critical creative collaborative

As a synopsis of Mobile Media: Changing Educational Landscape (Parts I, II, III), I would like to highlight:

5 Things to Consider in Changing Educational Landscapes

1. Changing (verb transitive): 

Changing is both an adjective and a verb. The imperative facing educators is to figure out how we engage with this change in positive, meaningful ways. Within an art and design context, how might we actively transform educational spaces?

2. Outside is In: Multi-sited Teaching and Learning 

Mobile media push the impetus for teaching and learning beyond the confines of a single “brick and mortar” classroom, lecture theatre, studio, or lab. To respond to changing economic realities and social situations, learning spaces need to be conversant with the movements of students (and faculty) across multiple (local, national and international) sites. Consider how our classrooms work withor includes the bus, train, airport lounge, or coffee shop.

3. Learning Cross-Platform:

Moodle, WordPress, Buddypress, flickr.com, Youtube,tumblr, twitter.com, Facebook.com,  wikipedia, to name a few platforms among many others—are instrumental in changing educational landscapes. However, they were not all created equal. Educators need to consider how / why / when we work with different proprietary and non-proprietary (open source) solutions.  Effective eLearning requires a knowledge of multiple platforms (and of the potential strengths / weaknesses of each), often within the auspices of a single course. There are seldom single solutions.

4. Co-Create:

The changing landscape is dramatic and involves many actors. Too often, we approach the situation from the top down, using technology solve simple problems. We need a variety of approaches to complex solutions. While they may not be the mythic Digital Natives we often hear about, students have extremely valuable ideas, insights, and skills that can help radically transform the educational paradigm. We need to follow the lead of Mike Wesch, who uses youtube.com and student produced video to teach “subjectivities,” rather than “subjects.” Or Jon Beasley Murray who, rather than restricting their use of the internet, had his 300-level literature students produce their written work on wikipedia (link).

5. Go Live: Teaching Out Loud

This is a time of great social change and rather than hiding ourselves away while we try and figure out the answers, as scholars have done historically, educators need to think (blog, podcast, document) their transformational research in public venues. This is not instead of academic publication but part of it. Part of the co-creational approach is sharing our thinking with our collaborators: students, colleagues, community members, the broader public.

This is an overview of my longer, rabbling posts on the subject. For more details and useful links, please read the following:

Mobile Media: Changing Educational Landscapes (Part I)

Mobile Media: Changing Educational Landscapes (Part II)

Mobile Media: Changing Educational Landscapes (Part III)

Part III of three part series on Educational Landscapes (Overview) looks at some of the new strategies I call on in my teaching. Many of these approaches are mediated by recent advances in mobile and social media.

III. Beyond Participation: Engagement

To help focus discussion on active, positive change, I’d like to draw on Eric Gordon’ thinking on engagement (Emerson College faculty page, personal website). Gordon brings the principles of game design to his research in civic engagement. I’m particularly interested in how this work undertakes a shift from participation to engagement. The difference between the two, as Gordon describes it, is that participation can be relatively passive and may not require much thought or action (beyond clicking a mouse, say), whereas engagement require a level of intellectual, emotional, or creative investment, and ideally action over time.

Think about “liking” something on Facebook as basic form of participation, not to say that these types of simple gestures lack important social potential. Liking (or not liking) can depend on snap judgements, blink. Meaningful social events—learning or interaction with an art work, for example—usually require significantly longer forms of engagement. Engagement involves returning to a situation or problem, and is what is need when we want individuals to actively undertake civic duties or other kinds of social actions—for example, helping to clean up a municipal park or to contribute to discussions about educational reform (check out PlanIt).

From his work on using social media to create meaningful social situation, Gordon offers Six Principles of Designing for Engagement.

1. What is the Reason for Engagement?
2. Who is Listening?
3. People Comprise Locations; Locations Don’t Comprise People.
4. Design for the Community you Want, not the one you know.
5. Face-to-Face Matters
6. Design for Distraction

These ideas may be fairly obvious for people who have done community-based learning or art projects, but they are also important in helping us to break away from the habit of depending on technology to solve our problems. Gordon’s work makes use of mobile and social media, but it does so in ways that actively seek meaningful involvement from different groups.

