Special issue of E-Learning and Digital Media, Editor Dr. Norm Friesen / Please Forward as appropriate!

Media today are everywhere. From educational gaming through portable e-texts to cell phones ringing in class, it seems we can’t escape. Nor can we live without media; instead, they form a kind of ecology that we inhabit. In addition, media have an epistemological function; they shape both what we know and how we come to know it: “Whatever we know about our society, or indeed about the world in which we live,” as Niklas Luhman observed, “we know through… media.”

Speaking of media in education suggests a range of possibilities that are different from what is suggested by educational technology (electronic, digital or otherwise). Describing computers and the Internet specifically as digital media casts their role not as mental tools to be integrated into instruction, but as “forms” and “cultures” requiring “literacies” or acculturation. In this way, speaking of media in education brings instructional environments more closely together with the world outside. Explorations of these terms and possibilities have been initiated by the likes of Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman and Elizabeth Eisenstein, and they are also touched upon in research on media literacies. However, more recent theoretical developments and accelerated mediatic change --from blogging through networked gaming to texting and sexting-- offer innumerable opportunities for further exploration.

This special issue of E-Learning and Digital Media invites contributions that focus on media, particularly digital media, and their ecological and epistemological ramifications. Specific topics may include:

• School and classroom as media (ecologies) and the changing world outside
• Digital challenges to media literacy and literacies
• Media socialization and media education
• Histories of media and education
• The epistemological character of (new) media

Submissions for this special issue are due May 1, 2010

Length of submissions: generally 6000-8000 words

Further submission and formatting information is available at: http://www.wwwords.co.uk/elea/howtocontribute.asp

Direct comments and questions to: nfriesen@tru.ca

Reading Winthrop-Young's Drill and Distraction in the Yellow Submarine: On the Dominance of War in Friedrich Kittler's Media Theory in Critical Inquiry theother day, I came across this provocative passage:

"With the decline of large-scale political activism in Western Europe and North America [terms like “guerilla” or “revolution”] were redeployed elsewhere, in particular within the more militant discourse of liberation of either nature or new information technologies. Information in particular appears to have become the proletariat of the third industrial revolution. It does the work, but it has yet to gain a true understanding of the historical impact of its labor; it enhances the freedom of those who exploit it, but it is itself unfree; it is by nature international, but it remains subject to national constraints. Technological advances may allow it to reproduce, circulate, and suffuse society at ever higher rates, but it depends on committed activists to secure its liberation.

"Once the chains imposed by adverse political and technological conditions have been thrown off, however, the new "mode of information" will realize its full potential and yield revolutionary social benefits. Data of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your access restrictions. This rhetorical migration from city streets to information highways has been particularly pronounced in North America, where it occurred as part of a large-scale displacement of utopian hopes ofthe sixties from social proj-ects onto new information technologies. The fact that the PC, the web, and early forms of VR technology have managed to attract so many of the aspirations born out of the consciousness-raising campaigns of the sixties has resulted in some family resemblances between the ways in which cyber-prophets of today talk about the communal and emancipatory potential of a wired world and their parents' discourse on social reform. The most conspicuous example of this move from Haight-Ashbury southward to Silicon Valley may have been Timothy Leary's well-publicized career switch from drugs as media to media as drugs; the most flagrant is the way in which multimillion-dollar software companies flaunt their adherence to the past ideals of Californian counterculture. This "soft" version, as it were, of the genealogical link between flower and browser power was accompanied by a transfer of the more martial tropes of self-stylization mentioned above. Starting in the late seventies and early eighties, popular culture became at-tuned to the image of the outlaw hacker, the lonely warrior or techno-guerillero in the war zone of codes and data who, rather than liberating the working class or the Third World is engaged in a struggle against the regime of IBM, Microsoft, the NSA, or any other force bent on restricting access to, or limiting the movement of, information.

