Can 140 characters communicate an idea? How do you grade a Prezi? Teaching with new media provides students and teachers an interactive platform where they can engage with ideas and communicate in a variety of modes. However bridging the rhetorical strategies valued by the academy with those needed in the workplace and for personal use can be challenging, particularly in the Humanities. To address these issues, our website will provide professional development resources, assignments, rubrics and student projects.
Objectives:
1. To frame discussions of digital literacy and citizenship in terms of professional development; address resistance to teaching with new media by faculty who believe teaching with it is neither rigorous nor pedagogically sound.
2. To demonstrate how engaging students with new media provides a model of critical, responsible use of new media tools; discuss how to “hack apps” to make them work for assignments, providing models of assignments and rubrics.
3. To illustrate how providing access to faculty research materials not only invites students to participate authentically in academic conversations but also engages them in discussion of open source culture, citation and intellectual property.
Guiding Questions:
Here are a few questions we had as we thought about our presentation; please bring yours to our session!
Objectives:
1. To frame discussions of digital literacy and citizenship in terms of professional development; address resistance to teaching with new media by faculty who believe teaching with it is neither rigorous nor pedagogically sound.
2. To demonstrate how engaging students with new media provides a model of critical, responsible use of new media tools; discuss how to “hack apps” to make them work for assignments, providing models of assignments and rubrics.
3. To illustrate how providing access to faculty research materials not only invites students to participate authentically in academic conversations but also engages them in discussion of open source culture, citation and intellectual property.
Guiding Questions:
Here are a few questions we had as we thought about our presentation; please bring yours to our session!
- What tools for reading as well as writing do both students and teachers need in order to interact effectively? For example, how does it change our thinking about language to consider a character limit on a platform such as Twitter (or in a proposal application) instead of the word limit we use in more conventional writing tasks?
- How do we address the gaps in student and faculty facility with new media? What issues of access should we consider?
- Where can teachers find professional development support as they learn to teach with social media? How might they convince skeptical colleagues that such learning is professional development?
- If it’s fun can it be serious? One of values of communication with new media is that it can be fun. But it can be challenging to represent assignments and student-produced texts as rigorous and valid in some traditional academic contexts (the faculty meeting, the academic conference) to those who might not be inclined to embrace such work. How do we create a framework for such discussions?
- While we are familiar with rubrics for evaluating an essay exam, a close reading of a novel and a research essay, for example, what kinds of rubrics are needed to assess a Tweet or a Storify essay? Where do we find them? How do we develop them?