Learning Through Digital Media is a fabulous resource. I look forward to blogging about it and it certainly will be a key textbook when I teach in our new Master’s programs in Knowledge Networks. I’m so thrilled by it.
Cathy N. Davidson, Ruth F. DeVarney Professor of English and John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, Duke University
Technology isn’t going to solve the problems of education today—that’s magical thinking. But digital media, properly used, can enlist the enthusiasm, curiosity, and collaborative instincts of students. The kind of pedagogy and learning that digital media make possible is both the subject of this richly useful new book, and the method used to create it.
Howard Rheingold, a critic and educator, author of Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution and The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. http://howardrheingold.com @hrheingold
A stellar group of scholars examine a wide range of platforms and programs reshaping pedagogy. These researchers are committed to the social implications of technology and learning, both in the classroom and in the public sphere. Thoughtful and engaged, these essays help us rethink our pedagogical assumptions through the limits and affordance of digital media. This is an indispensable collection for educators interested in the future of their practice.
Jack Bratich, Associate Professor of Journalism and Media studies at Rutgers University, author of Conspiracy Panics: Political Rationality and Popular Culture.
The collection Learning Through Digital Media offers a grounded analysis of a number of significant and recent situations of online learning. The collection appropriately includes examples of uses of online services with influence and application beyond classrooms (Google Wave, Facebook, Twitter, Zotero, Flickr, Ushahidi and Wikimedia). In these environments student learning opens onto more diverse and authentic vectors of connection than most uses of closed e-learning platforms. As such, the collection is important both as pedagogical insight and as timely cultural politics.
Chris Chesher, senior lecturer in Digital cultures at The University of sydney.
What a tremendous critical resource for students, faculty and anyone else seriously interested in how contemporary media have and will continue to shape the landscape of teaching and learning.
Joel Slayton, artist, writer, full professor at san Jose state University, executive editor of switch (http://switch.sjsu.edu), and director of the art and technology network zER01 (http://zero1.org) and cADRE, laboratory for New Media.
Learning Through Digital Media opens up a critically needed conversation between educators about what’s going on inside their classrooms as they confront the potentials and challenges of the new social media and participatory culture. The essays here are alternatively comforting and challenging, skeptical and enthusiastic, about what it means to bring networked communication, collaboration, and participation into the pedagogical process, about the challenges of deploying commercial tools to work in educational contexts, about how their expectations and their student’s experiences diverge and converge, and about the kinds of improvisation that must take place as we experiment with still wobbly tools and emerging practices. There’s plenty of practical, applied advice here from those who have walked the walk, but there’s also enough scholarly insights to help us understand the whys and wherefores of the changes taking place all around us. Most excitingly, this is not a book about technology; it’s a book which sees the social and cultural changes impacting education as being every bit as profound as the issue of whether to Facebook or not.
Henry Jenkins, Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture, Provost’s Professor of communication, Journalism, cinematic Arts, and Education, University of southern california. http://www.henryjenkins.org
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