While attending the Re:Humanities conference at Bryn Mawr College last week, I had the great pleasure of listening to Tara McPherson’s talk, “Feminist in a Software Lab”. McPherson highlighted several projects that allowed for humanities scholars to reconceptualize the ways in which they pose, research, and formulate scholarly questions through the use of digital technology. Coupled with “The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age” by Cathy N. Davidson and David Theo Goldberg, I turned back to one of my driving questions behind this Praxis: What skills and competencies are needed by students to succeed in a learning environment that will be increasingly shaped by digital technologies.
In setting out to answer this question, I turned to Davidson and Goldberg’s vision of the future of the institution. In their ten principles for the future of education, Davidson and Goldberg clearly articulate shifts in media social practices and how they relate to learning. The rationale for exploring their work proves primarily to position their findings as an “end goal” of sorts in order to consider the competencies required by students in order to succeed at an institution that Davidson and Goldberg predict will evolve with our changing methods of accessing information.
According to Davidson and Goldberg, the future of learning will be much more participatory, collaborative, and generative with the increased integration of technology into the process of education. Through McPherson’s projects as well as the observations that I have made at School One, I have definitely begun to see these shifts. However, I don’t believe that the participatory culture involved in digital media usage comes naturally. Rather, a certain unspoken, abstract skill set is involved in the production of digital media projects. And as I am seeing at School One, either the student has it or she doesn’t.
The project of articulating this skill set proves to aid teachers in considering how to teach their students that don’t “get it” naturally. Rather than throw students into digital media projects assuming that they will be able to, metaphorically speaking, swim, teachers should be carefully considering the methods through which they frame their assignments so as to provide students with a gentle nudge towards utilizing their tools to the maximum capacity. Thus, I aim to come up with a set of competencies and skills that students may need if Davidson and Goldberg’s vision comes into fruition. By doing so, I hope to provoke greater dialogue about the process through which both students and teachers alike conceive of their multimodal projects.
Tags: Field Notes, media literacy