New Media and Pedagogy

Catalog description

Exploration of relationships between communication technologies and beliefs about the nature of knowledge and the nature of art. AED 811 New Media and Pedagogy (3) Due, in part, to contemporary processes of globalization and the development of digital technologies and the Web; new issues, possibilities, and opportunities regarding media communities and art pedagogy emerge in the field of art education. This is the focus of this course. Course participants have the opportunity to explore the aesthetic communicative and pedagogical implications of intertextual Webs, hypertext and hypermedia, blogs, wikis, simulations, the body interfaced in virtual reality, threaded dialogue, WebQuests, online games, media communities, adaptive and assistive technologies, and media-rich essays. Learning activities will be in the form of explorations and creation with the links and resources provided, and focused discussions about these explorations and how to teach this content at participants' teaching sites. Following 5 thematic explorations, course participants write a capstone essay to construct a speculative fiction of a teaching scenario based on the content of the course imagined in a future teaching site. The main priorities in Exploration 1 are to imagine possibilities of human-technology interfaces for creating and critiquing art. In Exploration 2, participants select a social networking tool from the course's resources to conduct a collaborative mini-project concerning self-representation online and power relational networks of social, physical, technological, and discursive inscriptions or conditions. Exploration 3, involves using the Internet as a primary medium for art creation and involves developing criteria to critique interactive Net art. The focus of Exploration 4 is free, downloadable authoring programs outside of a commercial economy, which enables the creation of interactive experiences without the need for specialized programming knowledge or database support. Exploration 5 involves participants creating a socially responsive visual culture WebQuest, which is an inquiry-oriented activity in which learners construct knowledge through interacting with, evaluating, and connecting diverse, and sometimes contradictory, resources on the Internet in order to form new insights that they share in a tangible form intended to make a difference in the world. This is one of the required courses for the M.P.S. in Art Education. There is no prescribed sequence and no prerequisites for art education courses in the M.P.S. program.