Can New Media Be Taught in Schools?
Tests on Twitter, wiki-style study groups, students quizzed on yesterday's most popular YouTube videos and the biggest hits on Del.icio.us/Popular - is this what the future of education is going to look like?
In some journalism schools around the US, it just might be. Would that really be so bad? Though many may disagree with us, we think there is some merit to teaching new media in journalism and other schools.
Inside Higher Ed has an article today detailing some colleges' plans to fund "new media" sections in their journalism schools. Many people think that new media departments in schools are a terrible idea. Jobs in traditional media can't be considered secure, though. (See this example from today.) We believe that there will be some important successes in teaching new media in schools.
The world is changing, media education has probably always needed to change and this point in history offers some exciting opportunities for educators and students.
Making The Changes
Old media is slower, less compelling and more expensive than many emerging media online. It's also more professional, often of higher quality and generally easier to monetize. The same could be said of old vs internet new in almost any industry where new players are fast taking leadership positions they would not have been able to access so easily without the technologies in question.
We think the video short series Good Morning, Internet (right) captures some parts of this dilemma well.
What will the future of media work look like, for participants old and new? Good places to look for detailed guesses include the Poynter Institute, Kansas Proffesor of Digital Ethnography Dr. Michael Wesch and blogging media critic Jeff Jarvis (see Jarvis's post on Editor 2.0 in particular).
Can You Teach New Media In School?
The new media world of blogging, RSS, tagging, wikis, podcasting and more is all so new that there are hardly any established standards or best practices well established yet. That said, there are definitely skill sets that make a world of difference in a practitioner's efficacy.
Can those skill sets be taught in school? Most people we talked to said that schools could do well to facilitate learning experiences regarding new media. We believe, however, that there are large amounts of tangible information that can be transmitted to students in any setting that will enable them to have far more meaningful experiments in learning.
Drop a sucker in SecondLife and they'll be an avatar for a day, teach them how to learn about and navigate to the most interesting events going on there and they'll...well, you get the idea.
Update: A number of people have responded in comments, arguing that it's not the skills that need to be taught, it's knowledge about the issues. Ethics, history, ethos, etc. While that's all very important, the skills themselves are not trivial, either. As we responded in comments:
it's one thing to figure out how to use social media tools, another to learn how to use them powerfully in a professional context. I see that there are a number of people here saying it's "issues" that educators need to focus on, but I believe that proficiency in the use of the technologies themselves warrants extensive education as well.For example, journalists should know how to run a feed through a filter and then monitor it by IM/SMS. Just knowing different ways to do this is material enough for one short class session. Strategic considerations in doing it better than a competitor does are material enough for another session.
Journalists should know how to navigate Wikipedia, reading edit history effectively and understanding participants in conversations there in context. I'd love to spend one class session learning about that. Ethics and case studies could surely be one part of it, but the mechanics of advanced use of these tools are complex enough that teaching them is a good idea.
Can that information be transmitted to students in a school setting, though? Students may be better off spending an hour watching all the 5 minute Social Media in Plain English videos from Common Craft.
Academia tends to be woefully behind in almost everything it teaches. Experience in the private sector tends to be a faster and more effective method of learning almost anything. Hard sciences may be the exception.
The internet is changing faster than almost anything in this world, so expecting academics to be capable of offering timely teaching in this field may lead to serious disappointment. That may be shortchanging a lot of hard working teachers fired up about the web, though.
There is Hope
Looking at what Dr. Michael Wesch teaches college students, what the incredible Vicki Davis manages to do with Elementary school students and the internet and what popular education blogger Stephen Downes advises - it is clear that there is some powerful potential for teaching new media.
Nonprofit technologist Amy Sample Ward, who graduated with a Major in New Media from Valparaiso University in Indiana, explains what one new media teacher, Milan Andrejevich, was able to help her learn.
For new media 'courses' to be successful, in my opinion, the 'teaching' and 'learning' need to be synonymous. Experiential learning and project-based assignments are really the only way to provide a space to learn and discuss new media tools. For example, a project that I had in one of my new media classes, was to take the regional newspaper's website, and re-vamp it be an actual community space using new media tools for story-telling, community building, and up-to-the-minute input. We even had the chance to present our changes to the newspaper staff. It doesn't get much more 'real' than that; and made us all focus on the biggest lesson of new media application: it needs to fit, not just be cool.
