Liquid learning

Michael Sean Gallagher writes:

Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container
Wallace Stevens

A fascination and apprehension towards water and an appreciation of how it governs our thinking is the focus of this playlist and much of the kind of media gathering and mobile learning I like to do in my spare time. Everywhere I travel or live, I instinctively find myself leaning on a railing staring into a river or an ocean or sea or a lake. I see people wading in the water or having a picnic next to it or even just socializing or walking along it in the evening and I began to think about how much of the water itself is actually governing our behavior. How much of it defines how we learn in this world? 

So I began recording audio next to rivers to hear their flow and the people next to them. I kept hearing particular signatures in the water (how the Thames sounds completely different from the Seine, etc.) and I tried to make playlists that mirrored these. I assembled and edited the playlists haphazardly, looking for music that flowed, bounded, and receded, like waves on a shore. I listened to these sounds and playlists as I studied and as I walked, mostly through London along the Thames past Wapping, Limehouse, and Shadwell, out past the pubs of Whistler, Turner, and Dickens. I kept pulling from a literary past to make sense of it and so I turned to Hesse:
 

Siddhartha made an effort to listen better. The image of his father, his own image, the image of his son merged, Kamala’s image also appeared and was dispersed, and the image of Govinda, and other images, and they merged with each other, turned all into the river, headed all, being the river, for the goal, longing, desiring, suffering, and the river’s voice sounded full of yearning, full of burning woe, full of unsatisfiable desire. For the goal, the river was heading, Siddhartha saw it hurrying, the river, which consisted of him and his loved ones and of all people, he had ever seen, all of these waves and waters were hurrying, suffering, towards goals, many goals, the waterfall, the lake, the rapids, the sea, and all goals were reached, and every goal was followed by a new one, and the water turned into vapour and rose to the sky, turned into rain and poured down from the sky, turned into a source, a stream, a river, headed forward once again, flowed on once again. But the longing voice had changed. It still resounded, full of suffering, searching, but other voices joined it, voices of joy and of suffering, good and bad voices, laughing and sad ones, a hundred voices, a thousand voices.

Flow of ideas, aspirations, dreams through the imagination; collective action as packets distributed in bursts. Learning networks become like water on pavement: they find every crack and crevice. Full saturation. We love water (out of necessity) as it is ever-changing. So are we. We love music that mirrors this flow. It is perpetually possible, always in the process of becoming. 

So I assembled this brief playlist inspired by water.  It is an impression of water as an enabling agent, one that, despite its chaos, actually makes thinking and action lucid. We have talked about about that in this music project here, how adding music to a chaotic space makes it a lucid space. It filters all of it into meaning. The playlist was a cobbling together of songs that make me think of the water. I have included the track names below. Tinariwen might seem like a strange addition, but the sound of caravans and that rolling sense of Saharan music always makes me thinks of oceans. I had someone tell me that Saharan towns like Timbuktu, seemingly on the edge of nowhere in desert areas, orient themselves to the deserts as we might the sea. They are ports on a vast expanse of an ocean of sand. So motion is as important for them as it is for those living next to the water. 

Liquidlearning by Michael Gallagher on Mixcloud

Having your learners construct a playlist to reflect the learning or cognitive impression of a particular object or space is engaging another mode for reflection, another type of literacy. The tracks are:

1. ISAN: Cathart
   
2. Jonsi & Alex: Daniell in the Sea
   
3. Tinariwen: Matadjem Yinmixan
   
4. Mozart: Quintet for Clarinet and Strings in A Major: Kv 581
   
5. Squarepusher: Tommib Help Buss
   

And if you want to hear these different signatures in the water, listen for yourself. A few can be found below. 

• Hyde Park, London. This was a surprisingly beautiful day in early February and many people were in the park next to the lake. Available May 10, 2013 from http://bit.ly/10JfOJ0. 
  
• Hangang River Park, Seoul. Note that the music being played there dominates the aural landscape and attracted quite a crowd, but the people were drawn there by the river. Available May 10, 2013 from http://bit.ly/11fjE9g. 
  
• Shadwell Basin, London. This was recorded on a snowy day in January along the Thames. Many people were still walking, but were more withdrawn, introspective and this was, I believe, influenced by the snow and the water. Available May 10, 2013 from http://bit.ly/15t7ltq. 
  
• Tongyeong Ferry, southern Korea. This was a ferry ride to a small island off the coast of southern Korea. The passengers were a mix of locals returning to the islands and tourists like myself. There is a nice mix of social interaction present in this recording. Available May 10, 2013 from http://bit.ly/Zmp2Ki. 
  

Michael Sean Gallagher is a Professor at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies and a Phd candidate at the Institute of Education.