For me the question is how do we creating engaging teaching and learning situations, whether we are in a university, a gallery, or studio. To this end, I have begun to seek teaching and learning opportunities that build on the following:

The Multi-sited Classroom: students carry on their learn across a number of sites and are often in motion between these sites. As educators we need to provide them with better opportunities to get the most of their situation. For me this, involves thinking of the classroom extending beyond a single place, or set time. The classroom—or better space of learning—can more effectively engagement if it is approached as a series of opportunities to connect with course materials and to participate in an extend conversation around and through these materials. Think of the lecture hall or studio expanding to include the bus, the ipod, the library, the coffee shop, the job site. This is not to say that we can replace our studios, lecture halls, classrooms with ipod or mobile phones, only that these and other devices, practices, software allow us to make better use of students time and energies between scheduled classes.

Help students find affinities: Mimi Ito’s research with digital youth culture suggests that there are key differences among youth when it comes to connecting online. She suggests that

Facebook = Friends you had in Highschool

tumblr = Friends you wished you’d had

The students who have figured out how to thrive and to develop useful professional skills are those who search affinities and affinity groups. How do we do this in the classroom? How can I learn to work with or activate various social groups networks in the classroom.

Understand when and where students listen: in lecture the students may be asleep, but there are other times and places they are fully awake. How do we/I bridge this gap? Putting more course materials into mobile formats helps with this. I am consciously building a mobile media archive.

Informal Learning Matters: Seek out opportunities for students to draw on their prior knowledge and social engagements. Without diluting course materials or outcomes, it is possible to build assignments that encourage students to connect their “outside” interests with the core material. This is particularly useful in process-based or skills-based courses and assignments.

Learning is Co-creative: Mike Wesch’s work with his media students at Kansas State is inspirational here. Wesch talks about teaching “subjectivities” rather than subjects and creates courses in which his student participate in the creation of content: for example, youtube videos about social media. I’m also inspired by Jon Beasley Murray’s use of wikipedia to activate a 300-level Spanish Lit course “Murder, Madness, and Mayhem,” in which he had his student write their assignments in wikipedia and made there grades contingent on the level of uptake their writing received. There are plenty of opportunities to use new and social media to work with students, rather than simply trying to teach to them.

Go Live: Historically, academic thinking has happened in highly protected, exclusive spaces and has circulated across specialized groups. This is type of professional practice is import; however, the affordances of digital and social media mean that a lot of our work can be shared. Linking online discussions and research to teaching and learning situations allow students to understand where we our coming from and may in some instance find useful affinities with our interests. While I understand the history and importance of Academic Freedom and the crucial role universities play, I don’t think that it becomes us to obfuscate intentional. Sharing twitter feeds and delicious links are relatively easy steps toward maintaining a level of transparency and accountability. This blog and its various feeds are vital aspect of my research, teaching, and learning.

Part I: Mobile Media Changing Educational Landscapes

Part II: Mobile Media Changing Educational Landscapes

This is a continuation of a discussion presented in Mobile Media: Changing Educational Landscapes (Overview and Part I). For a synopsis, see this overview.

Myth of the Digital Native: put it to rest

Before I discuss mobile affordances, I thought I’d touch on the idea of the digital native. This is a topic others have discussed, but I think it is crucial to how we approach the problem of changing landscapes.

This term is troubling–culturally, ethnographically, and pragmatically. While our students may have grown up using computers, many lack sophistication, few are capable of critical self-reflection. They need opportunities to think through complex issues of identity formation, knowledge creation/validation. and network building.

The idea of the Digital Native is often based on a misappropriation of Marc Prensky’s 2001 argument about the divide between “Digital Native, Digital Immigrant” (pdf). The reification of the Digital Native not only risks dubious essentialisms around questions of demographics and language acquisition by asserting an analogy between those born before the 1960s and second language learners from immigrant families—Prensky suggests both share an “accent” of sorts. It also avoids difficult questions about the social differences that mark digital culture across age, gender, race, and class distinctions.

Experts are beginning to come to terms with the magnitude of cultural changes created by a shift in communications technologies. 10, 20 200, 500 years(?) How long until we understand the scope of the social impact of these new technologies. After all, we’re still grappling with effect of the printing press.

The study of digital culture and mobile media studies are growing and contested fields of research. Careful consideration of their importance to teaching and teaching is beyond this scope of these posts, even though they do influence my thinking. My main concern with is that we need to understand the disparate, often contradictory skill sets students bring to bear on post-secondary education.

On a pragmatic level, as Prensky (along with a host of others) suggests, we need to aware of the shifting cultural space of education and the dramatic impact of new media on the classroom. This a point Cathy Davidson makes clearly in her discussions on rethinking education beyond the confines of industrial learning.

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My concern is that too often we make assumption about the students abilities and facilities and in so doing, fail to carefully consider the deeper pedagogical implications of teaching in this networked and mediated age. To wit, I like to recommend to students that they check out the digital tattoo, a website/tool set up at UBC to help students understand their digital identity and to protect themselves.

