The Big One: Part One: Studies of our Past Blogs

This was an interesting process, to go back and remember all that we've learned this year.  I agree with Summer that everything is about the process: how books are made, how the sharing of knowledge changes, how we learn about those changes, how we come to appreciate self-directed learning.  I think that Dr. Burton and Dr. Petersen's goal was an apt one, to help us to be more humble and smart about our own ignorance.  It's impossible to learn everything, but it is possible to appreciate knowledge enough to know that you don't know everything, and keep searching.  

Unit One: Folk Knowledge

• Self-directed Learning
• "Colombian Hot Chocolate:" This was a random post about the history of chocolate and how it brings generations and communities together.
• Other's Blogging
• "Coming of Age:" Dane's Post: coming of age is a ritual for a lot of people throughout the world; in the Satere-Mawe tribe of Brazil, boys must wear a glove filled with ants for ten minutes; in America, too, the transition from boy to man is very important
• "Kissing:" Dane's Post: the earliest evidence of kissing dates back to 1500 BC in India, as an informal greeting; kissing connects us globally
• "These Workers of Darkness and Secret Combinations:" by Andrew Powley: What folk knowledge should we NOT be transmitting, like in the Book of Mormon, Mafia designs, Nazi Germany?; fathers and mothers pass down to their children
• "The Treasures of Darkness" by Jared Jones: He discusses what religion is, the positive human response that comes of an experience or confrontation with a "wholly other," indescribable, a mysterium tremendum et fascinosum
• "Once Upon a Bathtub:" by Jared Jones: He talks about how bathing has not always been such a common thing for people; in the 1790's, it was associated with curing medical ailments or for nervous conditions; then personal cleanliness became a sign of status
• "Once Upon a Time" by Summer Perez: She reviews the time-keeping methods of ancient civilizations.
• 20,000 years ago, ice-age hunters made holes and lines in sticks, based on moon phases
• Sumerians in Tigris-Euphrates river valley created a calender with 20-day months
• Egyptians created a calender by cycles of the moon, based on Sirius 365-day cycle
• For clocks, there have been obelisks (like sundials), horizontal sundials, water clocks, and mechanical clocks
• Collaborative Learning
• Group Midterm: We met together before to discuss what we would say for our conversation; it was interesting to see what we had to talk about from our learning and to be asked about our self-directed learning.  Prepping for the conversation involved collaborative learning.  
• Projects/Activities
• "The World Cannot Be Governed Without Juggling:" This was when I taught my roommate, Skylar, to juggle as a part of the teaching of a folk knowledge skill; it required patience on both our parts, as I learned to teach someone something I know how to do, and Skylar learned to juggle.  "The importance of folk knowledge is that it builds a community of teachers and students, and those roles are shifting all the time." 
• "Slip, Chain Two, Double Crochet:" Here I learned to crochet from my roommate, Hannah.  "Crocheting is one of those things that requires supervision and a really helpful instructor..."

