|
HyperText project
Solstrand seminar: something borrowed, something . . .
The advantages of using technology in teaching media are numerous, and probably obvious. These advantages I think about in three broad categories:
Collatoral learning is all that students 'pick up' from working in digital environments. These are general literacy skills in media use, and include writing HTML (which is a revolution because it is first of all a writing, not a publishing, technology), using email lists, utilising the Web, managing files on a server, managing email. These are, very often, skills that academic staff take for granted but many students either are unfamiliar with, or do not know exist. Examples of this in teaching and learning projects are things like students establishing and using email lists to manage projects (in effect time shifting their contact, much like we use a VCR), remotely accessing essays, handing in work electronically, and learning the necessity of making backups of material. While many of these appear to be minor they all involve a shift from the use of a computer as an individual workstation towards computers as networked environments, as students naturalise their use of computers in this manner there many minor but significant changes happen in their use of this technology. For example, students will request common group folders for a small project team, similarly a dedicated email list, and collectively write a web site. This is a co-operative working and learning model that leverages information technology proactively, and empowers students in their use of such tools. These are all fundamental competencies for graduates and for the employment environment they are entering as basic as knowing how to find, read, and use, a text book.
In augmented learning information technology is used to provide forums and content to benefit students online, but the fundamental practice of teaching, and the role of the student, assessment practices and paradigms, remain largely untroubled by the general changes in communication and literacy that electronic media have introduced.
This is where things like subject or course email lists, subject bulletin boards, and most online courseware fall. These tend to rely on existing paradigms of teaching and learning, with interactive content, synchronous and asynchronous conferencing, and online assessment added largely to benefit geographically (though not temporally) dispersed students. Digitisation of video clips can be useful here, providing access to film extracts to students on a network, or for that matter entire films with bookmark and annotation facilities available to students via video servers.
Augmented learning tends to concentrate on providing resources for students learning online, often on the model of the existing classroom, and generally attempts to provide sites for conversation, discussion, and argument. These may be in real time (chat forums) or through threaded discussion forums (bulletin boards). Courses delivered in such environments generally have firm timelines and so while they may be of value for students unable to attend a university they can be difficult for those students seeking flexibility with schedules.
Contextual learning is the deep learning that students can express when using new technologies. Deep learning is represented by the student's ability to recontextualise what they have learnt, rather than repeating information as formula, definition or rote repetition. It is this recontextualising of content that shows the student's development of learning schemas to adapt the content to novel circumstances. In other words what they have learnt is able to be applied outside of the contexts of formal assessment, and this recontextualising is the translation of information into knowledge.
Contextual learning is hard to assess as many of our traditional assessment practices emphasise testing and evaluation of information, rather than knowledge. However, hypermedia writing supports such learning outcomes as writing becomes original work, assemblage, quotation, and combinations of image, text, sound, and moving image. Once students work with different media within a common writing space multiple contexts adhere to these objects. Work, inevitably, tends towards variability and openness and students become knowledge architects rather than information parrots. This is probably not a great deal different to the sorts of project work that was done in primary school and hung up on the wall for display. This work lets students write with the technology, not just in it, in much the same way that most staff, when they move content 'online' write with technology and not just in it.
This learning requires a very different approach to teaching, largely because a lot of our assumptions about what constitutes the assessment of learning needs to be re-evaluated, and because the appropriate uses of information technology in teaching fundamentally alters the shape of pedagogy, and so the nature of knowledge as modelled for the student.
A simple illustration of this is to again consider the ways in which 'traditional' university teaching models traditional assessment practices. A formal lecture, journal articles, and tutorial discussions can all be seen to assist students in learning how to express themselves in specific academic contexts - the tutorial paper, the exam, and the essay. However, it seems a common place observation that electronic discourse, and literacy, is made up of a palimpsest of fragments, opinions, asides, allusions, quotations, parodies and grabs. This is what email is, and this is pretty much how we use, and write for, the Web. This is also, if we stop and notice, pretty much how most forms of courseware structure or train us to structure our content for electronic delivery - modularise, break it into bits.
If our 'knowledge', if our 'teaching' is best delivered in bits, then why or how should students' expression of this knowledge appear as 20 continuous pages? In black and white? Without audio?
Perhaps more significantly, if our teaching appears in 'bits' then where are we actually teaching our students how to write 20 continuous pages? Where is the 'fit' between what we teach, how we teach, and the what and how of assessment?
In the context of humanities teaching in most Australian and western European university's electronic literacy can be thought of as a post literacy - for a student to have arrived at university it can be assumed that they already know how to write an essay. In this situation the question of how to assess learning is always and only ideological, and in electronic environments we are well on the way to reinventing the location of teaching, yet excluding students from exploring and articulating those very forms we study: media, media literacy, and critical practice.
|
