Media Scholarship in the Liberal Arts Collaboration
March 28, 2009
Presentation by Janet Simons, David Baird, and Nikki Reynolds
Ursinus College - IT Leaders
Please click here to take the IT LEADERS 2009 SURVEY
Hamilton College, Colgate University, and St. Lawrence University are wrapping up a 2 year exploration of media intensive courses, those courses that include constructivist based student projects incorporating multimedia. Supported by an award of the NITLE Instructional Innovation Fund to the Moving Images Collaborative, we have analyzed these courses from the perspectives of faculty, students, and academic support experts. Commmon components of these learning experiences inlcude:
- Students engage deeply with content. Learning occurs along both cognitive and affective continuums and students retain knowledge gained.
- Most students need to develop their media, information, and technical literacy skills to author multimedia projects. Although we can expect that every student will enter our courses with foundational writing skills, the same is not true of other critical literacies.
- Evaluation of student authored multimedia projects can be difficult. There is a shift to evaluation of process rather than product in these projects. Faculty question how to evaluate the intersection of content and form.
- Collaboration across disciplines, among students, and among faculty and academic support is a strong component of successful learning experiences in media intensive courses.
- These courses are time intensive for all involved - faculty, students, academic support experts.
Our goals in identifying common components of learning in media intensive courses are to have deep enough discussions around desired learning experiences and expected outcomes to 1) soundly design and structure media based projects in courses across the curriculum, 2) Estimate resource/academic support loads, and 3) Summarize the activity of multiple courses of media based projects on campus to raise support for and recognize faculty investment in these courses. Ultimately the goal is to be able to adapt what we learn at the individual course level to a broader view that provides a framework for planning the integration of multimedia and new media technologies. What we have learned from the introduction of each new technology in the past that might help us meet the rate of change of technology and its potential for learning with a plan?
There are baseline questions that have to be recognized and addressed before a we can plan. To this end we ask each of you to visit our poster and answer three questions...
Full-size Poster
Strategic Discussion Handout