Abstracts
Holly Willis - Toward an Algorithmic Pedagogy
The demand for an expanded definition of literacy to accommodate visual and aural media is not particularly new, but it gains urgency as college students transform, becoming producers of media in many of their everyday social activities. The response among those who grapple with these issues as instructors has been to advocate for new definitions of literacy and particularly, an understanding of visual literacy. These efforts are exemplary, and promote a much needed rethinking of literacy and models of pedagogy. However, in what is more akin to a manifesto than a polished argument, this essay argues that we need to push farther: What if we moved beyond visual rhetoric, as well as a game-based pedagogy and the adoption of a broad range of media tools on campus, toward a pedagogy grounded fundamentally in a media ecology? Framing this investigation in terms of a media ecology allows us to take account of the multiply determining relationships wrought not just by individual media, but by the interrelationships, dependencies and symbioses that take place within the dynamic system that is today’s high-tech university. An ecological approach allows us to examine what happens when new media practices collide with computational models, providing a glimpse of possible transformations not only ways of being but ways of teaching and learning. How, then, may pedagogical practices be transformed computationally or algorithmically and to what ends?
Jamie ‘Skye’ Bianco - Composing and Compositing: Integrated Digital Writing and Academic Pedagogy
Offering theoretical and practical criticism of the conventions of first-year university writing instruction in the United States, Bianco suggests that writing pedagogy incorporate various digital and new media modes of writing into the teaching of composition. The essay asserts that compositional digital platforms are already used prolifically and socially by young writers and that the affective charge of integrated digital writing, or multi-and hyper-media compositing, might be productively crossed with academic knowledge production. Illustrations of three classroom examples draw out the critique and proposed digital revision of university writing pedagogies.
Cheryl Ball & Ryan 'rylish' Moeller - Reinventing the Possibilities: Academic Literacy and New Media
This webtext demonstrates the possibilities of using new media to teach students critical literacy skills applicable to the 21st century. It is a manifesto for what the authors think writing scholars should be teaching in general-education "writing" classes like first-year composition. In order to answer the question of what we should teach, we have to ask what kinds of academic literacy, if any, we value. The authors argue here that rhetorical theory is a productive way to theorize how meaning is made among new media texts, their designers, and their readers. They use the Ancient Greek concepts of topoi and commonplace to explain how designers and readers enter into a space of negotiated meaning-making when converging upon new media texts. That negotiated space offers a new-media space for learning critical literacies by means other than research papers. As examples, they discuss two student texts and the literacies they demonstrate.
Darren Jorgensen - The Digital, the Virtual and the Naming of Knowledge
Amidst changing regimes of disciplinarity, the digital has become a
term used to delineate a mode of knowledge and educational methodology.
Its currency comes from the technologies that share its name, yet the
territory that it marks is much greater than this, referring to the
cultural, economic and social. The digital is too proximate to the
technological to adequately account for this territory. Instead, I
argue for radical interventions in the naming of knowledge in order to
defamiliarise the digital. Different accounts of the virtual by Pierre
Lévy, Katherine Hayles and David Summers suggest that this term
establishes a greater range of enquiry and contestation. The virtual is
but one alternative to the digital as a means by which new disciplines,
methodologies and pedagogies might be constituted.
Lisa Gye - Some thoughts on the evolution of digital media studies
From networked Doom to social media, this article traces the writer's experience of teaching digital media studies over the past 15 years. While some other fields of academia meander along changing in increments and gentle undulating forays into new fields of enquiry, new media studies hurtles along like a Atari game on an emulator without Speed Throttling and Auto Frameskip. Keeping up is not the only concern - slowing the frame down long enough to establish a research target is often impossible. By way of a series of blog style vignettes, the article tries to indentify some key moments when the target came briefly into view.
James Farmer with Anne Bartlett-Bragg and Chris Bigum - Roundtable Audio Discussion
RoundTable on Technology, Teaching and Tools.
This is a roundtable audio interview conducted by James Farmer, founder of Edublogs, with Anne Bartlett-Bragg (University of Technology Sydney) and Chris Bigum (Deakin University). Skype was used to make and record the audio conference and the resulting sound file was edited by Andrew McLauchlan.
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