Unit Two: Oral Knowledge

• Self-directed Learning
• "Can you say Shibboleth for me?:" I talked about the history of the word "shibboleth," which has come to mean a word that distinguishes between groups of people and is used in Judges 12:4-6 when the Gileadites identified the Ephraimites who were trying to escape back to their homeland by asking them to pronounce shibboleth and they couldn't.  The spoken language allows to convey our emotions, direct others.  "Language is not an abstract construction of the learned, or of dictionary makers, but is something arising out of the work, needs, ties, joys, affections, tastes, of long generations of humanity..." -Noah Webster
• "The Upanishads, translated by Michael N. Nagler:" This introduces the Upanishads, a series of spiritual teaching sessions and Indo-European Sanskrit oral poetry between 1000BC and 200BC.  It means, in Sanskirt, "sitting down near," and at forest academies, ashrams, teachers would take their students.  This mentions the implications of memorizing stories verbatim, but that that might be coming at it from a written culture perspective.  Yugoslavian bards internalize a poem, use the same structure, but have their own words (from Walter Ong's book)
• Other's Blogging
• "A little more about Assyria: Catherine Hawkley:" the hymns weren't written down with notation, so it's hard to tell if they were sung.  There are three periods in Assyrian history: Old Assyrian (economically doing great), Middle Assyrian (expands, conquered by Babylon, 200 years with no knowledge preserved), and Neo-Assyrian (Assyria rises against Babylon, expands in 1000BC, conquers until 609BC, and then becomes too cultured to do that, are conquered).  Most knowledge comes from Neo-Assyrian period; Assyria adopted cultural traditions of the societies that conquered them.  
• "Greek Please!:" Blaine Harker: The average Greek home did not have many instruments, like the lyre, but might have a double reed instrument called the Aulos because it was cheaper.  Greek music uses the perfect fifth, but most of Greek music today comes from an Arab Renaissance because our musical system is derived from the Judaism music system.
• "Ta'ziyeh:" Kacee Hill: Ta'ziyeh is the Islamic drama that "is part ritual, part history, part poetic recitation, part storytelling, part music and song ...it is much more an act of religious faith than it is a theatrical exhibiton."  It is used to remember the battle of Kerbala, when the leader of the Shi'ites, Hussein, was killed by the Sunnite leader, Yazid.  It also discusses the beginning of the Shi'ites and Sunnis; Shi'ites believed Muhammed's descendants should lead while Sunnites believed an elected official should lead.     
• Collaborative Learning: 
• Our Group got together to talk about oral knowledge for a long time, and then video-taped.  Summer talked about the Ancient Minoans on Crete; I spoke of the Ancient Aryans; Dane spoke about the Celtic culture; Andrew spoke about Islam; Morgan Reber talked about the Incas.  We discussed the importance of memorizing texts; "How do you define what something worth memorizing is?;" Is it just an entertainment value?; Why do we memorize the Articles of Faith?  Maybe art and music and poetry, it's more important to have something memorized
• For King Benjamin's Speech, our final project: We got together to practice before our presentation both the verses assigned to us and the verses of other people, to make sure that we had them.  Acting was just as important as memorizing the speech in the project, and repeating all the verses together as a class recreated in part the feelings of the saints at the time of King Benjamin's speech 
• Projects/Activities
• "Gurcharan Gill, PhD, and the Aryans:" This was the oral interview I had where Brother Gill explained that the ancestors of the Aryans, the Scythians, lived near the Caspian Sea and that their ancestors, the Aryans, were traders along the Silk Road.  For this reason, Sanskrit, German, and Latin make up part of the Indo-European languages.  The Indus River valley was a hot-spot of civilization.  900 years after they came, they wrote down a version of Sanskrit, to record the Veda and other scriptures. 85% of people in India now speak Hindi, but the Brahmin speak Sanskrit for religious ceremonies.  I also discussed the history of Manu, the Aryan Noah, who was saved in a great flood.  Each brahmin was assigned one village to remember, orally, all of the family history of.  

Unit Three: Written Knowledge

• Self-directed Learning
• "The Lotus Temple:" I went to the Krishna Spanish Fork Lotus temple with my sister Sarah and learned that to describe Hinduism as polytheistic is inaccurate because Krishna, Vishnu, are all forms of Krishna.  The lady who took us on a tour brought up the "Aryan problem" Brother Gill had talked about, except that she believed the Aryans had always been in the Indus River valley.  A community of worship in the Vedic culture is called a sangham.  The Bhagavad Gita is the song of God, a conversation Krishna had with a warrior-king, Arjuna, on the eve of battle.
• "Why the Brahmins Didn't Want Writing:" The Aryans believed that to escape the process of transmigration, a cycle of living and dying, one needed to become part of the Whole, and that was done by knowing.  "Veda" comes from vid which means "to know."  Listening to the words of one's teacher (sravana), reflecting on the words (manana), and meditating and realizing the truth (nididhyasana) all were a part of that. The Rig Veda is the oldest religious text in the world, from 1500-1000 BC.   Religious texts weren't written down until 400AD, probably with the Buddhist schools.
• "Ancient Indian Cartography:" There aren't a lot of ancient maps left; the first one we have is a pictorial representation of a mythical continent, Nandisvaradvipa, in 1199-1200AD.  The Golden Age was between 320 BC and 550AD, the Gupta Age, and the ruler was Kaviraja, king of poets.  Poets were sponsored by kings at this time, and men like Kalidasa wrote plays like "Malavikagnimitra, Abhijnanasakuntala, and Vikramorvasiya."  The story of the king, Dushyanta, and the girl he marries and the ring that's lost.
• "A Treatise on the Art of Performing Everything:" The Nayasatra was an instruction guide for the arts, written in 100BC or earlier.  It might have been written by the sage Bharata, in Sanskrit, and is sometimes considered a fifth veda.  It was what most influenced Indian classical music until the 1200s.  There are eight major emotions and four different kinds of acting (action using body parts, acting with words and speech and song, acting expressing emotions well, and acting using dress and decoration).  This was when knowledge was meant to be compiled.
• Other's Blogging
• "Learning to Learn:" by Madison Grant: The earliest form of codex was a wax tablet that could be bound together at the edges; it could be smoothed out and redone, so nothing was permanent.  
• "Egyptian Frustration:" by Kimberly Gidney: For the Hebrew/Islam group, they created a double-sided scroll with a passage from the Qu'ran and one from the Torah.  They used a scroll pen, which was difficult.
• "Art and Institutions that saved:" Madison Grant: The illuminations used in Bibles were expensive, which meant the book was highly valued.  "They were 'treasured as works of art and as symbols of enduring knowledge.'"
• "More Calligraphy:" Andrew Powley: Muslims used calligraphy to decorate their mosques.  Although the Chinese had paper first, their complex characters made it difficult to write; the first paper mill was established in Baghdad around the 800's, so there were a lot of Qu'ran written copies and they had an assembly-line method of handwriting religious scriptures and business transactions and maps.  
• Collaborative Learning
• "The Name's Stone. Rosetta Stone:" For our civilization blog group we used dried Bamboo leaves to sub in for talipot palm leaves, which went out of style during the age of print because they had to be recopied whenever they deteriorated.  The leaves were often connected by strings and surrounded on either side by a hard material.
• We had to translate the Ogham script into Sanskrit and Ogham is a series of lines marked off on a much longer line, from bottom up and around the top of murals.  
• Projects/Activities

