Do Worlds Collide? Revisiting Experiential Learning

Mali is one of the world’s earliest centres of learning. Timbuktu has more than twenty libraries that have preserved more than 700 000 scholarly manuscripts, some of which date back to the thirteenth century. Over the last ten years, many of these have been digitally copied allowing new insights into Africa’s history, thought and religion. And, again, the web has provided a global platform for research and teaching, widening our scope of comprehension. Mali is emblematic of what I want to say today in several, intersecting, ways. It is now a cliché that we live in a connected world, and it comes as no surprise that Timbuktu and Bamako are in the Web. But Timbuktu has also long stood for the opposite of the West; somewhere arid and alien, lost in the Sahara, mysterious and threatening. Considerations that set to one side questions of how technology is used may perpetuate stereotypes of colliding worlds at the very same time that they make use of the digital connections that join us. For example, the 1990 film of Paul Bowles’ novel, “The Sheltering Sky” is trailed on the Web as “a woman’s dangerous and erotic journey”: “the American artist couple Port and Kit Moresby travel aimlessly through Africa, searching for new experiences that could give sense to their relationship. But the flight to distant regions only leads both deeper into despair”. The turning point for Kit comes as she becomes the sex slave of a nomadic Malian warrior. In ways such as these, the oldest stereotypes of the Dark Continent are extended and attenuated through globally available, high resolution digital media. What space is left for the recognition of Timbuktu as one of our oldest places of scholarship and learning?