There's certainly no substitute for experience, but there are some basic skills that new practitioners can benefit from being taught by someone else. We're sure there will be a lot of bad New Media departments popping up in colleges around the world, but we believe there is hope that many others will be worth attending, too.
Photo at top: "School Rules" by Flickr user zzellers
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I think the ethics, ethos, history and case studies of social media should be taught in school, but the tactics themselves, not as much. The students are using the tools, in many cases more effectively than business does. They just need to learn how to use them ethically, safely and successfully within the context of business.
In a recent social media class there was a lot of time spent discussing The Cluetrain Manifesto. Most of the class was government employees and a little older, and that concept was just foreign to them.
Josh, I think your comment probably touches on something more important than I anything I discussed in the post above. As New Media prof. Hilary Mason also said on Twitter just a moment ago - this isn't just journalism + toys. The "ethics, ethos, history and case studies of social media" are unique and important.
It's not "new media" or "media competence" that needs to be taught: It's criticism and reflection that's truly needed. And it's needed whatever media is read, heard, watched (now and in future).
Smile! Gerrit - We speak Online.
I just took a tour of the new Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri (http://rji.missouri.edu/vision-and-mission/index.php.) Unbelievable. Check out the convergence media at program at: http://convergence.journalism.missouri.edu/convergence.html
I think we're going to see a lot of exciting stuff come out of this program.
Most new/social media tools are so easy to use it doesn't take much instruction to figure them out. But that's not the point. The point is that we need and should encourage students to think about the social and ethical ramifications of these new technologies. What's important is to get students to engage these technologies critically and to examine how they are changing our culture and business models, who they are empowering, what impact they have on the mainstream media, etc.
Students also need to learn to become responsible citizens of this digital world. That includes teaching them how to develop a public voice through the use of participatory media and showing them how to manage and protect their online identities. And yes, I believe that as educators we should be teaching them those skills.
Corinne, it's one thing to figure out how to use social media tools, another to learn how to use them powerfully in a professional context. I see that there are a number of people here saying it's "issues" that educators need to focus on, but I believe that proficiency in the use of the technologies themselves warrants extensive education as well.
For example, journalists should know how to run a feed through a filter and then monitor it by IM/SMS. Just knowing how to do this is material enough for one short class session. Strategic considerations in doing it better than a competitor does are material enough for another session.
Journalists should know how to navigate Wikipedia, reading edit history effectively and understanding participants in conversations there in context. I'd love to spend one class session on that. Ethics and case studies could surely be one part of it, but the mechanics of advanced use of these tools are complex enough that teaching them is a good idea.
"Academia tends to be woefully behind in almost everything it teaches. Experience in the private sector tends to be a faster and more effective method of learning almost anything. Hard sciences may be the exception."
I agree with this to a certain point. In fact, I bypassed traditional education myself because there was nothing like http://webscience.org/ back then. They are slow.
However, let's not forget that Academia is the birthplace of many inventions, and the driving force behind valuable research.
So, I guess the problem ( obsolescence) lies in the lack of granularity.
Academia has traditionally provided packaged "careers" instead of just focusing on granular subjects because they respond to industry needs ( they provide the customer/student with a certificate that allows them to fit in a certain profile, minimizing the risk of the employer and the hiring costs ).
Being so big and intertwined, careers are difficult to steer. This would not happen if we kept things at a more granular level. Atomic subjects or interest groups would be more dynamic and reactive to external changes.
However, extensive granularity would make the management process complex and entrance to the marketplace harder... too much information to process.
Oh, wait!
But that's exactly what head hunting / job marketplaces try to do these days.
They don't really care about your title anymore ( just for the initial screening ). They go into your personal interests and achievements.
IMHO, packaged careers (as the main option) are dead. This is just inertia.
Disclaimer: I recently graduated from Northwestern University with a degree in new media journalism.
For new media 'courses' to be successful, in my opinion, the 'teaching' and 'learning' need to be synonymous.
Such a great point.
New media are inherently networked and participatory, whereas old media tend to be disconnected and passive. New media should be pervasive throughout education and will, in my opinion, really change the face of classroom instruction (without even getting into distance learning).
Can it be taught? I think so.
