Final Blog post

Folk learning is a type of knowledge taught through other people, to which collaboration and communication are essential principles. Although some people think that folk knowledge is in a separate category from oral, written, and print knowledge, folk learning is at the base of all types of knowledge because it can be incorporated into all forms.

Final: So long, Farewell

Knowledge institutions build upon each other. Each plays a different role in molding the human experience. You need them all to gain the ultimate human experience. Yet despite the necessity of every type of knowledge institution, the tradition with the most powerful effect on human emotion is oral knowledge.

Final: Essay Based on the Salon

Printed knowledge has been very important in history in relation to religion. The Reformation is a great example of how printed knowledge impacted many people. This being true, I argue that oral and written knowledge has had a bigger impact than that of printed words.  Oral knowledge has a power over people when delivered right. A Great speaker can move many people to action. Written knowledge solidifies what oral knowledge can’t. An idea can be preserved through writing.

Final Exam Post: All I've learned

Looking back at history we clearly see and trace how different formats for the transfer of knowledge, folk, oral, written, and printed, have each contributed to the basis of knowledge available to many today. Despite all of the knowledge that has reached the modern world, many other pieces of knowledge did not make it due to censorship in each time and unique to each medium used to preserve knowledge. Whether on purpose or not each form of knowledge has inherent cracks that can allow even the most valued knowledge to slip through, our problem is to find them and stop them before we lose more. 

Notes for the Final: Maddie

FOLK KNOWLEDGE:

Through my self-directed learning I seemed to focus on cultural folk knowledge, as opposed to things you would learn at home. I discovered that traditions are a huge part or folk knowledge.

What I learned from other’s blog posts was that not all folk knowledge is something that you would necessarily guess. Through Emily’s post on manners, we can start to see that not all knowledge is though a “learning institution” or part of the category of “classical learning” (literature, arithmetic, etc.)

During the project where we had to teach another person something that we know and when they taught us something, I taught a friend to play the harp and a friend taught me to do a French manicure at home. I learned that we don’t realize many of the things we have to teach others. It doesn’t seem like a skill to us.

These projects taught me to collaborate, which was an essential principal to learning folk knowledge.

Final Notes: Kimberly

Here are some of my ideas for the final. I am curious to see the themes that everyone else found!

Notes for Final: Erin

These are my notes for the final event/exam we are having tomorrow. I'm not sure if they are supposed to be in a table format like Emily's, but I just can't think that way. For these notes I first went through all of my posts, and tried to categorize them by focus area and then unit. My main focus for this class was to try and bring some relevance through self directed learning, so that's where most of my posts went. I then took a larger look at our blog in general. Here they are!

Notes for the Final: Emily

	Unit 1: Folk Knowledge	Unit 2: Oral Knowledge	Unit 3: Written Knowledge	Unit 4: Printed Knowledge
Self- Directed Learning	~  Taught/learned a skill ~  Research types of folk knowledge (singing, cooking, medicine, beauty) ~  Etiquette	~ Akkadia: ~ Hymns/songs ~ Myths (water theme, flood and Moses stories) ~ Origins ~ Songs brought together conquered countries by combining deity	~  Akkadian Cuneiform ~  Propaganda (cylinders) ~  Mainly religious and business ~  Adopted and modified Sumerian writing. Sumerian writing and language became obsolete ~  Sufism	~  How printed knowledge affected the Reformation ~  Propaganda ~  Books and witch burning ~  Annotated Bibliography ~  Using the library system ~  Woodcuts
Other’s Blogging	~  Braiding ~  Learning to drive stick (Erin) ~  School ground knowledge (Kim) ~  Harp ~  Manicures, beauty (Madi)	~  Myths ~  Origin stories ~  Songs ~  How languages died out (Kim) ~  Kim: Samaria ~  Erin: Navajo ~  Madi: Rome	~  Cartography ~  Codex ~  Egyptian hieroglyphics ~  Paper making	~  Typography ~  Censorship ~  Print and Religion ~  Book Binding ~  Standardization
Collaborative Learning	~  Class discussion Bryn Mawr commencement address ~  Oral group test	~  Group video ~  King Benjamin Speech	~  Group projects about writing and translating ~  I learned that if a language didn’t have a written language, it soon died out	~  Group editing of papers ~  Class discussion: Walter Ong
Projects/ Activities	Teaching/ learning a “folk” skill	~  King Benjamin Speech, group practice of speech and performance	~  Rosetta stone Project ~  Library Speaker about writings in books/ scrolls/ on papyrus	~  Written paper ~  Library Speaker about codex’s

King James Exhibit

Visiting the "Life and Legacy of the King James Bible" exhibit at the Harold B. Lee Library was an interesting experience for me. Like Erin, I did not particularly enjoy the exhibit. I visited awhile ago, and all I really got out of the experience was a slightly increased appreciation for the history and evolution of the Bible. However, to me, a book is only as important as the knowledge inside it. If you're not going to actually read and handle a book, it is worthless. Books in glass cases are therefore worth only as much as what's on the open page: just a small coin compared to the wealth of knowledge potentially contained in the pages.

