EduGlu Sandbox

Back in the heady early days of podcasting - all the way back in 2005 - one of the first use cases of the technology was to create “walking tours” where a narrator could guide students through a tour of an area. When video podcasting became possible, it would make the guided tours more effective because you could show supplemental or orienteering images to support the narration.

HAL Beta 0.66, originally uploaded by jurvetson.

I’m back from the ELI Annual Meeting in San Antonio, wading through the emails I’ve been ignoring, looking in on Twitter trying to recapture a little of that unthreaded love thang weave — thankfully it’s been as unstable as normal, so I’ve been forced to move ahead.

I have three, maybe four (we’ll see how brave I am) posts percolating in my head, and I really do want to get them out. The accumulation of sleep deprivation, the inrush of daily employment taskage, reconnecting with family, my own cognitive weakness, I can feel the intensity of my impressions receding. Nothing would make me happier than sitting down calmly, taking a stress pill and thinking things over, and maybe doing justice to the many fabulous contributions people made to my learning this week. But if I’m going to salvage anything out of the experience, I need to let go, get what I can up on the open web, and accept the limitations thereof.

So, some fragmented, non-integrated responses to the session led by Gardner Campbell, Serena Epstein and David Moore entitled “Information Fluency as Curricular Innovation: New Media Studies in General Education.”

• First off, there was a hell of a scheduling dilemma. Because I attended this session, I missed George Siemens discuss Connectivism (I do hope to catch up via the podcast), and also Cole Camplese’s session…

• Gardner’s opening remarks framed the challenges beautifully. How do we reconcile the fact that the web, while being the most powerful technical medium of expression ever created, can be described as fostering a culture whole greatest literary achievement is “LOL”? How does the academic community step up, move towards a mindset in which attention to the means of communication is “baked in” to the curriculum, and not simply “bolted on”? To be truly curricular new media needs to be seen as legitimate inquiry, about “habits of mind,” and not merely a set of useful skills.

• The New Media Reader proved to be an immensely useful core textbook, and can definitely be a useful resource for anyone who cares to integrate these issues meaningfully into higher education. I need to snag myself a copy.

I was simply blown away by the poise and intelligence of the students, and by how differently the two of them approached their final projects (representative of how diverse the methods of new media studies can be).

• David Moore fought valiantly through a flu bug, presented a detailed and impressively grounded overview of the challenges implicit in the structure of discussion forums, and outlined a very promising model for a recommender and referral model that goes deeper than the Slashdot model, one that reminded at least one attendee of eBay.

• Serena Epstein had a much more visceral and artistic approach to the new media domain. She showed a short excerpt of her final project film, and I am a bit sheepish to admit how much I related to the slacker angst the clip depicted.

Later that night, I watched Serena’s whole film, and was moved in a number of respects. First off, it’s just a fine piece of moviemaking. I was especially affected by the sections acted out by Gardner and Shannon Hauser… But the part that just smacked me was the post-film final blooper reel, of all things. Something about what it revealed of what a teacher-student relationship can be… My throat actually tightened up when they walked out of the coffee shop together.

Yes, this culture can foster something a little deeper than LOL.

Technorati tags: ELIAnnual08, Gardner Campbell, literacy, new media…