Will it need to be taught to children 20 years from now? 10 years from now? Even today? I'm not so sure. When you don't know any other way, you just sort of "get it," which is where the ethics discussion comes in to play.
Great post.
Marshall - interesting article, and Corinne brings up some excellent points, too.
Two issues I see:
First - kids are already way ahead of schools when it comes to proficiency with Internet media and social media tools.
Second - any technical skills they develop now will be out of date before they graduate.
Ideally, schools would teach the concepts underlying the types of things you advocate - like using aggregators and filters to sift through various sources - to give students the mental skills to apply to future technologies.
Not at the moment.. i dont think most young people care enough to be honest!
Posted by: TheThirdEye
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July 31, 2008 2:25 PM
@ Marshall: I guess what I'm trying to stay away from is teaching students how to use a particular technology or web app (i.e. how to use Twitter or Bloglines) mainly because those technologies will probably be outdated or gone by the time they graduate (as James pointed out).
Take blogging as an example. I usually don't need to spend much time showing students how to register for a blog, how to embed a picture or movie in a post, etc. They've learned to do this on Facebook and that's not what will teach them about blogging. It's when the students actually start blogging as part of a course assignment that the real learning occurs. I could never bring home the concept of the power of blogging as well as Google picking up a student's post and catapulting it to its first page of search results for a key tag or topic. I'm convinced that the students learn more about tagging, linking and SEO from that experience than they would from a lecture or PPT presentation.
The same is true for social media's power to connect people. We can talk about it in theory, but unless a student has blogged about someone and that person actually responds to their post, they'll probably never fully grasp the sheer magnitude of its power.
What I like to do in class is get students to understand why these things happen: why did Google pick up your post, how did this person know you blogged about them, how did they find you, etc.
I think it can, but I don't think it should be taught without media literacy.
Posted by: Cecily Walker
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July 31, 2008 4:16 PM
i just came out of a discussion with a branding consultant for my nonprofit where half of the meeting was talking about leveraging our use of social networks like youtube, facebook, twitter, to reach a larger audience, connect with more people. we talked about the various ways of building real, lasting, content-filled relationships with other people online who care about what we do.
is it worthwhile to get trained in this? heck yes. would i want to be taught about it in grade school as part of my basic curriculum? no. i think it would be more appropriate to be in a specialized class, like art or spanish. i just get this weird feeling that if you make it a basic part of the curriculum, it takes the fun, real-ness out of it. kinda like all kids going to school having to learn how to enjoy the circus. how does that change the experience of going to the circus?
Corinne, I see what you're saying. I think I agree.
zd - fair points, thanks for bringing them up. Not sure I'd want to sit in a class about this stuff either, but for people who haven't had the time to learn through trials of fire - a quick catch-up in a formal situation might work really well.
Nice post Marshall: A few thoughts since I've been pondering this issue for a while now. First, some background. I was lucky enough to be at Columbia in 1995 where the J-School cooked up the first new media class. We were editing stories in Unix. The problem then--as it probably is now--is new media classes have this tension between learning the toys and techniques and the actual reporting and story telling.
In a nutshell, I think new media still needs roots in the old school, but does need to add other items mentioned in the comments here--ethics, global knowledge etc.
What's a bit alarming to me is that schools are just getting around to this new media thing--13 years after it hatched. That state of affairs isn't as alarming to me as profs that are teaching journalism without ever really practicing it--too busy doing English lit papers I presume.
The other thread that's missing in new media classes is the entrepreneurial thing. Let's face it many journalists will wind up working for themselves. They may even launch fine sites like ReadWriteWeb. Are universities teaching the journalism student how to take his or her expertise and launch a media business? Not even close.
Most schools are too busy teaching students that they need to get newspaper jobs in an industry with a shaky business model. Thanks for the rant. Cheers.
Very nice points. One has to wonder how structuring student's interaction with new media might stifle or otherwise condition their use and innovation, even with up to the second information.
Part and parcel of new media is the transparency plus wide open access to materials that ethics as well as personal preferences and biases would be inherently monitored and subject to scrutiny far beyond that of traditional one so there is no need to dwell too much on teaching these. Much as schools would love to produce graduates with 'ideal' attitudes, there might just be cases where personality will eventually come into play.
I'd reckon that old school roots plus a focused understanding of tech tools and skills training might be a quicker model.