The Essay

During this past week, we were given an assignment that required us to write a paper on whatever topic we chose for the annotated bibliography. The topic that I had chosen was religion and print in Germany. Luckily, I had found many books to go with my topic and I found it really interesting!

A Paper on Censorship (part 3)

This is it! The final draft of my little paper on censorship! Thanks for all of your help and hindrance along the way! As the semester draws to a close most of the authors will begin fading out of writing as our self-directed learning shifts in different directions. Hopefully we'll all help you to continue to follow us on our adventures on the web.

Visiting King James

Found here. 

The other day I too visited the exhibit on the King James Bible in the Harold B. Lee Library on the beautiful campus of Brigham Young University. But rather that post solely my impressions of the exhibit, I want to share what my classmates have said. Below the break is a list of the classmate's name and a couple of words about what they said. For the picture at right I took the phrases my classmates used and put them in a Wordle. (I would take 2 min and explore wordles, they are the word pictures you never knew you needed for your next blog post.)

Learning Outcome + Thesis

So I think for my paper, I'm going to look at whether the Reformation was spread by preaching or printing. This ties to learning outcome three:

COMMUNICATING KNOWLEDGE
Students recognize differences in the forms through which knowledge is preserved, communicated, and experienced and can interpret the consequences of these differences historically and personally.

My paper will explore (hopefully) the consequences of the printing press, and how it communicated the Reformation more quickly and effectively than just preaching alone. What do you guys think?

A Paper on Censorship (part 2)

As the due date looms nearer I have posted my very first rough draft of my paper on a Google doc here. I have also ventured to post some of my notes from the reading/research I have done with this paper here.

How to Help:

1. Look for errors! (I am not the worlds best speller!)
2. Find ways to expand/clarify my arguments.
3. Find ways to expand/clarify the opposition.
4. Think of how I can include a learning outcome.
5. Add general comments either here or on the docs on how I can improve.

Thanks People of the Internet!

Clarification

Hey guys, can we work on not giving all of our posts the exact same title? Maybe thesis: *insert your topic here*? Thanks!

Thesis: Print and Reform Movements

As you know, our class was assigned a paper for the unit capstone project. I am trying to come up with a thesis and was wondering what you guys think about this, or if you have any other ideas. My bibliography can be found here.

Posiible thesis: Though the Catholic Church had powerful leverage, the printing press limited the influence and allowed the spread of many reform movements.

Thesis

Hey guys! Think I could get some feedback on my thesis for the paper? And just for reference, my bibliography can be found here and was on the art of book binding..

Thesis: "Although many people think that binding books only had an effect on the general cost and long term preservations of books, few know that the strengthening of the Bible and church was aided by book binding since Bibles were more portable and light weight, could be searched through more effectively, and were more economical."

A Paper on Censorship (part 1)

Yesterday our instructors announced a paper as our final unit project for this unit.  Madison did a good job of capturing nearly everyone's reactions in the beginning of her post yesterday. So now that it has settled in that I am actually going to be writing a formal paper for this class, I asked myself, "Self what are you going to write about in this paper?". Myself then answered, "Something about censorship". And that's about as far as I've gotten. Now I need your help!


People of the internet I am asking for ideas/sides to argue in a paper themed on censorship. There is the obvious how much should we allow censorship/freedom of speech topic, but I am looking for something that has more to do with what I've already researched. (The books I've read in research can be found in my bibliography.) Probably it will focus more on how effective censorship was in the early days of printing, focused  in England. Look for updates and send thoughts my way!


Thanks!
Erin


P.S. This paper is also supposed to address one of the learning outcomes for this course.  And I'm thinking it will be number 3: COMMUNICATING KNOWLEDGE
Students recognize differences in the forms through which knowledge is preserved, communicated, and experienced and can interpret the consequences of these differences historically and personally.

(updated 2/12/11 11:30am with learning outcome)

Book binding paper

Well, that was unexpected! This morning in our Civilizations class at BYU we were assigned a paper for our final! (A more detailed description of the assignment can be found here.) How unconventional of Zina Peterson and Gideon Burton to do something as conventional as a paper. It's so filled with irony.

