June 2010 Archives

Transmedia Education: the 7 Principles Revisited

Last week, I participated in one of the ongoing series of webinars for teachers which is being conducted by our Project New Media Literacies team. The series emerges from an Early Adopters Network we are developing with educators in New Hampshire to drill down on the skills we identified in our white paper for the MacArthur Foundation and to think through how teachers in all school subjects and at all levels can draw on them to change how they support the learning of their students. Vanessa Vartabedian is the coordinator who has been running this series. Each month, they focus on a different skill. This month's focus was on Transmedia Navigation. The webinars are open to any and all participants and are drawing educators from all over the world. The webinars are also available after the fact via podcast. The Transmedia Navigation discussion involved not only some remarks by me but als o a conversation with Clement Chau from Tufts University and Mark Warshaw from the Alchemists who has developed transmedia content for Smallville, Heroes, and Melrose Place, among other properties.

Early Adopters of the New Media Literacies in Practice : Pt. 1

I have been working with an exceptional group of educators from the state of New Hampshire for the past six months via online professional development around the integration of the new media literacies across curriculum. The goal, ultimately, is that these teachers, technology integrators an library media specialists will be able to pass this new expertise on to other educators, and facilitate guidance around adopting the practices and skills they have been exploring with others statewide.

Of course, they first needed to adopt these ideas as valuable to their own classrooms, attempting to make direct connections to the relevance it has to the lives of their students, and their curriculum. Throughout this professional development, the early adopters have taken on the role of 'teacher as researcher'. This has required some rethinking of their pedagogical practices and even a consideration toward a paradigm shift  in terms of the teacher/student relationship to a more co-configured approach-where they are facilitators of student learning, rather than experts delivering content.

The nml skill Play, which is the capacity to experiment with one's surroundings as a form of problem-solving, made intuitive sense to most of these educators in terms of learning, yet they initially feared trying it out in their own teaching.

This is not a criticism of these teachers. On the whole, they struggle with what most educators in America are up against - preparing students to be expert test-takers and competent autonomous learners armed with a specific body of knowledge. Most of the time, play just seems like too much fun.

As most of us know, 'play' does not mean unstructured learning,  but it does require the willingness to learn by failing. And with the pressure to provide students with a "21st century education" - technology has become the primary focus. Of course equipping schools with new technological tools doesn't mean we know how to engage students in meaningful learning with them, nor are the skills students need always best taught through technology. Technology is, after all, a tool, the means by which we should engage students in learning the content and broader skills they will need as citizens and workers of the world. Learning the tool, for students anyway, is usually the easy part - they play with it all the time. But for teachers who experience technological-access inequity, or lack the professional development opportunities to explore the relevant affordances these tools can have to their curriculum, the frustration factor can be a stunting experience for professional growth and student engagement.  

Below is a re-blog from Wesley Fryer, who visited one such risk-taking early adopter in her classroom earlier this spring. Maria Knee is a kindergarten teacher whose educational practices have evolved at the speed of technology, and has been lucky enough to receive a tremendous amount of support from her school in doing so. When these factors are in place, it is interesting to see just how a teacher includes technology in her practices without making it the end goal of learning.