Best.
alain
www.mor.ph
Part and parcel of new media is the transparency plus wide open access to materials that ethics as well as personal preferences and biases would be inherently monitored and subject to scrutiny far beyond that of traditional one so there is no need to dwell too much on teaching these. Much as schools would love to produce graduates with 'ideal' attitudes, there might just be cases where personality will eventually come into play.
I'd reckon that old school roots plus a focused understanding of tech tools and skills training might be a quicker model.
Best.
alain
www.mor.ph
I used to work @ the Center for New Media, UC Berkeley.
They have an excellent program which focuses on New Media, pervasive computing, et al.
http://cnm.berkeley.edu/
The tools are changing so rapidly that I don't think it makes sense to teach specific tools in school. Instead youth should learn about the value of content and context, criticism, relations to other people, networking. All the sort of things that you can apply in settings independent on technology or platforms.
We shouldn't immerse ourselves in the fling of the moment, but inspire and motivate children and youth to really dig deep and truly understand the broader issues. That to me is the only sustainable long term solution for both themselves and for society as such.
Marshall - I actually just received my Masters in Mass Communications with an emphasis in New Media. It was an amazing learning experience, and I took so much away from the program - theoretical knowledge, a keen sense of the issues in New Media and a robust skill set. I'm a huge proponent of teaching this in schools and applaud your support here. If this is the future of communications, shouldn't we be doing everything possible to ensure the next generation of professionals are ready and able to perform at the highest level possible?
I think we are looking at the wrong place right from the start. It is not up to our schools to teach and cover all this material. It is up to the home to start the guidance of all the unrestricted social activity our kids dive into. From there, utilizing the new media approach to supplement the older materials our students use.
So as a disclaimer, one of my kids is now in the eMints program in elementary school. It certifies teachers to use new media tools to strengthen and teach the class. They are moving beyond smartboards (which took forever to get into classes) and on to wikis, podcasts and blogs.
I agree with a previous poster that teaching the reach a blog or podcast can have and getting the feedback that is processed and engages conversation, takes learning far outside where we grew up. We watch as kids are stuck in older books and materials while we know there is a wealth of information that is not globally connected.
Instead of looking at 30 year old pictures of the Great Pyramid, we had a student take recent Flickr photos from the public tagged stream and utilize those (with credit in his presentation). The idea is to teach the value of the media available through the sites and how best to leverage those to strengthen your own core knowledge. Too many teachers still deny the students the right to use sites like Wikipedia, but instead refer them to a 1992 textbook. Sometimes with errors, of course.
So new media has a place in the classroom, supported by the early teachings of how best to gather, produce and engage with it.
Agree that j-schools can teach the concept of social media but it is experience in the private sector that tends to be the most effective method of learning. It will be interesting to see what types of real-world exposure j-schools offer their students so that they have the necessary skills for job placement upon graduation.
I'd say that one of the issues that comes up here isn't how new media can be introduced to existing, in many ways outmoded ways of sharing/generating/disseminating information, so much as how institutions should be adapting to these rapidly evolving means of communication and learning.
I see a lot of people working on the assumption here that the learning experience should still be a top-down, injection model whereby the teacher projects information (by means of PowerPoint, lecture, whiteboard-style teaching), and the students somewhat passively absorb it for later use. The last thing we need is to treat new media as an interchangeable canon of subject matter that will slot cleanly into the place of science, math, geography or whatever else. Any attempt to do so is doomed, anyway, due to the speed at which things move. So where does that leave us?
In my own experience of education, formal and informal, it seems that educational theory (and dragging its feet behind, practice) is moving towards a more open-ended, discussion-based approach rooted in conversation, the teacher as facilitator, and the discovery of connections, concepts and best practices by means of interaction and collective intelligence. Whether the school system as we know it is the best environment for this approach to prosper is doubtful, thanks to the inertia discussed above, but I've seen first-hand concessions to these (in some cases a century old) notions. At least in the education and media courses I've participated in.
All of this said, I think that there are definitely "power user" hard skills that can be learned, as Marshall is proposing here. Being able to upload pictures to facebook and intuitively grasp the concept of feeds via friends' status updates is still a way off using the business critical skills Marshall touches on in his post. A few minutes in the company of people like Marshall, @Cleverclogs and @Robingood are enough to work out that the rabbit hole is much deeper than it first looks when it comes to the effective use of social media tools.
