Category Archives: iconclip
Models & Media Tools for Digital Storytelling Resources: Explore Media Tools & Models for Supporting Digital/Multimodal Narrative Building
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The Pedagogy of Production Investigating What Works for Teaching Media Literacy
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Theory
AUTHOR
Joslyn Hunscher-Young
ABSTRACT
Rapidly changing technologies and new forms of communication demand a revision of what literacy instruction needs to look like today. There is already extensive research about literacy in a wide variety of contexts, including both in-school and out-of-school situations. However, there is limited research published around the learning that occurs in media literacy programs. This article explores what we can learn from media/literacy programs, and how these programs can inform – and help us rethink – literacy-learning in dynamic production contexts beyond media literacy classrooms.
This article can be explored conjunction with Joslyn Hunscher-Young’s video presentation in this module.
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Teaching Multimodal & Digital Literacies in L2 Settings New Literacies, New Basics, New Pedagogies
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Learning through Digital Storytelling
Teaching Multimodal & Digital Literacy in L2 Settings: New Literacies, New Basics, New Pedagogies
AUTHORS
Heather Lotherington, York University
Jennifer Jenson, York University
Related Videos: L2 Digital Storytelling with Scribjab
ABSTRACT
Globalization and digitization have reshaped the communication landscape, affecting how and with whom we communicate, and deeply altering the terrain of language and literacy education. As children in urban contexts become socialized into communities of increasing cultural and communicational connectivity, complexity, and convergence (Jenkins, 2004), and funding for specialist second language (L2) support declines, classrooms have become linguistically heterogeneous spaces where every teacher is a teacher of L2 learners.
This article has two purposes: The first is to give an overview of the concept of multimodal literacies, which utilize diverse media to represent visual, audio, gestural, spatial, and tactile dimensions of communication in addition to traditional written and oral forms. Since the New London Group’s manifesto on multiliteracies in 1996, which merged language and literacy education agendas in L2 teaching, language arts, media literacy, and cultural studies, new basics have developed that apply to all classrooms and all learners. Second, this article reviews and reports on innovative pedagogical approaches to multimodal literacies involving L2 learners – approaches that might helps us more generally rethink 21st Century literacy and learning.
Filed under iconclip, storytelling, Text, yellow
Exploring Media Literacy & Computational Thinking A Game Maker Curriculum Study
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Learning through Game Design
AUTHORS
Jennifer Jenson York University
Milena Droumeva, Simon Fraser University
ABSTRACT
While advances in game-based learning are already transforming educative practices globally, with tech giants like Microsoft, Apple and Google taking notice and investing in educational game initiatives, there is a concurrent and critically important development that focuses on ‘game construction’ pedagogy as a vehicle for enhancing computational literacy in middle and high school students. Essentially, game construction-based curriculum takes the central question ‘do children learn from playing games’ to the next stage by asking ‘(what) can children learn from constructing games?’
Founded on Seymour Papert’s constructionist learning model, and developed over nearly two decades, there is compelling evidence that game construction can increase student confidence and build their capacity towards ongoing computing science involvement and other STEM subjects. Our study adds to the growing body of literature on school-based game construction through comprehensive empirical methodology and evidence-based guidelines for curriculum design. There is still debate as to the utility of different software tools for game construction, models of scaffolding knowledge, and evaluation of learning outcomes and knowledge transfer.
In this paper, we present a study we conducted in a classroom environment with three groups of grade 6 students (60+ students) using Game Maker to construct their own games. Based on a quantitative analysis and a qualitative discussion we organize results around several core themes that speak to the field of inquiry: levels of computational literacy based on pre-and post-tests; gender-based attitudes to computing science and programming based on a pre- and post-survey; and the relationship between existing media literacy and performance in programming as part of the game construction curriculum. Significant results include some gender differences in attitudes towards computers and programming with boys demonstrating slightly higher confidence and performance. We discuss the complex reasons potentially contributing to that, particularly against a diverse ecology of overall media use, gameplay experience and access to technology at home. Finally, we theorize game construction as an educational tool that directly engages foundational literacy and numeracy, and connects to wider STEM-oriented learning objectives in ways that can benefit both boys and girls in the classroom.
Affordances of Equality Rancière, Emerging Media and the New Amateur
Learning through Critical Making
AUTHOR
Kurt Thumlert, York University
ABSTRACT
This article extends a recent educational engagement with the work of Jacques Rancière by linking his meditations on 19th-century worker emancipation to present cultural contexts and media forms. Taking Nick Prior’s (2010) notion of the ‘new amateur’ as point of departure, I argue that new media and attendant production contexts offer an unprecedented occasion for rethinking the educational experiments of Joseph Jacotot (the subject of Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster, 1991). By bringing Jacotot’s “method of equality” into relation with present forms of cultural production, I elaborate a notion of affordances of equality that updates Jacotot’s practice of “experimenting with the gap between accreditation and act’ — a method that invited learners to improvise in the gap between an expert role and a talent imitable by anyone at all. In conclusion, I ask what educational theory might learn from the new amateur, from the emerging media these amateurs are engaging, and from the production literacies they enact.
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Putting the Critical (Back) into Maker Spaces Critical Making Takes a Holiday
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Learning through Critical Making
AUTHOR
Laura Elizabeth Pinto, University of Ontario Institute of Technology
ABSTRACT
Among educators today, ‘making’ has become a vogue term. The recent wave of makerspaces, however, has shifted away from the original maker movement’s roots. Rather than taking a stance against consumerism, making has emerged with a new purpose, as articulated by the Maker Education Initiative: ‘a strategy to engage youth in science, technology, engineering, math, arts, and learning as a whole’. So, instead of making as an interdisciplinary means of personal and community self-reliance, many newer projects see it as a way to engage students in subject-specific learning. In schools, maker kits and prepackaged a ‘maker curriculum’ are welcomed as part of this movement. This article explains what is lost when making is co-opted by consumer curricula and predetermined maker outcomes, and how we might put the critical (back) into maker spaces.
Supporting Texts & Resources:
- Ratto, M. (2011). Critical making: Conceptual and material studies in technology and social life. The Information Society, 27(4), 252-260.
- Wark, M. (2013). A more lovingly made world. Cultural Studies Review, 19(1), 296-304.
- Pinto, L.E. (2016). Critical making takes a holiday. Philosophy of Education Society (PES) Annual Conference, March 18-21, 2016, Toronto Ontario. (Slide Deck Available in Downloads Area).
