Mystory
"To approach knowledge from the side of not knowing what it is, from the side of one who is learning, not from the that of one who already knows, is mystory." --Gregory Ulmer, Teletheory
Mystory is the name of a new pedagogical genre created by Ulmer in his book Teletheory. It was a response to a suggestion by Hayden White that if the concept of history had been invented in the twentieth century rather than the nineteenth, it would be quite different. The idea was that if people had begun serious study of the past in the twentieth century rather than the nineteenth, the result would be quite different than what it is today.
Mystory is Ulmer's new approach towards learning in general. A mystory itself is a website created by the student that explores the four discourses (career, family, entertainment, and community) and then has the students find links between the various discourses to gain a new understanding of how they think. The final synthesis of these ideas is represented by a self-created emblem that represents the student, their history, and their method of thinking.
The final product of the mystory is to have a new approach to learning that allows them to learn better than they would by following the standard methods of learning usually propagated within colleges and universities. By learning to learn based on themselves and their own culture rather than the culture of the school, the students gain a deeper understanding of what they're learning. In addition, this new vantage point towards knowledge aids in thinking about problems and issues in society, which is part of the EmerAgency concept.
The idea behind the mystory comes from Ulmer's attempt to create electracy and the EmerAgency. The mystory site allows for students to re-evaluate their ways of thinking and then apply that to situations and ideas that the EmerAgency would deal with.
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