New media, new genres

by | Friday, December 12, 2008

There is an interesting article in today’s NYTimes titled Content and its discontents by Virginia Heffernan. In this article she makes the argument the new digital, online media require new ways of representing information, new ways of thinking about how ideas are wrapped and presented, in short they require the development of new genres. As the article says, and I quote:

This argument concedes that it’s not possible to translate or extend traditional analog content like news reports and soap operas into pixels without fundamentally changing them. So we have to invent new forms. All of the fascinating, particular, sometimes beautiful and already quaint ways of organizing words and images that evolved in the previous centuries — music reviews, fashion spreads, page-one news reports, action movies, late-night talk shows — are designed for a world that no longer exists. They fail to address existing desires, while conscientiously responding to desires people no longer have.

There is a parallel here to the way in which Matt Koehler and I have articulated the TPACK framework.

New technologies are not merely an add-on to the standard forms of pedagogy but rather require that teachers and educators develop new forms of pedagogy that best exploit the affordances of these new technologies. This is a non-trivial task, requiring a deep knowledge not just of the disciplines and pedagogical techniques but also of what is best possible using these new technologies. This means that as technologies evolve, we will need to develop new pedagogical techniques as well – and it seems to me that we are at the very beginning of some interesting new approaches and genres. The rise of online learning (something I had written about here) is just the tip of the iceberg.

The first line of dialog in the movies (in the 1927 movie The Jazz Singer) was the following, “”Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet.” These words hold true even today. Truly we haven’t heard (or seen) nothin’ yet! You can see the clip below, approximately 4:20 into the clip.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ES_RYXPb1-k]

Some previous postings related to these issues can be found here and here

A few randomly selected blog posts…

My journey through design: Keynote at IDC

My journey through design: Keynote at IDC

Design is core to my identity, to who I am. Education is the space within which I function but I try to approach everything I do as a designer. This was not always the case. Back in 1984, I had just graduated with an undergraduate degree in engineering, and if there...

TAPS / TPACK videos

A few years ago, as a part of our PT3 project Matt Koehler, Ken Dirkin and I video taped a series of teacher interviews around authentic problem solving in teaching using technology. The teachers were winners of the TAPS (Technology in Authentic Problem Solving)...

Like to learn, but hate school

In this TCRecord piece, Daniel T. WIllingham uses what we know about cognitive psychology to explain  Why students don't like school. He suggests that although most people believe that humans are good at thinking, it is actually the weakest of our mental faculties......

Repurposing a stick. What fun!

Teaching with technology, for me, is all about repurposing technology. Such repurposing requires creative play. Our presentation at SITE 2010 was around some creative micro- and macro-design tasks that can help foster such creative repurposing. I just came across this...

Jeff Keltner from Google Education to talk today

There has been a great deal of interest in the educational use of cloud computing tools such as Google Docs in the College (and at MSU at large). Though these tools are often free and easy to use, they come with concerns about intellectual property and ownership of...

A pome a day

Greg Casperson is a graduate student in our Ed Psy & Ed Tech program. He has been engaged, over the past few months, in the most interesting experiment. He carefully selects and posts to his website one poem every day! Greg's RSS feed has become one of the first...

Finding humor in play

Learning through play has been an important part of my philosophy of teaching (and learning). In fact I have argued that play is far more important than games (though games have been receiving a great deal of educational interest lately). [You can read a previous...

Dreams of our futures

I started this blog on the 1st of January 2008. Barely 4 days later I a posted a video and asked the question, Is this a defining moment of our time? See it here Almost exactly six months later my question was partially answered, and I blogged about it here. Today,...

Special issue on TPACK in Context, with a new & improved model

Special issue on TPACK in Context, with a new & improved model

Since we first introduced the TPACK model in 2006, the role of context has been a subject of ongoing discussion and evolution. The journey began with a grey smudge in 2008, in the first TPACK (actually then called TPCK) Hanbook. This evolved into the now canonical...

1 Comment

  1. Ben Mitchell

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