CSED 565

Course Description

"Learning is the human activity which least needs manipulation by others. Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting." - Ivan Illich

This course is an interdisciplinary course within the Faculty of Education, designed as a workshop and seminar, to explore cognitivist, constructionist, ecological, feminist, and situated approaches to learning. We will explore the nature of these distinctions and examine how they overlap in the context of the technology-intensive learning environment. We will start with an examination of the relationships among learning, design, and critique. And we will build a common new media artifact that connects our process of learning with the process of design. Multiple viewpoints of the objects we create will enhance our understanding of how technologies "live" in situ, how context shapes learning, and how knowledge is not a commodity but rather a shared construction that is situated within a community of inquiry. Or, we will find yet a new way to think about these issues that extend the current view. The course is not designed as a didactic experience but rather an exploration into conceptual and practical concerns as digital media technologies become pervasive in every aspect of our learning, teaching, and research lives.

Goals

This seminar/workshop can serve as an exemplar of how to enable other learners to become designers and digital "ethnographers" describing their own culture using digital media tools.

Participants will become partners in developing theories about:

1. what happens when multiple recordable media - text, graphics, motion pictures,

sound, and computer programs - are used in educational settings.

2. how networking and digital video tools provide platforms for sharing works.

3. design teams and how they relate to experiences between self and other.

4. how knowledge is molded through socially mediated experiences and situated social construction.