Unit Four: Print Knowledge

• Self-directed Learning
• "The Printing Press and Science:" Erasmus wanted to make a Bible with multiple languages in it before the Spanish did, so it wasn't completely accurate.  He promised the government that he would put the trinity in the Bible if they found an older manuscript of it.  Eistenstein claims that the printing press DID NOT stunt the advancement of science because scientists could record and share their observations and make maps that would not deteriorate in quality as they were copied over again.  Printing enabled people to recheck "Ptolemaic astronomy," "Galenic anatomy," and "Aristotelian physics." Everyone could stay on the same page.
• Other's Blogging
• "Crandall Historic Printing Museum: a Diamond in the Rough:" Summer Perez: The first movable type was clay (960-1127), then wooden (1127-1279), then tin (1271-1368), and then bronze used during the Ming dynasty.   Cuneiform tablets dated back to 1900BC in Mesopotamia and there were Phaistos discs found at the Temple of Phaistos during Ancient Minoa.  During this time, printed books were still illuminated.
•  "More about the King James Version:" Dane Olsen: A document in 1408 called the Constitutions of Oxford made it illegal to translate the Bible into English.  William Tyndale was denied that in 1523, so he went to Germany and did it secretly.  At the invention of the printing press, Gutenberg only printed about 200 books the first time.  Two generations later, Martin Luther printed a pamphlet and sold over 250,000 copies in one year.  
• "Rise of the Author:" Jared Willden: "[It] seems ...following the abundance of authorship in antiquity, there was virtually no authorship in the middle ages because they relied on classical texts so much, but once the Renaissance began after the development of the printing press, authorship resurfaced."  Shakespeare and Machiavelli rose after the printing press.  From 400-1400, there were very few theological texts because everyone used Augustine for theology, and for science/philosophy, it was Aristotle.  
• Collaborative Learning
• "A New View on Plagiarism:" When authorship became a trade in the 1600s because of the printing press, the idea of plagiarism came into being.  Before this, you could use other's ideas and maybe even write a better story, but the first English copyright act of 1710, enabled authors to say that they owned their stories.  I talked to my group member about this, and got good advice at making my argument stronger. 
• Projects/Activities
• "The Rise of the Author: Delving into the Depths of the Library:" Before 1709, the Copyright Statute (I think of Queen Anne) didn't protect authors' work, and most could not survive on that trade alone.  Reverend Skeat, who translated a lot of "The Canterbury Tales," wrote his own "Canterbury Tale." The Humanists did not rediscover old authors, they just became popular again.  Pliny was an ancient author, who the book Natural History is attributed to.  At Inns of Court in the 1500's, young men could go to learn like a university, and learned "classical verse satire," epigrams, elegy, etc.  What is the meaning of the word "author?"
• "The King James Bible, "She-Bibles," "He-Bibles," and all that Jazz:" In 405 AD Saint Jerome finishes his translation of the Greek and Hebrew Bibles into Latin, to become the Vulgate Bible, written on vellum.  Most people in Europe used this Bible up through the Middle Ages.  Print enabled men like William Tyndale to produce the Bible in English, and other bibles followed: The Great Bible, the Geneva Bible, the Bishops' Bible, and the King James version.  Robert Barker, King James' printer, held a royal patent for printing Bibles in England, but he took on the cost with investors to print it.