As you'll know if you frequently author content for a blog or for distribution via any medium, planning is the key to maintaining consistency and quality. It's a rare day indeed that I wake up at 6.00am, the proverbial light-bulb goes on and I say to myself "Eureka! Adaptive learning! That's what I need to tell the people about today!"
Well, today isn't one of those days, but this post is good, so I still urge you to read on...
There are many myths and misapprehensions non-Irish people have about Ireland; leprechauns, drinking alcohol to excess, rustic types saying "Sure and begorrah." I can't even spell shillayley shylleleagh shillelagh, and you can't get Lucky Charms here.
“Say you like me hat!” Tom Cruise in Far and Away
In fairness, we do play it up a bit to get the tourists in, but post-Celtic Tiger, we're all broke and we need your cash.
Some of the characterizations of Ireland are based in fact though, among them our rich literary heritage. Remarkably, for a country with a population of about 4.5 million people (about the same number of people as Greater Manchester in the UK, or the Boston Metro area in the US) we have produced four Nobel Prize winners for literature: William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett, and Seamus Heaney.
I have always been intrigued by the later works of W.B. Yeats, and particularly how this master of traditional poetic forms adapted to Modernism.
Yeats' 1920 poem "The Second Coming" has an fascinating couplet:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
and the first phrase in particular has always resonated with me - and not just with me: "Things fall apart" has appeared in creative works as diverse as Chinua Achebe's eponymous 1958 novel through to an episode of Ugly Betty.
As it's the first anniversary of the Lehman Brothers' collapse, I've been considering writing a post on the economic "anarchy ...loosed upon the world" and it's impact on the Learning & Development industry as a follow-up to my 2008 post Recession and the challenge to e-learning. This post is not that post, but while I was researching the subject, and considering some approaches to fusing the unlikely bedfellows of high finance and poetry in a blog article, I happened upon an excellent interactive Yeats exhibition hosted by the National Library of Ireland.
In it, you (the viewer) can explore the environment Second Life-like, interact with the exhibits, "pick up" original MSS, and get a sense of the times and places Yeats inhabited, including a set from the Abbey Theatre, and the poet's library.
If you're a Constructivist (like me) you'll appreciate how well this exhibition aligns with Bruner's Principles (see Table 1).
Table 1 Principles of constructivism
| Principle | Definition | |
| Readiness | Instruction must be concerned with the experiences and contexts that make the student willing and able to learn | |
| Spiral organization | Structure. | The content must be structured so that it can be grasped by the learner. |
| Sequence. | Material must be presented in the most effective sequences. | |
| Generation | “Going beyond the information given” - Instruction should be designed to facilitate extrapolation and or fill in the gaps | |
I have created a short video to demonstrate some of the features and functionality of this exhibition, and I encourage you to "drop in" and take a look yourself; you never know - it might just be a template for the type of immersive learning environment you need to engage and support your learners.
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References:
Bruner, J. S. (1966) Toward a Theory of Instruction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
National Library of Ireland. (2009) The Life and Works of William Butler Yeats. Internet: Available from: http://www.nli.ie/yeats/main.html (Broadband and Adobe Flash Player Required). Accessed 14 September 2009 --
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