All that we've learned: Oral Knowledge

From US Embassy New Delhi on Flickr

For those of you counting on this post to go up Friday morning, sorry despite the rumors I'm not perfect. This post took a little more research than I originally intended. As our discussion of oral knowledge winds down I wanted to take the opportunity to look back at all of that we've learned and discussed on this blog. Although our instructors have given us many interesting topics to learn about in this unit, I've enjoyed the themes that we pulled out here on our blog.



Learning about myths from our culture:

• Emily: First Look at the Akkadian Civilization: Learning about Akkdia
• Maddie: The "start" of it all...: Roman Origin Myth
• Kim: Stories of Samaria: stories about Samaria
• Erin: Myths of Origin: learning Navajo Origin myth

Why we have myths:

• Emily: Akkadian Stories: truth of myths
• Erin : "The Way" of the Origin : why myths are the way they are
• Maddie: Chicken or the Egg: why/how myths come to be
• Maddie: Myths make the world go around...:need for myths

And other ideas:

• Erin: Navajo War Language: Elements of the Navajo language
• Kim: Samaritan Synagogues: setting for oral sharing
• Emily: Myth Dreaming: oral tradition in writing

I don't whether or not my fellow bloggers have noticed our themes, certainly I didn't notice until I went looking, but they are interesting to reflect upon because it relates to how we learn. None of us had the opportunity this unit to interview some one with expertise in our field, but we managed to learn something from the non-experts in our field, each other. Now if I had a mind to I could relate this to the awesomeness of the digital age, however I think the most direct cause is more than that. 

I think our themes have come about because of what we've talked about as a group. I remember when we first got our civilizations we all talked about how we didn't know much about our cultures, and then we got our first theme. That theme progressed as we shared more about our civilizations with each outside of class time, and the blog. (Because let's face it we're girls and would rather talk about than type it out). 

Then in our second week of oral knowledge, we started to talk about our group project and decided to focus on some of the similarities that we had with our cultures, which led to many great discussions, not the least of which appeared on the blog as why we have myths, and why the heck are they important enough for us to spend weeks talking about. 

I found out discussions rather interesting, I hope you, my faithful reader, did too. Look for more group discussions in a group post that is under construction on Google Docs.