It is incumbent on educators, artists, curators, and other cultural theorists to be vigilant to the actors and networks changing around us. I invoke Bruno Latour’s ANT (actor-network theory) (reference), because it helps me to think about the landscape of education in a very broad sense and to new configurations of  human and non-human actors and the myriad links between us.

The increasing diversity of students can not be thought of or approached separately from the proliferation of hardware and software that is reshaping our teaching and learning environment, our lives. The laptop, cellphone, ipad, digital projector, ipod, as well as moodle, tumblr.com, wordpress, buddypress, twitter.com, posterous.com, facebook.com need to thoughtfully and carefully understood in terms of a web of intricate association.

II Looking for Affordances

To move this discussion back into the realm of the practical and pragmatic, I’d like discuss Mobility Shifts, a recent conference at the New School in New York. This conference brought together digital educators and innovators to discuss mobile media and open access to education. The organizers said, the conference was motivated by a crisis in the US system of post-secondary education (higher tuition costs, escalating student debt, and a struggle for universities to remain relevant).

To highlight the main ideas, I would like to quote from John Belshaw’s blog post:

5 key trends for the future of education

1. Openness – This has been going on for a while, but there’s a real drive towards open access for academic research in particular.There is a feeling that education and public services should be open and transparent.
2. Greater insight into the knowledge creation process – This is similar to openness but pertains to the creation of articles, books and other material. It’s not just the output that should be shared, but the context of how it was put together.
3. Mobile learning. – The big movement at the moment outside the conference is BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) but the focus at Mobility Shifts was upon mobile for ubiquitous learning. It’s not so much about the mobility of the device but the multiple ways in which the learner is mobile.
4. Alternative forms of assessment – This is a big one with Mozilla’s Open Badges leading the way. Because assessment often drives the structure of learning, this is key.
5. Rethinking the classroom environment – This goes hand-in-hand with the curricula redesign necessitated by alternative forms of assessment. How should we build new (or reorganise existing) classrooms?

http://dangerouslyirrelevant.org/2011/10/mobilityshifts-5-key-trends-for-the-future-of-education-guest-post.html

Without going into a play-by-play of the different conversations presented at Mobility Shifts, I’d like to point to a number of people / projects helping in thinking about making positive changes to the landscapes of education.

This is not an exhaustive list, but it suggests a few interesting and, for me, watershed projects.

Trebor Scholz: Mobility Shifts organizer, collectivate.net, and editor of Learning Through Digital Media: Experiments in Technology and Pedagogy (online)

Shin Mizukoshi: Mobile Media theorist and specialist at the Univ of Tokyo (Hastac link)

John Willinsky: Standford Professor (link) and advocate for open source academic publishing, involved with the Public Knowledge Project.

Bob Stein and the future of the book are radically transforming the way we think about and experience books.

Mimi Ito: Cultural Anthropologist and author of Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media (pdf). Ito’s work helps us to understand the diverse experience shaping young peoples use of social media.

Mike Wesch: Prof of Anthropology at Kansas State University (see digital ethnography). Wesch is well known for his youtube channel and ground breaking (co-creative) work with students.

Cathy Davidson: Duke English Prof, author, geek, educational mover and shaker (fast company article). Check out. Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn (Viking Press June 2011 publication date). 2010. [web]

Matthew Gold: One of the creatives of the CUNY Commons, a buddy press built multiuser blog the multiple campuses of the City University of New York.

Geert Lovink: digital editor, publisher, activist (see Institute of Network Cultures). Lovink’s understanding of the need to support writers on the level of content while respecting the human/emotional side of academic publishing is important.

Eric Gordon: Professor of Media Studies at Emerson and Director of Engagement Game Lab. Gordon’s approach to engagement vs. participation is extremely useful and will be more fully discussed in Part III of this series.

Closer to Home, I should also mention

Brian Lamb (blog) and BCCampus. Both have had an important influence on eLearning in BC and on my own teaching and learning directly.

Part I: Mobile Media Changing Educational Landscapes

Part III: Mobile Media Changing Educational Landscapes 

This three-part series (Overview) looks at the impact of mobile media and social media on post-secondary teaching and learning.

Joy James invited me to the UWO to talk about my research at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, and my discussion draws heavily MobilityShifts.org, a conference I recently attended at the New School in Oct. 2011.

1. Part I looks at my thoughts changing landscapes of education.
2. Part II discusses mobile media affordances—key projects, people.
3. Part III focuses on engagement and the potential for reshaping our teaching and learning.

