Scholarship is a cognitive endeavor in humans that enables shared learning through sharing of human experiences and experiments.
Ever since human evolution, communication has fostered learning and a major breakthrough in human communication happened in our cave dwelling ancestors thousands of years ago when they learned to code, initially using their vocal cords and tongue and palate to produce repetitive syntactical sounds that could be replicated between humans to create meaning aka semantics.
Kids globally and since time immemorial are hardwired to learn high level coding from the age of one and 99% of them do it very well as long as they can hear their parents or primary care givers speak.
Using vocal cords to code and witness output functions as soon as they run a vibration on their vocal cords is innate in most kids who quickly learn to use coding aka language to navigate their world when they notice the vibration "da-da" brings in a moustached gentleman running at their beck and command while "ma-ma" brings a clean shaven person who satisfies their hunger and also makes the moustached man run around with commands.
The next step in learning to code is at the age of 3-4 when they are introduced to hieroglyphs that become alphabets and code syntax when the audio visual "apple" becomes a syntax "a".
Other than the evolution of language described above, the next major breakthrough in human cognition and communication was the development of asynchronous learning when our cave dwelling ancestors would log their daily events, experiences and experiments along with current location using paint on their cave walls and the written alphabet was born. The journal space is a legacy of that period which has evolved from papyrus to print and finally into an electronic space shared globally in the cloud.
Scholarship is an expression of this asynchronous communication utilizing the tools of reading and writing that are symbolic ways to transfer information to a large human audience without having to meet them face to face at the same time and was exemplified in early human history through letter writing as soon as humans made the transition from cave dwelling animals to using papyrus.
Scholarship has evolved from the above humble beginnings of asynchronous communication in our cave dwelling ancestors to the current complex expressions in various media and yet remains at it's core a usage model of symbolic communication to transmit insights from one human to many.
Please click on the link below to get back to the first layer of the chapter:
No comments:
Post a Comment