Thinking of the manifestos (Cluetrain, or Barlow's "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace") and other pronouncements/predictions about the revolutionary promise of data and networks, one is led to wonder. Why motivates or authorizes the association of revolutionary language with data and information technology? Is it a good thing or a bad thing that this shift has occurred? What events might drain data of this potential, as happened with the proletariat?

Over the last 10 years, the status of educational metadata, specifically as they relate to learning objects, has changed radically. In the heady days of the turn of the millennium, learning objects and their metadata were seen as being “destined to forever change the shape and form of learning;” by 2007, this approach has been derisively labeled “industrialist,” and said to be quickly running “out of steam.” Given such drastic changes, how are metadata to be understood in the context of different and emerging approaches to online learning resources, above all those labelled 'open'? This question will be the focus of this presentation by Dr. Norm Friesen, Canada Research Chair in E-Learning Practices at Thompson Rivers University and Director of the CanCore Initiative. Dr. Friesen will consider a number of alternatives to “learning object metadata,” focusing in particular on those presented on the one hand by very informal approaches exemplified by folksonomies and RSS-type metadata, and on the other by the more formalized mechanisms of the semantic Web. Dr. Friesen will conclude his presentation by discussing approaches that incorporate both “high tech” and “low tech” approaches –one that is currently under development as a multi-part international standard under the auspices of ISO (the International Organization for Standardization).

I have been looking into the current status of the Learning Object Metadata, an IEEE standard that was a central focus of my professional life --at least while the CanCore initiative was active.

Projects and writing on the LOM seem to drop off precipitously after around 2006 --right around the time that the term "Open Educational Resources" was coined at a OECD meeting. (See this survey of LOM projects and of the rise of OER/CC licensing in the special OER issue of IRRODL). But this is not based on objective measures; it has much more to do with what one can glean based on the last time a site was updated, or an article was posted or published.

At the same time, though, I say a tiny note at the bottom of a page at the IEEE site (and had this confirmed by Erik Duval) that the IEEE LOM has been reaffirmed by the IEEE --in May of 2009. It will be an international standard for at least 5 more years.

This left me wondering: If this describes the de jure status of the IEEE LOM as a standard, is there information --other than musing and gleanings-- about its status as a de facto standard?

So I decided to look up a few search terms on Google insights, and the results are illuminating.

The flash graph below shows I got when I keyed in "learning object metadata," "cancore" and "open educational resources."

While hardly definitive of "interest" (as Google might lead one to believe) --and while OER and the LOM are obviously not mutually exclusive-- the trendlines represented in this chart provide some grounds for speculation...

This is a screen capture (due to variations in Google's data). See "live" Google insight data here.

Check out this slideshare for a presentation I recently gave at the annual conference of the German Society for Media Studies. You can also download the full-text version as well.

Abstract: Next to media themselves, pedagogy or education --configured specifically as a “training the senses” (McLuhan & Leonard, 1967) or “sensuous education” (McLuhan, 1964)-- is one of the most prominent themes in McLuhan’s corpus. It is the focus of numerous articles published throughout his career and of two significant albeit relatively obscure monographs that effectively book-end his work on electronic media. As Janine Marchessault says, McLuhan articulates “a specifi cally argued pedagogical enterprise” that is central to his “aesthetically-based, highly performative and historically grounded..contribution to the study of media” (xi, 10, 34). In this paper, I focus on McLuhan’s pedagogical enterprise specifically as it develops from his highly original understanding of the senses. In doing so, I also show how McLuhan’s contribution to media is indeed aesthetically, historically and performatively charged, and make the case for the ongoing currency of his pedagogical enterprise today.

Two days ago, I participated in a really interesting panel session that compared something as "simple" and "basic" aslesson planning in different national contexts.
 