Alright, so it won't be so bad, but what

do I argue?? The paper is supposed to be about the recent bibliography assignment where we had to find 5-10 books about a certain topic revolving around printed books. I picked the "art" of book binding because I'd never thought of book binding in this way, and it interested me. I'd never really considered it an "art", let alone given much thought to the binding process at all.




So near the end of class I decided to have a little talk with Dr. Peterson, and see if she had any ideas on the pretty straight forward topic. She reminded me to search the Harold B. Lee Library website for sources, and told me that, although it doesn't seem so, there are many people who feel strongly about what book binding has brought about. Bound books were more durable and cost efficient, but more specifically, they could be used to do such things as missionary work abroad since they were more cost efficient, durable, and compact. This is what I plan to do my paper on. I'd love hear suggestions, and if anyone has any ideas on what I should write about or what they might like to know more about concerning book binding, please, do tell. I'd also love to hear what you guys are planning for your papers.

More on Censorship

After posting my annotated bibliography on my initial research into censorship I kept thinking about part of the story I didn't share. So in a spare moment today I looked further into the idea and this is what I found. (yes these are all online resources, but that's what you get for asking a child of the digital age!)

The Story (Part 2):

So as I was researching and flipping through books about censorship I kept thinking about a book that I had read in the 9th grade, which I was told had a central theme of censorship, Fahrenheit 451. To be sure I had the right book I checked in out on Wikipedia, where I found this:

Annotated Bibliography: English Censorship (before 1700)

This is one of my least favorite kinds of posts. I call this type "the assignment" post. Unique to a course based blog, this type of post is generally lacking flavor, swag, personality, d all of the above. However, despite my personal feelings about this post I am going to do it anyways for my grade and because someone out there might appreciate it. So here goes nothing. For more information on the assignment itself check here. Basically what follows is an annotated bibliography on the topic of censorship before 1700. The tale of how I found all of these books can be found at the bottom of the post, if you're here for entertainment value, or to grade, start there. The links lead to the GoodReads page for each book. (Which can also be a good starting place for research!) 

Reform Movements brought about by Print

First of all, I'd like to apologize for not posting last week. I realized too late that being out of town would mean no internet connection.

I loved visiting the library and perusing the shelves for books on these reform movements. As Blaine said in his post about printing presses, I loved how the books are grouped by subject. A library is much more convenient than Google in this respect. Online search engines may be fast and easily accessible, but you have to sift through a lot of fluff to really get down to the real scholarly materials; whereas in the library, if you find one good book nearby will be more. My favorite part about this was actually handling the books. An online article may say the same thing, but there is something about handling the leather-bound pages of a book that makes the information inside seem more real, more reliable. A couple of the areas I had difficulty finding any books in the library, including the online databases, so I had to turn to Google books. After handling the "real" references, it sort of felt like a betrayal.

Before the break in class we talked about the Catholic Church and the changes that were brought about by the printing press. One subject I found especially interesting was the different reform movements. Seen as heresy by the Catholic Church, these movements believed not just different doctrine (or the explanation of dogma), but different dogma itself (the immovable parts of a belief system). The different reforms were as follows:

Print and Religion

As I started to look for books that had to do with the topic of the Protestant reformation, I found many printed resources about the change of religion in general so that is what I decided to focus my research on. My plan was to first check out the library to see what it had to offer. Once I had found the section where print was discussed, I discovered that there were A LOT of books. I picked up a few because their titles described what I was in search of, and a few I chose just because the covers were so old that I had to read it! Reading these books, I am a little sad that I just have to give a brief overview of them. I would have liked to quote some of the books because a few of the authors had personality oozing out of their writing! Especially Amy Cruse. Her style of writing was informative, yet entertaining.

The art of binding

When I did a simple search on bookbinding, I found many titles referring to bookbinding as an “art”. I had never considered bookbinding as this but as I looked more into the art of making codex I understood more about the art of book making. The way that I went about finding this category was through ScholarSearch on the Harold B. Lee Library website which allows one to refine published works by type (book, journal, article) or even by subject. The website even shows where to find the book in the HBLL.

Written Knowledge Final

This is a little Prezi presentation on our final for the Written Unit.

Rosetta Stone Project on Prezi

Posts from other members of the group:

• Brianne
• Mike
• Will
• Morgan
• Holland

Updated 29/11/11 with links to posts from other, and the prezi was changed to add suggestions from readers.

