Themes

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For our upcoming issues, we hope to have clusters of essays, reviews, vignettes, and links around major themes. We're especially interested in exploring six areas that we think have the most impact on the uses of technology in liberal education. To suggest other themes that we might explore, send us an email at editor@academiccommons.org, or leave a comment below.

Open Source / Open Access (aka the "free as a free kitten" issue)
Everywhere you turn in Higher Ed. you hear stories of open source and open access as the cure to all our collective woes. No longer will we be beholden to the commercial software and publishing sectors that don't understand us. Is this true? We want to look critically at a wide array of open source and open access projects and ask a set of hard questions of these initiatives: Who is doing this work, and why? How will they be sustained? Is there evidence that these approaches are making inroads in turning the tables on the growing costs of IT and library operations? What benefits are faculty and students enjoying? Through a series of reports, interviews, essays and reviews, we hope to spark an engaging conversation about the state of the practice, helping us to better understand where these allied movements are heading.

Educational Gaming
A recent surge of interest in educational gaming has led to increased research into gaming and engagement theory, the effect of using games in practice, and the structure of cooperation in gameplay. By studying the principles of game design, educators are learning more about how to package and deliver content to facilitate comprehension and retention. Educational gaming is a growing field with serious implications for adult learning that we are only beginning to understand, but we are not that far away from seeing what games can really teach us.

New Media and Higher Education
We all seem to agree these days that digital storytelling, new media formats, and changing means of organizing information have profoundly changed the nature of higher education. But what do we really know about these shifts? What do we know about the ways in which digital storytelling is actually deepening the ways students learn and share knowledge? What kinds of assessment strategies have we created to address new forms of authorship? What do we know about the effectiveness of collaborative work so often demanded by new media authorship? Do we have good evidence that the academy prizes non-sequential, hypertextual presentations of information, that the professoriate is becoming more accustomed to shaping such narratives, and that our graduates have mastered these new forms of literacy? This special issue opens up a variety of intriguing questions and invites a range of contributions: a rich gallery of projects featuring new media, critical pieces considering the pedagogical and epistemological shifts, and vignettes evaluating classroom experiences.

Emerging Literacies and Pedagogies
The emergence of powerful and relatively inexpensive technologies for authoring in multimedia, accessing and refashioning information, and publishing academic and creative work has altered many of our existing conventions for knowledge acquisition, demonstration, and dissemination. The potential for what Richard Lanham has called "a whole new semiotics of expression" would seem to require some fundamental rethinking of what it is we think students ought to know and how it is we might be teaching them. More recently, Daniel Cohen and Roy Rozenzweig have suggested that the entire model of the multiple choice exam may—from the perspective of cell phones connected to the information stores of the world wide web—soon be rendered anachronistic. At the same time, a significant amount of the course content and organization of learning associated with "distance education" is organized around the model of "training to the test."  In this issue we aim to explore how new technologies have altered, challenged, or negated our conceptions of how students learn, what it means to be "literate," and the range of pedagogical responses that are possible within this changing landscape of teaching and learning.

So What? The Unbearable Burden of Assessing Technology in the Classroom
After devoting unprecedented resources and attention to new computer technologies over the past two decades, what has fundamentally changed in the classroom? We have much better networks, more powerful programs, great tools, but what do we actually know about how teaching and learning have changed because of changes in technology? These questions, of course, are just subsets of the larger concern with assessment and accountability that accrediting agencies have shown with growing insistence. But is there a connection? Has the concern for assessment grown because of technological changes? Has technology made assessment more possible, more necessary, more unbearable? In this issue we want to look critically, beyond all the generalizations and cheerleading, at specific work that examines how new technologies have changed the ways we envision and practice liberal arts education. Do we have good evidence—in the growing body of scholarship on teaching and learning or in significant assessment projects—that technological innovations are being used to improve our practices in liberal arts teaching? Can we find examples and models of how new uses of technology help students learn—in ways that enhance the traditional mission of liberal education? Can we gather a body of practitioners with evidence about how technology might actually strengthen teaching and learning?

Social Software (aka web 2.0):  Challenges and Possibilities
"Web 2.0" combines social software, microcontent, expanded user participation, and open services. No single technology is required, although some are frequently referenced (XML, Ajax, RSS). What do Web 2.0 services offer pedagogy? While microcontent lowers the barrier to entry, and the focus on user participation aligns with the liberal arts emphasis on student collaboration and research, support issues abound. Most Web 2.0 services take place offsite, beholden neither to academe nor to one's campus. As microcontent increases the ability to include rich media, so too it increases demand for expanded bandwidth, storage, and preservation. Proliferation and fast development of projects increases training demands. Who on our campuses is trying out these new technologies? Does a world of small pieces loosely joined fundamentally change what is happening in our classrooms? What is lost in a world that is no longer dominated by authoritative texts and highly-centralized  technology systems?

How to cite this work

Michael Roy. "Themes." Academic Commons Issue Name (Spring 2008): 14 October 2008. <http://www.academiccommons.org/>.