Mobile Media: Changing Educational Landscapes (Part I)

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.

Part I looks at my thoughts changing landscapes of education.
Part II discusses mobile media affordances—key projects, people.
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.