This week’s discussion exercise alone did a lot for the creation of my imaginative bridge. Although some of what came upon me from the exercise showed up in the discussion, I would like to expand upon those questions.

Just because an experience is compelling, is one necessarily learning or at all enriching one’s self? This question, for me, generates a following question: Are learning and enrichment of self one and the same enterprise? No, they are not – they may be, but one is not a necessary requirement for, or a necessary result of, the other. Consider, for example, an education under Nazi rule; of course, this would be self-enrichment if one examined it from a Nazi perspective. To take this consideration of learning v. self-enrichment into the classroom, I begin to ponder the implications that therefore lace or load an experience’s hidden or unintended curriculum. To illustrate what is meant by hidden or unintentional, Stephen Spielberg once said of movies: “you make a movie to get the audience to stand up and cheer”, which places cheering as the intention of the event – as learning is the intention of curriculum. But what of the patron leaving the movie theater after viewing Star Wars who did not stand up and cheer, but sat there and pondered “In what direction is mankind’s collective habits taking me and my species?” What of the student who, rather than learning skills from endeavors in school, learns that they are worthless in the eyes of their peers? This later learning is the hidden curriculum –as the term is used here. So, while the intended experience may be sincerely compelling, leading the experiencer to learn something, the unintended experience may compel the individual to limit their own capabilities and potential. This automatically raises the question in my mind: is there is any way to consciously and effectively deal with such an unfortunate outcome?

How does the design affect the delivery of some knowledge? In other words, how do the defining components of a learning experience contribute to the formation of a learned individual? This question, in part, assumes that the outcome of a learning experience is part of that learning and that experience. This question picks up exactly where the discussion of the last inquiry left off: How does the engineer of an experience go about predicting, approximating, or anticipating the subjective reactions of an individual exposed to that experience? This measurement will guide the process of engineering to create an experience that results in the engineer’s intended outcome.

Does one’s experience affect how one views the design of that experience? Even if one is creates an experience that generates an intentional manifestation, will any given individual see the design as it was intended to be seen, despite individual concerns related to their personal life - unique to their psychological development and particular genetic layout? This question addresses or anticipates the following question’s concern of “as relative to temporally coinciding concerns of the individual”.

And what influences the effect a design has on an individual, as relative to temporally coinciding concerns of the individual? An individual’s momentary temperament may override the impact which perceptibles have up them - their emotional state or their attitude, possibly their mental or physiological condition, has the potential to enable or inhibit the reception of perceptual information and thus allow thei impact intended by the engineer – regardless of how perfectly designed (not to mention as well updated with methods of individual and social control) it may be. Following the cognitive formulae lain before us, it is quite compelling in and of itself to find that all of one’s efforts available to them in their world are still overridden by an intention all its own… echoing a Gung Fu meditation:

"The high wind does not last all morning.
Neither does a sudden rain last all day.
Heaven and Earth are not able
to make things last forever,
So how is it possible for man?"

To put this in perspective, no matter how much we care and how hard we try, nor the power of our teaching abilities paired with our capacity to engineer an experience, there remains a superseding essence of an individual or interaction that may render the potential of the experience inconsequential.

To me, this is quite humbling.