COURSE DESCRIPTION: This course examines the educational possibilities of digital media, asking what and how we know is reshaped, re-mediated and altered by technology tools and their affordances. The course focuses primarily on the design, development and practical implementation of technologies for learning, in close relation with pedagogical theory and technology studies.

COURSE DETAILS: More and more of our time is spent working, learning, and playing with digital media (online and off), and it’s increasingly important that we understand the epistemologies and cultural practices that are co-produced and re-shaped through the use of technologies, particularly those cultural practices that are media based. The premise of this course is that media have never been separable from what we purport to teach.

As a way to demonstrate this, we will trace a path through the history of learning and literacy via the educational ‘technologies’ or ‘media’ deployed at various times and for various purposes – right through the very media used in this course.

We will closely attend to the opportunities and constraints of new media, exploring what and how we learn with and through these tools, as well as explore changing definitions and forms of literacy and literacy-learning over time e.g., from traditional definitions of literacy to multiliteracies, critical (media) literacies, multimodal literacies, DIY ‘critical making’, and situated ‘production literacies’.

Here, the stakes go beyond educational practice to address critical questions about participation, equality, and democracy — and the creative capacity of anyone — in an increasingly networked society.