ReThinking Competency through Media

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Re-Thinking Competency through Media

• Norm Friesen, PhD
• Umea, Sept. 18, 2009

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Overview

• Summary of conventional understandings of media
  in education and instructional design
• Media and knowledge the mediatic turn
• How media shape education
• Media, education and socialization
• Conclusion Mediatic turn and competencies

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Media in Education

• Educational/Instructional Media the intentional
  and systematic use of computer, broadcast, and
  other technologies for instructional purposes,
  generally in instructional settings. A means to
  acquire competencies.
• Media Literacy providing students with the
  competency to read or be literate in use and
  consumption of media. (broadcast model)

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Instructional (multi)Media

• focusingon how people learn from words and
  pictures in computer-based environments. These
  environments include online instructional
  presentations, interactive lessons, e-courses,
  simulation games, virtual reality and
  computer-supported in-class presentations. (Mayer
  2005, p. ix)

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Media Literacy

• The process of understanding and using the mass
  media in an assertive and nonpassive way. This
  includes an informed and critical understanding
  of the nature of the media, the techniques used
  by them and the impact of these techniques.
  (Boles 2008)
• The competencies of an individual in (isolated)
  encounters with specific media

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student academic learning model Michael
Molenda 2005
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The mediatic turn

• Via empirical evidence "Whatever we know about
  our society, or indeed about the world in which
  we live, we know through media" (Luhmann, 2000)
• As a way of viewing the world
• Engineer looks at problem spaces for
  formalization (systems)
• Psychologist looks for motivation from personal
  history (sexuality)
• Media as a category vocabulary to view the
  world

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Media as Epistemological

• Media have taken on epistemological role they
  are a part of the way that we know about things,
  about ourselves, and about knowledge and
  competency themselves
• They dont simply have an impact on knowledge,
  they are the way we know, how we identify,
  evaluate, circulate knowledge
• We are our media

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E.g. the Epistemology of Print

• The mastery of the alphabet and then mastery of
  all the skills and knowledge that were arranged
  to follow constituted not merely a curriculum but
  a definition of child development. By creating a
  concept of a hierarchy of knowledge and skills,
  adults invented the structure of child
  development And since the school curriculum was
  entirely designed to accommodate the demands of
  literacy, it is astonishing that educationists
  have not widely commented on the relationship
  between the nature of childhood and the biases
  of print.

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Epistemology of Print, cont

• For example, a child evolves towards adulthood by
  acquiring the sort of intellect we expect of a
  good reader a vigorous sense of individuality,
  the capacity to think logically and
  sequentiallyas well as the capacity to
  manipulate high orders of abstraction Infancy
  ended at the point at which a command of speech
  was achieved. Childhood began with the task of
  learning how to readchildhood became a
  description of a level of symbolic achievement.

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Print sets the Agenda

• Competencies required of students in school are
  those of print
• Orderly conduct in a structured environment
• Environment structured in a linear and logical
  way
• Reading requires discrete levels of competency
  (reading at a grade 3 level a grade 1 level
  book)
• Learn from a distinct curriculum, deliberately
  designed learning by doing is removed from the
  classroom

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Print and Curriculum

• the groundrules through which reality is
  constructed for children are not simply
  transformed instead, a whole new system of rules
  emerges. The culture is no longer presented to
  the child in its entirety, but only in part
  namely, via a kind of pedagogical rehearsal or
  practise, as it would be for someone from a
  foreign land. This makes certain institutions
  necessary such as schools orphanages and
  kindergartens. (p. 50)

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Result Socialization vs. Education

• Education formal process, institutional
  structures, intentionally done, planned through
  curricula, shaped very deliberately
• Socialization development of selfhood and
  identity through the social and material
  environment
• is about getting along with and communicating
  with others
• is clearly social

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New Media and Competencies

• De-value the structures of print-based literacy,
  including
• Classroom structures, customs and forms
• Competency definitions, and ways competency is
  measured
• Blur the boundary between formal and informal
  competencies (education and socialization)
• Involve learning in different ways socialization
  versus instruction
• Competencies acquired and measured informally

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Print and Schooling

• Print competencies are not learned through
  socialization, but through deliberate and
  structured schooling
• The classroom and the school, as one example, are
  said to be inventions of the printing press,
  and are said to stand or fall on the issue of
  how much importance the printed word will have in
  the future. (Postman)

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Mediatic Turn and Competencies

• Competencies and schooling will continue to be
  defined in terms of the epistemology of print
• New Media are not new in terms of offering an
  alternative to schooling
• Learning by being shown remains important, and
  continues via the Web as it did via TV
• For competencies, blur any line between
  socialization and education but a separation
  exists socialization does not operate like
  education

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Bibliography

• Friesen, N. Hug, T.  (2009). The Mediatic Turn
  Exploring Consequences for Media Pedagogy.  In K.
  Lundby (Ed.). Mediatization Concept, Changes,
  Consequences. New York Peter Lang. Pp. 64-81
  http//learningspaces.org/n/papers/Media_Pedagogy_
  _Mediatic_Turn.pdf  
• Postman, N (1994). The Disappearance of
  Childhood. New York Random House.
• Eisenstein, E. (1982). The Printing Press as an
  Agent of Change. Cambridge, UK Cambridge UP.