Haiku, mobile learning and the practice of writing

"Mmmm, you could create a form of mobile-audio Haiku though," continued that voice in my head.

Long conversations
beside blooming irises -
joys of life on the road
Matsuo Basho

Seeking - Walking the streets (Sept 26th, 2006)

Marica at Seeking reflects on the use of audioblogging, after my spending time in Wellington with her and her colleagues at the Open Polytechnic of NZ. I was particularly drawn to her thoughts about the Haiku and how a short piece of writing can convey much (in a similar way to an image that speaks a thousand words I suppose).

The haiku is a great metaphor for mobile learning, in that much is captured in a small 'space'. I have set up a Winksite called Mobile Explorations (for access via your mobile device, go to http://winksite.com and enter site ID # 17112) to capture these smaller moments that can be viewed and interacted with via a mobile device. Still in 'testing' phase, I have added a couple of haikus to the Zine, titled 'Haiku thinking'. You can add your own haikus via the Guestbook if you wish. Here's how it looks:

How can this be developed as a useful learning venture? Playful jottings and a few meaningful words can capture much of the essence of an experience in the same way images often do. It can enable the writer to develop ways of writing that convey a meaning or sense of an experience, just as we might interpret an image, its meaning, representation and structures, according to our position and frame of mind in time and space. Wu and Bergstraum describe this as the haiku moment:

It seems easiest to liken haiku to a photograph, which captures a moment in time. A pure photograph describes a scene, and this description causes an emotional response in its viewer. There is no caption on the photograph that tells us what emotional response we are to take from it. It is instead a simple moment in time, unencumbered.

Haiku is the same thing. When a butterfly lands upon an open flower, what does the haiku poet take from this? The same thing that his reader will take from it when he describes the moment in verse. But he trusts his reader to sense the same emotion from his accurate description of the scene. He does not need to say "How beautiful!" in reference to the moment, because his words should evoke the correct response in his reader.

I often have jottings and snippets or phrases dotted around my desk on sticky notes, or written messily into notebooks (like my A5 laptop for example!) - even noted quickly in my mobile phone - and these hold meaning for me in ways a well-structured sentence may not.

Thus, from little things big things grow, as they say!

I'll leave you with my try at a haiku:

Live out loud and soft:

Expect a newness within

Greet the world in song.

technorati tags:haiku, mobile, mlearning, seeking, marica.sevelj, winksite, writing, prose, poetry, learning, practice

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