I came across a Chinese joke the other day talking about how hard it is to be a foodie in the Qin Dynasty. With a series of cartoon images, it shows a hungry foodie time-traveled to a restaurant in the Qin Dynasty. He tried to order one meal after another just to find that none was available because they were either not invented or not imported yet.

At a first glance, it is a merely a joke made for fun; but if you pay a bit more attention to the content, you will find that it embeds quite a bit of knowledge in terms of the development of food culture in China. It reminded me of note cards I made for high school history class when we were learning about the dynasties in China and the development of agriculture. If I add the chart of dynasties, these series of cartoon image would present a vivid image of food history in a country that prides itself for its culinary culture:

A joke about a time-traveling foodie taught me the track of food development in China and made me build a connection between the knowledge gained in the past and the information received just now – SERENDIPTOUSLY!

Lee Shulman pointed out that most learning takes place in a serendipitous way. But serendipity doesn’t mean individual amusement or aimless meandering. In fact, when it comes to pedagogy, it means an open system with a vast knowledge base and diverse perspectives. As teachers, we always have a learning goal in mind, but the process of learning can unfolded so differently: if students are found lost in a large amount of text, maybe a concept map would help; if the concept is too hard to comprehend, maybe a graph would illustrate; if it is hard to find an entry point to introduce new knowledge, maybe a joke would break the ice. Would it be nice if my high school teacher started the course with a joke about a time-traveling foodie?

Seventeen years ago, when I started my first job as a computer graphic designer, a typical task of the day was to type text from a highlighted textbook to PowerPoint slides. At the time, PowerPoint was considered very technical. Almost twenty years have passed, I still see PowerPoint being used as a document instead of a graphic tool. Presentations are still heavily dominated by text taken directly or summarized from the textbook.

As David Kolb pointed out, the purpose of education is to equip the learners with the ability to conduct reflective observation (watching), abstractive conceptualization (thinking) and active experimentation (doing). While a person unequipped with such skills will jump from feeling to action, a person with such analytical skills will run through the cycle of feel, watching, thinking, and doing.

During the thinking stage, analytic procedure will work only when the abstract concepts is understood and applied effectively. A colleague of mine just shared a presentation by Michael Prais at the Slate Conference, who pointed out that sorting through paragraphs of text to comprehend abstract information is inefficient and ineffective. Conceptual relationships are best illustrated with infographics.

If learning is a journey from A to B, with A being not known and not able and B being known and able, instructional design is the work of crafting or paving the paths for it, of which copying the text from a book to the slide will only prolong the journey. Meaningful instructional design requires building a creative pathway between the old and the new, through sound, graphics, and sometimes, even jokes.

While writing this blog, I found a web page called “Joking, and Learning, About Philosophy” where an interview with the authors of Understand Philosophy through Jokes was recorded. For a subject as abstract as philosophy, jokes seem to lend themselves well to it. While it takes talent to produce jokes for the cause of teaching, it only requires a thoughtful mind to find some to serve for the purpose of learning.