This occurred in the context of the European Conference on Educational Research in Vienna. Here's the panel description: http://tinyurl.com/yb42572
 
See the description for my presentation in this panel, below; and download my .ppt slides here: http://learningspaces.org/NAlesson_planning.pdf. It's especially interesting to compare them to the description of German lesson planning (http://tinyurl.com/ybvzsqd)
 
Lesson planning is indispensible to research and teaching in American and other English-speaking contexts, and is defined largely in terms of psychological theories of learning and instruction. Popular lesson planning models such as Hunter (1982) and Chatel (2002) make frequent reference to taxonomies and heuristics employing behaviorist, cognitivist and constructivist vocabularies. The most prominent of these heuristics are Benjamin Bloom’s hierarchy of cognitive objectives, and Robert Gagne’s nine “events of instruction.” Bloom’s categorization of educational objectives begins with factual knowledge and ends with synthesis and evaluation, bringing to mind Piagetian and other psychological-developmental hierarchies. Gagne’s sequence of instructional events begins with attentional stimuli and ends with long-term storage and retrieval, bringing together behaviouristic and information-processing lexica. Accordingly, more recent developments in the theory and practice of lesson planning reflect the continuing evolution of normative psychological theories of learning and instruction, including social-constructivist and explicitly eclectic approaches.

Theo Hug and I just gave the presentation described below at the Euro. Conference forEducational Research in Vienna. The conference SIG or network on media has been great:http://tinyurl.com/yc28e5m
 
The powerpoint for the presentation is available as a .pdf: http://learningspaces.org/ECER09.pdf
 
A draft and citation for the book chapter used as a basis for this presentation is here:
 
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. Online version available at: http://learningspaces.org/n/papers/Media_Pedagogy_&_Mediatic_Turn.pdf
 
Abstract
:
Media are in many ways presumed as important factors for educational processes. This applies to media use in everyday life as well as to institutions of learning and also to various forms of the creation of knowledge scapes by knowledge workers using knowledge media. Furthermore, media education has been promoted in diverse domains of practice, and it has become an established field in many universities. Today it is mostly seen as a branch of educational sciences and less as a specific concretisation of general pedagogy or educational theory. As for its foundations, tasks and aims, the dynamics of its development have been characterized by processes of extension and differentiation. New questions and research topics have been added, many new approaches and conceptions in different paradigmatic directions are being developed, some areas having a socio-pedagogic focus, some being directed towards learning sciences or being infiltrated by teaching psychology and some – due to didactic or technology-oriented reasons – addressing the topic of “e-activities.” Unsurprisingly, terms like ‘educational media,’ ‘knowledge media,’ or ‘learning space’ are used with different meanings and often in metaphorical ways which sometimes suggest questionable forms of reification of knowledge dynamics or ontologized media. Some of the corresponding problems can be clarified on a terminological level. The mediation of knowledge, for example, can be described in the sense of changing knowledge structures as a consequence of media use or as knowledge transmission in educational terms. But what do processes and results of the mediation of knowledge entail more explicitly? How can other concepts like mediality, mediatization, or medialization contribute to a better understanding of current educational dynamics? It is noticeable that some frequently employed patterns of thought and argumentation present the relationship between reality and media reality in such a way as if the media could be added to “actual” reality or not. The media open up many new rooms of reflection, creation and action but they also provide the material for discussing the relationship between the real world or “reality” and medialised realities including their consequential problems. This calls for more reflection in media education by reverting to elements from media theory. The paper seeks to elucidate the relationship between of education, knowledge, and media on a conceptual level. It refers to relevant debates on the mediatic turn as they have been led in English and German speaking countries recently. Furthermore, some consequences for education are considered.
 
Method
The contribution focuses on the importance of (1) mediatisation, medialization, and mediation as theoretical objects of inquiry and conceptual elaboration, and (2) the application of these concepts in theory of education and its relation to media education. The paper seeks to make progress in these investigations through reflecting recent debates on the mediatic turn and considering them in educational contexts.
 