The Standard

As I came upon a small article the other day entitled Five Events that Shaped the History of English (which can be read here), I noticed standardization among the five events. The article labels the Anglo-Saxton Settlement, the Scandinavian settlements, colonization/globalization, the Norman Conquest (1066 and after), and standardization as the five most influential events in the course of the English Language. The start of my research on standardization began here.

Restoration v. Reformation

I fully intended for this post to be super awesome and feature my first prezi presentation as a testament to the sweet changes brought by a new medium. As it turns out prezi is harder to work with than I had previously imagined, so it isn't something I can do in an hour of unfocused work. You'll get to see that in the next couple of days as I work in some focused time...

Learning to Learn

The codex form is highly preferred for how durable and compact it is; yet where did it come from? Well, it didn’t just pop out of nothingness! The earliest form of codex was a wax tablet, which could be bound together at the edges. Since what was being written in was wax, it could be smoothed out and redone if needed, nothing was really permanent. No one gets everything perfect the first time, so it makes sense that the Romans created a way of writing for learning. The instruments and materials they used were not as expensive as an alternative like animal skin. Messing up was just part of the process of learning.

Books Burn People

From as early as 560B.C., people have been condemning witches. Exodus 22:18 "Thou shalt not suffer a sorceress to live." In 1484 and 1580, books were printed to warn the people of witchcraft. The first was commissioned by Pope Innocent the VIII and the second by Charles IX of France. The hysteria escalated as people started to read the books. So as you can see, books can burn people.

1484                                                                                1508

Egyptian Frustration

For the end of unit project, I am in the Hebrew/Islam group. For our artifact, we created a double-sided scroll with two passages of scripture: one from the Qu'ran, written in Arabic, and one from the Torah, written in Hebrew. That, however, was the easy part. For the Rosetta project, my group received an Egyptian Hieroglyphic to translate. It turns out that it is very difficult to translate Egyptian logograms. We tried to find a professor to help us, but none were available. So, we went to the library. 10 books and 4 hours later, we still weren't sure what any of it said. We tried to find online Egyptian dictionaries, but everything we found seemed to be directed towards children or high school students. We tried to contact the African group so they could hint at which book to use, but it seemed they either didn't know the title or didn't answer. So after several hours, we just took the symbols we found and strung them together as best as we could. I'm sure the translation is incorrect, but we tried our best. And we were able to correctly translate the English sentence we came up with into Hebrew and Arabic. This assignment taught me quite a few things:

1. I gained a greater appreciation for the people who wrote with actual feather pens. We were using a calligraphy pen and it was extremely difficult. I can't imagine using a feather. It took a long time to get the ink flowing. You have to hold it at the precise angle so it doesn't smear, and you have to take just the right amount of time on each letter so the ink isn't too thick or too thin. And we learned that if the ink isn't flowing, don't suck on the pen, or your mouth will be black.

Yey for Clay!

For the final from the writing section, we have had to write in the form that our civilizations wrote in, translate another language and write it in our own. This has been a very challenging project because there is no quick translation tool for Akkadian.
Our group wrote in Akkadian and had to translate Chinese into it. This is what our final products look like:

Chinese                                                        Akkadian                                              English

I think they turned out AMAZING!

Celebrating 400 years

As I visited the Life and Legacy of the King James Exhibit at the Harold B. Lee Library I was able to learn so much about the history of something I hold so sacred. The Bible has played such a role in my life as I based much of my conversion to the Church of Jesus Christ of LDS on it and my personal testimony.

Just as King James I rose to the thrown, tensions were growing between the Puritans and the Church of England, especially since the puritans rejected the divine authority of kings. King James I believed that the Puritans, along with the Geneva Bible, were hindering the monarchy.

In 1604, he gathered an assembly of Puritan and Church of England leaders together to let their resentments and grievances air out about the church reforms. James did not approve of the propositions made by the Puritans but he did listen up when they mentioned a possible new Bible translation. Although the puritans may have wanted a retranslation of the Bishop’s Bible, James commissioned a new translation entirely.

Richard Bancroft, the Bishop of London, who then qualified scholars and translation rules to guide the work, oversaw the process of the new translation. He established ecclesiastical posts for the translators, since neither the King nor Parliament were paying for the new translation. Portions of the Biblical text were divided between groups of translators. Their ultimate goal was to find the most accurate translations for the Greek or Hebrew terms, even if that meant adding marginal notes. The divided translations were

then brought together for the final review in front of a group of delegates for approval. After that, the final copy was given to the King’s printer, Robert Barker, (who had a royal patent which allowed him the monopoly on the printing of Bibles.)

Barker received no payment for printing the King James Version of the Bible from the King, the Church of England, or Parliament. Instead he made financial partners to help with the burden of buying new types, paper, ink, and labor. This information and more on the topic can be found here.

So many people were dedicated to finding the most inspired and direct word of God. We can see that the coming about of His word has a long history with many people giving so much to a cause they felt was inspired. Where would we be without the King James Version?

Without Missin' a Beat

In the idyllic example of the studious student that I am, I started this post by poking around on THE BLOG, and trying to fulfill the learning outcomes exactly, came across this post. This post reminded me that while having fun learning from and serving the people on the Navajo Reservation are good ideas, this class requires a bit more research out of me. In this case you will now read about my words on Mozart. Yes, that's right, if you stay tuned you too can know what the engineer thinks of the crazy musician and what he could possibly contribute to the world of knowledge. Mostly the world of written knowledge.

Chapbooks

Chapbooks were early examples of novels. They were cheap and easy to read so the poor would be able to understand them. They covered a wide range of topics: romance, poetry, recipes, etc... Chapbooks created an available source of literature making people want to learn how to read because they can purchase their own literature.

Islamic Calligraphy

Most of my group for the final project was studying an Islamic nation, and since I have been studying Samaria, a Hebrew nation, I decided to research Islam and its written tradition to get up-to-speed.

Islamic cultures write in calligraphy. Calligraphy is basically the art of handwriting. In Islamic cultures, it is forbidden to draw God or represent God with images, so they make the words describing Him as pretty as possible. They also intertwine the letters and symbols to make it look more like a picture, It was the main way Islamic cultures physically preserved the Qur'an, so the art of calligraphy is highly respected and appreciated.

There are a few different forms of Arabic/Islamic calligraphy. There is the geometric style, which is clear-cut. The consonants and vowels are sometimes distinguished with dashes and dots to make reading easier. The cursive style is more decorative and still easily read.

Calligraphy is traditionally written using a dried reed or bamboo pen, called a qalam. Before paper, papyrus and parchment were used for the calligraphy, but after paper, calligraphy-making exploded so that the Muslim world had thousands of books while Europe still only had a few dozen. The ink used for calligraphy was often colored to make it more impressive. Calligraphy was also inscribed on coins and woven into silks.

In addition, mosques are decorated with calligraphy, both inside and out. Typically, it is combined with Arabesque, the geometric and beautiful art of Islam. The words and patterns are written on the walls of the mosque, in accordance with the functions of different parts of the mosque.

Cartography

The earliest known map is the subject of some debate since the definition of a map is not clear and since some artifacts thought to be maps might be categorized as something else. An example of this is a wall painting, which may be the oldest map, depicting the ancient Anatolian city, Çatalhöyük, which has been dated back to the late 7th millennium BCE.

The ancient Greeks and Romans had maps of their own too. The latest being Anaximander in the 6^th century BC, but the most known being in Ptolemy’s discourse on cartography, Geographia, written in the 2^nd century AD. This work contained Ptolemy’s world map according to what the Western society knew at the time.

During the medieval times, European maps were centered on religious views. T-O maps (also O and T maps, or O-T maps) were common during that time. They depicted Jerusalem in the center and east towards the top of the map. These maps were named this because of how they look like the letter T inside of an O with Europe being on the bottom left, Africa on the bottom right, and Asia on top.

The 7th-century scholar, Isidore of Seville, depicts the known world through a T-O map in his Etymologiae (chapter 14, de terra et partibus):

(translated)

“The [inhabited] mass of solid land is called round after the roundness of a circle, because it is like a wheel... Because of this, the Ocean flowing around it is contained in a circular limit, and it is divided in three parts, one part being called Asia, the second Europe, and the third Africa.”

They made maps according to what they knew of, which were the three semi-connected continents.

Creating maps has clearly been of great interest to early peoples. Perhaps this stemmed from the interest in the unknown. Now that we have all of the information about maps that we need, we seem to not regard it as much, yet we seem very interested in another type of cartography, astrology, and even outer space in general. I believe this is because we don’t have as many answers about it as we do geography.

Through maps, we can tell much about a certain group of people as with the Europeans cantering their maps on Jerusalem and how that reflects themselves (as a generality) centered on their church.

In the Land of the Dine (Navajo)

3 of the best engineers ever!

Last week I left you all on the note that I was adventuring out into the Land of the Dine (aka Navajo Reservation) to work on service, engineering, and how I learn! Well here is the post you've waited all week for! What did she actually learn??

(Besides that engineering, service, and the Navajo are awesome!)