NITLE Summit
March 29-30, 2009
DoubleTree Hotel, Philadelphia, PA
Please click here to take the NITLE SUMMIT SURVEY
Constellations or "futzing around the edges"?
In describing our current conversations about learning and new media technologies, Randy Bass points out that "...we can only 'futz' (descriptive term from Cathy Richardson) because we do not have a vocabulary or a tradition for engaging with learning in meaningful communal ways." He goes on to say that it is important to put, "...into practice wide-scale views of learning outcomes as textured as those of faculty who look at learning in their own classrooms." [1] In looking for "wide-scale" views, we are considering eight components that consistently appear in media based courses in our media scholarship collaboration. We liken these components to stars in a constellation. The pattern of the stars may vary by location and point of view, but the stars themselves are consistent navigation points. In similar locations, we can even reach communal agreement on the pattern of the stars... Using this analogy and looking for patterns, we have plotted the relative variability of eight components of case study courses in our media scholarship collaboration. We wish to increase the number of courses and institutions plotted to determine if there are emerging patterns in media scholarship. Would relatively consistent patterns facilitate our discussions across courses and disciplines? Would patterns help us to move from anecdotal to communal understanding of the changing nature of learning in multimodal and new media environments?
1 Randy Bass. "New Media Technologies and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning." Academic Commons. Jan 2009. http://www.academiccommons.org/commons/essay/introduction.
