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"In 1596, Matteo Ricci taught the Chinese how to build a memory palace." Today, he's going to teach you how to build a web.
Read the opening paragraphs of Jonathan Spence's The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci with the Web in mind. A memory palace and a web have a lot in common. Even though Ricci Street depends on modern computer technology, it points to the past. The World Wide Web is a new way to do old things.
Matteo Ricci would immediately recognize a web as an explicit electronic extension of the memory techniques that he learned five centuries ago from Roman-era texts such as Cicero's De Oratorio.
To the other Jesuits back in Europe as well as to his Chinese hosts, Matteo Ricci was an evangelist, gadfly, maverick, and trailblazer. The analogy can get stretched only so far, but these characterizations of Matteo Ricci's life and mission guide the development of Ricci Street.
I believe it true to the spirit of Matteo Ricci to imagine that he would welcome you to re-map your world, blaze your own trails, build your own memory palaces, and discover human language, history, and culture in the emerging digital world.
First and foremost, Matteo Ricci was an evangelist: a zealous preacher and missionary. He left his home in Italy to take the gospel to the Chinese.
By analogy, U.S. higher education is the ancient, closed Chinese society and those bringing webs to it are the evangelists. To many faculty and students, technology is a foreign language and webs are dangerous to all that academics hold sacred. Ricci Street will preach by example, as did its patron.
On Digital Wares' Lantern Lane, you'll find a list of example course webs.
To the Chinese, Matteo Ricci was a gadfly: a constructively provocative critic of existing institutions. He challenged the Chinese soul with the gospel. He challenged the Chinese mind with the mathematics and memory palaces of the ancient Romans and with the newborn science of astronomy.
Will higher education do as the Chinese? Almost four hundred years after Ricci's death, the Chinese still resist contact with the West and its culture. For example, less than a tenth of China's 1.2 billion people have access to a telephone. How long will higher education cling to live lectures and dead-tree texts?
At Gizmos, Inc., the mill on Ricci Street, you'll learn how to construct webs that will challenge the traditional classroom teacher to tear down the walls and throw away the clocks.
To both his Chinese hosts and his Jesuit sponsors, Matteo Ricci was a maverick. He was an alien to the Chinese and such an independent thinker that the gospel he preached left out the part about Christ's resurrection and ascension. He baptized those who continued to practice Confucian ritual.
Were these accommodations heresies?
Were they necessary concessions and
compromises to an old, rich, and secure culture?
College professors can put their lecture notes on the web and their multiple choice tests into a form. They can have office hours in a chat room. Are they selling out a millennium of progress? Or are they harbingers of a new order?
It took the Catholic Church two centuries to declare Matteo Ricci mistaken. At CyberSea Inn [temporarily unoccupied as of July 2001], you'll find some examples to help you decide what to do next week, not two centuries from now.
Traveling from Italy to China four hundred years ago was a once-in-a-lifetime adventure difficult to duplicate today. We aren't surprised that trailblazer Matteo Ricci never returned home.
He invited the Chinese to adjust their world view to the facts. He brought:
astronomical instruments such
as sundials and clocks
books on cosmography, geography, and
architecture
The latter contained diagrams and maps of towns and buildings. Chinese maps of the time combined images and words. They show a few islands on the edges of a China that takes up most of the map. Ricci wrote:
The extent of their kingdom is so vast, its borders so distant, and their utter lack of knowledge of a transmaritime world is so complete that the Chinese imagine the whole world as included in their kingdom.
So Ricci drew a map called the Complete Geographical Map of all the Regions of the World. While Ricci Street's Port 80 isn't as beautiful, in its own way, it provides an ongoing snapshot of the world, a record of your trailblazing.
Contrary to Church practice, Ricci knew that Christianity could not be transplanted from Europe. To survive and grow in China, Christianity had to speak and act Chinese. In a similar manner, Ricci Street is trying to pave the way for a new era of learning.
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