Expected Outcomes
The contribution aims at conceptual clarifications of the key terms at stake and their relevance for media education and educational theory. As a result, programmatic options for (media) education after the mediatic turn are described. Furthermore, the contribution shows exemplary innovative options for argumentations in media education and educational theory on that basis.
 
References
Bauer, Walter u. a. (Eds.) (1998): Weltzugänge: Virtualität – Realität – Sozialität. Baltmannsweiler: Schneider Verlag Hohengehren. Binsbergen, Wim van / Mul, Jos de (Eds.) (n. d.): The mediatic turn: Aspects of the ontology of mediation. (book announcement at http://www.shikanda.net/general/gen3/index_page/philosop.htm [Accessed: 2007-05-15]). Hug, Theo (ed.): Media, Knowledge & Education. Exploring new Spaces, Relations and Dynamics in Digital Media Ecologies. Innsbruck: Innsbruck University Press, 2008. Hug, Theo & Perger Josef (eds.). Instantwissen, Bricolage und Tacit Knowledge ... Wissensformen in der westlichen Medienkultur. (Instant Knowledge, Bricolage and Tacit Knowledge... Knowledge Forms in Western Media Culture.) Innsbruck (Studia) 2003. Hug, Theo (2007): Medienpädagogik unter den Auspizien des mediatic turn – eine explorative Skizze in programmatischer Absicht. (Media Pedagogy under the Auspices of the Mediatic Turn -- an exploratory Sketch with programmatic Intention) In: Sesink, Werner u. a. (eds.): Jahrbuch Medienpädagogik 6: Medienpädagogik – Standortbestimmung einer erziehungswissenschaftlichen Disziplin. (Orienting within an Educational Discipline) Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, pp. 10-32. Hug, Theo (ed.). Didactics of Microlearning. Münster u. a. (Waxmann) 2007. Hug, Theo: Medienphilosophie und Bildungsphilosophie – Schnittstellenerkundungen. In: Hrachovec, Herbert & Pichler, Alois (eds): Philosophy of the Information Society. Proceedings of the 30. International Ludwig Wittgenstein Symposium Kirchberg am Wechsel, Austria 2007, Volume 2. Frankfurt u.a.: Ontos, 2008, pp. 43-73. Hug, Theo (ed.): Mediatic turn – Claims, Concepts and Discourses / Mediale Wende – Ansprüche, Konzepte und Diskurse. (= special issue SPIEL, 25 (2006), H. 1), Frankfurt a. M. u .a.: Lang, 2009. Krotz, Friedrich (2007): Mediatisierung: Fallstudien zum Wandel von Kommunikation. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Lundby, Knut (Ed.) (2009): Mediatization: Concept, Changes, Consequences. a. M. u .a.: Lang, 2009 (forthcoming). Margreiter, Reinhard (1999): „Realität und Medialität: Zur Philosophie des ‚Medial Turn’“. In: Medien Journal 23, Nr. 1, pp. 9-18. Rusch, Gebhard (2007). Mediendynamik. Explorationen zur Theorie des Medienwandels. Navigationen. Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturwissenschaften, 7(1), pp. 13–93. Schulz, Winfried (2004). Medialisierung. Eine medientheoretische Rekonstruktion des Begriffs. Beitrag zur Jahrestagung der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Publizistik- und Kommunikationswissenschaft, Erfurt, 19. bis 21. Mai 2004, URL: http://www.kowi.wiso.unierlangen.de/pdf_dateien/DGPuK_Medialisierung_end... [Accessed on 2006-08-01]. Sesink, Werner, 2004. In-formatio. Die Einbildung des Computers. Beiträge zur Theorie der Bildung in der Informationsgesellschaft. Münster: Lit. Sonesson, Göran (1997). “The multimediation of the lifeworld.” In: Nöth, Winfried (Ed.): Semiotics of the Media. State of the Art, Projects, and Perspectives. Proceedings of an international congress, Kassel, March 1995, pp. 61–78. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter.