Recognizing the Gift: New Media & Learning for the 21st Century

Dr. Gardner Campbell

Baylor University

www.gardnercampbell.net

How long will it take before we see the gift for what it is—a single new medium of representation, the digital medium, formed by the braided interplay of technical invention and cultural expression at the end of the 20th

century?Janet Murray, “Inventing the Medium,” The New Media Reader (MIT, 2003)

“Millicomputing,” Adrian Cockrofthttp://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail3871.html

ON THE WAY:1080p video playback10 x today’s web surfing speed20 megapixel camera130 hours of audio playbackon a mobile device.

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The Nature of Technology

Technology: Brian Arthur’s 3 Definitions

• A technology is “a means to fulfill a human purpose.”

• A collection of technologies is also a technology, a “body of technologies.”

• The “technium” (Kevin Kelly) is the ecology of technologies in our world.

Sarah Groman | Staff Photographer

At Waco's Homestead Heritage, the residents are almost entirely self- sufficient. Here, a local seamstress produces fresh yarn from real sheep's wool by hand.

http://www.baylor.edu/Lariat/news.php?action=story&story=63523

My large argument

• Technology uses natural phenomena “for some purpose”—Arthur.

• School is a technology that uses our brain’s natural phenomenon of wanting-to-learn.

• The purpose of school is faster and better learning.– Faster means one can learn more in one lifetime

– Better means that one can learn more effectively

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Other schooling technologies

• Credit hour• GPA• Course• Semester• Examination• “Year” (freshman, sophomore, junior, senior)• Transcript• Faculty

The liberal arts / gen. ed. “hazing.” See T. Clydesdale, The First Year Out (U. Chicago Press, 2007)

Our Shared Reality, 2010

“We are living in the middle of the largest increase in expressive capability in the history of the human race.”Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody

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Flickr Photo by David Anthony Porterhttp://www.flickr.com/photos/davidaporter/

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ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

Photo by Yoshi: http://www.flickr.com/photos/niwru/406431361/

From Steven Johnson, The Invention of Air

From Steven Johnson, The Invention of Air

http://bokardo.com/archives/how-social-is-amazon/

Game released end of October, 2008.One million levels by end of July, 2009.Two million levels by end of February 2010.http://kotaku.com/5320365/littlebigplanet-hits-one-million-levelshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LittleBigPlanet

Hofstadter: Generalization involves the ability to internally reconfigure an idea, by• moving internal boundaries back and forth;• swapping components or shifting substructures from one level to another;• merging two substructures into one or breaking one substructure into two;• lengthening or shortening a given component;• adding new components or new levels of structure;• replacing one concept by a closely related one;• trying out the effect of reversals on various conceptual levels; and so on.

Discussion Forum, Web 1.0

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Photo by Jeff Steely: http://jeffsteely.blogspot.com/2009/09/layers-of-learning.html

http://courseblogs.gardnercampbell.net/baylor_nms_f09/

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51http://2008financialcrisis.umwblogs.org/

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“Roughly half the class continued to work after the semester was over, and roughly half of those were seniors who had graduated. I believe this is evidence of genuine engagement.”Dr. Steven Greenlaw, “Teaching as modeling disciplinary practice”

http://pedablogy.stevegreenlaw.org/?p=703

Modeling good practices

• Laptops are more than just electronic notepads.

• Wireless is more than access to FB

• The class hashtag and its subtle benefits

• The model of “conference tweets” applied to stream during mini-lectures, discussion, student presentations

• Archives for further reflection

Toward Full Fluency

• Information Literacy

• Digital Fluency

• Meta-Medium Fluency

• A Personal Cyberinfrastructure

• Digital Citizenship

How do we get there?

• Heroic enthusiasm

• A strong network

• A continuum of innovation

• A renaissance of wonder

Marco Antonio Torres is a 10-year high school teacher, media coach, and education technology director for San Fernando High School, one of the nation's largest urban schools in Los Angeles. He is also a professional filmmaker and photographer who uses these digital storytelling skills to add value to his curriculum.

Two Kinds of Technology

“To have no technology is to be not-human…. Technology is part of the deeper order of things. But our unconscious makes a distinction between technology as enslaving our nature versus technology as extending our nature…. We should not accept technology that deadens us….”

A new way of knowing

“We do not speak of isolated clever tricks that help in particular situations. We refer to a way of life in an integrated domain where hunches, cut-and-try, intangibles, and the human ‘feel for a situation’ usefully co-exist with powerful concepts, streamlined terminology and notation, sophisticated methods, and high-powered electronic aids.”

Douglas Engelbart, “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework,” 1962

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.

--William Blake

The task is the same now as it ever has been, familiar, thrilling, unavoidable: we work with all our myriad talents to expand our media of expression to the full measure of our humanity.Janet Murray, “Inventing the Medium”