as a part of a pictorial rhetoric that reinforces speaker’s message. Athens were “displayed” to participants of the assembly giving their speech, and, as a result, they were able to reflect upon them and consider the message in an active manner. The visualization schema that complies with the world picture’s model of time is strictly connected with the axiological sphere and the model of cognition that was developing in the classical culture, based on a rationalized stance with regard to the world (a human as a distanced observer that is able to make an objective evaluation). 15 https://clalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Mission-Pack-I-Spy-Greece.pdf 12 470 471 472 473 474 475 476 477 478 479 480 481 482 483 484 485 486 487 488 489 490 491 492 493 494 495 496 497 498 499 500 501 502 503 504 505 506 507 508 509 510 511 512 S. BOROWICZ Therefore, Pnyx’s geographic location with regard to Agora, Areopagus and Acropolis realizes the primacy of a particular thinking model developed within the Greek world, that is based on distancing oneself, reflection, observation and theory (gr. theōría, “carefully observing,” theōréō, “looking, considering,” theōrós, “spectator”), and rational premises. One is supposed to make important decisions as a speaker and a spectator on the Pnyx, looking at one’s polis from a distance. Considering this rhetorical scheme can constitute an interesting exercise while organizing various types of school debates that are aimed at practising arguments and discussion, for instance during a Socratic Smackdown, i.e. a model developed by Rebecca Grodner for Quest to Learn schools in New York.16 It is also worth emphasizing that a multi-modal 3D interface named Bema enables active participation in a debate on Pnyx in virtual reality (Kim et al., 2015). Summary I believe that the future of highly technicized school and university is a kind of multimodal education, where science can be integrated with humanities through a network of transdisciplinary modules. Programming skills as a new form of literacy and a deeper knowledge of mediatization processes are fundamental for such multimodal meta-platforms. Additionally, within the perspective of a couple of dozens of years, it will be necessary to incorporate self-aware non-human entities into learning processes instead of robots with computational “thinking” as is the case today. The goal of such integrated education based on advanced technologies is a new polymathy and a transversal mindset that will enable students to move freely in multiple modalities and diverse (in traditional terms) learning areas, while maintaining a poetic sensibility in the age of highly technicized societies. Connectivity, dialog, and communication between the specificity of individual subjects or different “languages” of learning is already the basis of innovative education in Finland, among others, where newly designed schools have no clear division into classrooms, and students can freely “flow” between courses by mixing their ages. Finally, it should be emphasized once again that the truth sought within science is fundamentally different from the truth that literature has been containing, developing, and sustaining—from Gilgamesh to technopoetry. Our task is to ensure that cognition in the philological sense is not completely supplanted in school (or university) education by cognition in the scientific sense. It is literature, regardless of the media it uses, within the 16 https://clalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/SocraticSmackdown.pdf (03.05.2023). COMPUTERS IN THE SCHOOLS 513 514 515 516 517 518 519 520 521 522 523 524 525 526 527 528 529 530 531 532 533 534 535 536 537 538 539 540 541 542 543 544 545 546 547 548 549 550 551 552 553 554 555 13 framework of specific languages it uses, that makes it possible to create human subjectivity and fulfill social needs of an individual. At the same time, it is worth emphasizing that technologies have been changing civilization since Paleolithic hominids began to chip the first stones. They have always shaped the way our species thinks, subsequently significantly redefining the most human of the sciences, philosophy and philology. However, in terms of the ability to make and use tools, technology is significantly older than literature. It is also related to learning at the most rudimentary level. 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