I'd say the issue is less one of teaching the morality of new media usage so much as it is the contextualization, and facilitation of task-based, concrete scenarios where the skills and their function/relevance can be explored and discovered simultaneously, as Corrine discusses above.
Perhaps, then, rather than being a discrete, atomized schoolroom subject, new media can be used as a means of discovery and facilitation for a much broader, interconnected field of learning. But then, how are the schools going to package that up to sell to prospective students? Not my problem, thankfully.
Lots of food for thought here, thanks Marshall for putting out content that goes above and beyond the gossip mill and breaking news tedium that seems to dominate so much tech blogging recently.
Great discussion and I'm somewhat surprised at a few of the comments here.
Students absolutely need to be taught frameworks, methods, skills and tools for how to thrive in a world where information, people, social media are readily accessible.
They also need to be taught the skills of how to keep their knowledge work skills up-to-date throughout their career. This is probably the biggest change. If you are over 40, you were taught how to use a card catalog, microfiche reader, taking notes on paper in a library, etc. as the methods for research. That's changed quite a bit. How did you learn these new methods - likely ad hoc through friends? But that means you have gaps.
This is a topic that we are trying to address at: Work Literacy and we welcome participation.
I also just posted about a very similar issue on my blog: Brain 2.0.
Thanks Marshall. We've been watching this world quite closely at Common Craft and a big part of my perspective comes from my own experiences in education. I need/require context. For me to learn something, I need to care about it - to see how it fits into my life.
In terms of teaching new media, I agree that it's not tactics that should be the focus, but context. I think the goal should be to give people a reason to care about new media. It's what we always say about our videos - they're not focused on how something works, but why you should care about it. And caring is the hard part. If you can get a student to care about something, they are more likely to develop a long term interest that will teach them through experience.
From what I've heard from instructors, students use a number of social tools, but few see them as anything more than a communication utility. I think the opportunity lies in building context around how these tools are changing the environment and opening up new opportunities for new kinds of skills and jobs. It's not "a podcast is an RSS feed with an enclosure" it's "here's how podcasting is creating fun and interesting opportunities for people like you."
Last year, I taught a course at Stanford and Berkeley, using blogs, forums, wikis, twitter, chat, and Second Life to engage students in learning about issues and texts regarding identity, community, collective action, public sphere, social capital that arise from the use of these media. I'm revamping the course, based on those experiences, to make the courses far more student-centric, based on collaborative inquiry. I'm also using a Drupal-based social media collaboratory that I developed with Drupal developer Sam Rose over the summer
Some links:
http://www.socialtext.net/socialmediaberkeley/index.cgi?syllabus
http://www.smartmobs.com/2008/02/23/howard-rheingold-one-of-17-winners-of-hastacmacarthur-foundation-competition/
Hasn't this same title and story come up every time a new technology arrives? From youtube to podcasts to blogs to forums to chatrooms to TV to ham radios to radio...to daily newspapers. Medium is the message, message is the medium.
I guess the good thing here are the schools embracing the new technology. So, that's progress (yes?) on a conversation that arises with every generation, and now every 18 months or so with a new technology.
There has been a enormous change in information processing during the last 60 years. And because of this there is an unconditionally need to teach the youth in the so called new media. The only question is about the aproaches to use.
I just want to add an other example:
Sadly but that´s the reality. 12-year old kids share the most disgusting videos on the schoolyard with there mobiles, I do not want to name them, you can imagine the sort of videos I mean. Parents often do not know that there exist such videos, but the kids grow up with them. In this case I totally agree with #1 Josh. On this example you see: there are some things you cannot change and cannot prevent, so you have to find and teach the (maybe) right way to come along with that. By dealing with with situations openly and teaching values, logically and structured thinking and last but not least the skill to distinguish I am looking forward to the outcomes of the next generations.
I teach web design in the school of Media Studies at the University of Guelph-Humber in Toronto.
I think it's true that students are more tech/web literate each year - - but that's not the same thing as being tech/web media professionals.
I agree with some of the other commenters that this is a discussion that comes up with each new type of media technology. It certainly did with Film / TV theory courses in the past. I think there are a lot of similarities there.