Introduction

A modal thing: When Joy James invited me to present, we talked about focus and possible titles. She suggested Changing Educational Landscapes, and I really liked the modality of “changing.” I liked changing as adjective and verb. In the context of mobile media—or media mobilities—I like the imperative mood, the command to change educational landscapes.

I also like that the various senses of these changes—adjective and verb—require collaborations that bring together educators, artists, curators, community organizers , and other professional communicators.

Background / Deqq.com Experiment:

This talk comes out of a pedagogical experiment Joy and I began at Emily Carr two and a half years ago. We were interested in trying to activate a “back channel” in an English 101 lecture and wanted to complement Moodle (Course Management Software) by adding a social media channel.

Deqq is a proprietary application developed by Vancouver-based digital agency Work at Play for the entertainment industry. Joy and I understood Moodle to be an integral part of our course delivery, and we reasoned that this extra open channel might allow students to offer a different form of feedback.

Deqq, which allows students to log on using twitter and Facebook, is based on channeling discussions from social networks back to a central site; we wanted to use it to facilitate a sharing (microblogging) of ideas and media in and between lectures, more or less on the fly. The experience of tweeting a youtube link, spontaneous thought, or request for clarification of terminology is very different from posting to a closed Moodle forum. Joy and I strongly believed that the Deqq channel would shift the lecture dynamic in positive ways.

Our pedagogical intervention failed. Students liked Moodle, but that they didn’t want or need another social media platform. We had a few positive adapters; however, the majority of the ENGL 100 students were either vociferously opposed to being “guinea pigs” (their term) or entirely non-plussed.

As research, as a scientific experiment, our project did work. It worked very well to demonstrated key limitations in our own thinking about student needs. It taught us valuable lessons about how or how not to build student involvement.

Without going to far into this research project, I might say that the problem was one of execution: our hearts/minds were in the right place, but we weren’t prepared or didn’t understand how to engage with the students. Nor did the students understand the change in relation to the expectations they brought to the course, particularly about the nature and space of a university lecture.

My UWO presentation represents a continuation of this research. It set in motion a larger, vital dialogue around the problems of more fully engaging students in shifting the educational paradigm. How we can work together—students and teachers—to create new spaces of teaching and learning that reflect the world/s we live in.

(If you want to read about this experiment in a larger context of social media in the university classroom, Pieta Wolley’s Georgia Straight Article might be helpful. It draws heavily on an interview I did with her).

I. Landscape

A teaching studio without walls: the ideal spaces presented to us are increasingly hybrid spaces of old and new technology—formal and/or informal teaching studios with lots of shiny tech and moveable walls. La gaîté lyrique in Paris is my favourite examples of this—based on images and ideas presented by its Managing and Artistic Director, Jérôme Delormas.

These idealized media spaces have the potential to dramatically reshape our teaching and learning environments. There is little doubt they are changing our imaginary landscapes. The Media Lab at MIT, the Critical Media Lab at Waterloo, Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Art and Technology, Emily Carr Intersections Digital Studios, Western’s ArtLab—all impact our understanding of what is possible in terms of a new office/classroom/studio space.

Nevertheless, as much as I like the idea of la Gaîté lyrique, I understand that my attraction to it is tied to a hybrid, digitized brick and mortar fetish. The multipurpose teaching, learning, exhibition, screening, dance environment and media library, as exciting as the possibilities it presents are, runs the risk of becoming a quaint aspiration in the not-so-distant future.  Without long-term support, funding for people as well as spaces and machines, and a well-developed sense of programming or research potentials, there is a danger that these spaces will stagnate—remaining fixed within a particular, outmoded sense of utopia.

mobile media change landscapes

The great potential of mobile media has less to do with things and buildings (though these are both important) and much more to do with a cultural shift. The real question is not how are we going to construct new buildings—new classrooms, new lecture theatres, new galleries, new university. Instead we need to ask how we are going to adapt our expectations and practices to embrace  multi-sited learning.

What can we do here and now, with relatively little spending to engage the student on a bus—in the coffee shop, or between shifts at Starbucks or the Keg.

The social and economic reality facing most post-secondary students, particularly in an art school, is that they do not have a lot of down time. For better and worse, they are “jacked in” to the net. If we expect to compete with the barrage of tweets, txts, status updates—forget about email, its irrelevant research tells us—in any sort of meaningful way we need to change the way we think about teaching and learning.

Part II: Mobile Media Changing Educational Landscapes

Part III: Mobile Media Changing Educational Landscapes