Brief Summary:

The readings this week were all about the changing learning environment in which teachers are encountering. Not only is the technology around teachers changing, but the way we must theorize about education and learning is changing. “Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century” by Henry Jenkins mentions teaching 21st Century Literacies. In the past, literacy was related to reading and writing in print. According to Jenkins, students must have basic literacy in order to interact with new media. They must also learn skills conducive to producing texts in other visual environments.

“A New Paradigm for Undergraduate Education” by Robert B. Barr and John Tagg argues that in the past, college institutions have used an “Instructor Paradigm” and should instead use a new “Learning Paradigm.” The Instructor and the Learning Paradigm differ epistemologically, which in turn influences learning. In the Instructor Paradigm, knowledge is considered objective and seperate from the student learning it. In other terms, knowledge is “out there.” In the Learning Paradigm, knowledge is formed collaboratively and knowledge is interpreted differently by different students. In the instructor paradigm, the instructor has much more control over the classroom space. In the Learning Paradigm, students are encouraged to take more “active roles” in learning. The Instructor Paradigm is product-based and meant to produce results, the Learning Paradigm is meant to produce learning.

Chapter 1 of New Learning by Mary Kalantzis and Bill Cope is about defining different concepts important to the book. Education is defined with three key concepts in mind: learning community, curriculum, and pedagogy. Essentially, education is “learning by design” (page number.) The book also points out that many people have pointed out the importance of education, especially now that technology has radically altered society, but that little resources have been dedicated to doing so. This book addresses changes in the world through the idea of “new learning.” Like the Learning Paradigm from Bar and Tagg’s piece, new learning consi sts of a broader definition of learning and the role of the instructor.

Readings and Relation to Course Outcomes:

These posts relate to the course goals of this course in that this course is about teaching writing with technology. Not only must we think about technology as a tool of production, but we must also think about how interfacing with new media changes the way learning works inside the classroom and out.

One of the course goals is to “express reasons and cite data about why it is important to teaching with technology in the 21st Century.” The piece by Jenkins in particular states that while many people already interface with new media in their daily lives, it is also important to teach students 21st Century literacy for several reasons. Not all students have the same access to new technologies, while technology attempts to be invisible it does change the way messages can be sent and received by an audience, and the ethical problems that students may face as they participate in online discourse and make their writing public (13-8).