Media Arts As Our Society's Nervous System - MAE as an interactive, multidimensional textbook and educational system

It shouldn't be a stretch to acknowledge that media arts is our society's nervous system. We now function collectively as a species through this electronic multimodal cognitive system. To a large degree, we perceive our world and and interactively respond to it through digital media platforms. We learn about our world through audio/visual channels. We share about and discuss it through online social media platforms.

Media arts is primarily a means of presenting, perceiving and learning about things. It is a flexible multimodal (multimedia) system for forming our collective consciousness about our world - our history, our scientific understandings, our political views, our major news events, our thoughts and ideas, our cultural experience across the arts, cuisine, fashion, popular media, etc. etc.

Schools are places where we present, view and learn about all of these things, but primarily through textbooks.

Why wouldn't we now integrate digital media into our schools? In a manner that mirrors our current society? Where students could interactively and multimodally experience and demonstrate their learning, in an active manner that is aligned with their natural, multisensory cognition, and with society's interactive communications and design systems?

We assume that textbooks are the only means of formal, 'rigorous' learning. Why? We believe that traditional reading and writing in English texts are the sole, superior means of educational communication and interaction. And yet, YouTube has demonstrated that the majority of people find it to be an effective place for learning just about anything. Young people have been raised within a multimodal society. In this sense, we are teaching Digital Communications rather than traditional English Literature.

Contrary to popular belief, school is not a place for effectively mastering content. It is actually where we are all supposed to master formal learning itself, as a scholarly, 18th Century, book-based and teacher-centered system. And now this is organized through an industrial era factory-like model, where all students are implanted with all the same information in an identical manner. Read my book to fully understand this model.

In truth, students in schools learn primarily how to "do school", rather than holistically engage with the content and its actual application. They learn to listen, take notes, read and highlight, study and memorize, translate their own understanding into their own metaphors, language and imaginative images. And finally how to comply with a complex system of various teachers and subjects, tests and learning activities, towards supposedly remembering large quantities of content. 

Traditional education is more about mastering this very peculiar factory system itself, than it is about applying the content in authentic, real world situations. It is not primarily about the student's natural learning process and whether they value that content enough to want to remember and build on what they know. All the content is presented in the same manner, as an indirect presentation of abstract ideas, which is dependent on the student's mental projection, rather than active, living, tangible, meaningful and purposeful knowledge.

In contrast, MAE, across all of its forms, is an interactive, interdimensional, immersive form of textbook and workbook, that can incorporate the totality of literacy and numeracy, as well as history and science, in ways that are much more dimensional, real world, flexible, engaging, effective, collaborative, active, as well as meaningful and purposeful. Students ultimately build a more robust and interconnective system of understandings that are more adaptive and resilient, because they are student-owned and developed. This results in 'metalearning', or mastering the learning process itself.

MAE's educational system is a dynamic, interactive, adaptable and open-ended learning ecosystem that flexibly accommodates and supports each unique learner to their capacity and ultimate potential. This system comes alive with the vibrancy and collaborative enthusiasm of the students themselves, as they realize the joy and fulfillment of learning itself. This is the "Culture of Learning" that propels collective learning and education to new heights of success for all students. At last, learning is liberated into its limitless possibilities!

Media Arts Education vs. Traditional Education: What does MAE deliver that TE does not?

 

Another Conversation with AI (Gemini Pro 2.5; Notebook LM) with the primary resource: Olsen, D. (2024). Media arts education: Transforming education through multimodal cognition, holistic learning, and techno-embodiment. Routledge.

Prompt: What would a fully developed MAE program deliver for K-12 student learning and lifelong preparation that the current educational institution is not?

A fully developed Media Arts Education (MAE) program would deliver a transformative and human-centric approach to K-12 student learning and lifelong preparation, addressing significant shortcomings inherent in the current traditional educational institution.

1. A Natural, Embodied, and Holistic Learning Process:

• Student-Directed and Engaged Learning: MAE supports students to direct their own creating processes, allowing them to determine what and how they are learning, which fosters full engagement. This contrasts with traditional education's (TE) top-down, teacher-centered, and often disengaging methods. MAE ignites intrinsic motivation by connecting learning to students' interests and creative expression, making learning a joyful and rewarding experience.

• Deeper Content Mastery through Multimodal Production: Instead of passively receiving information from textbooks or teacher explanations (an indirect and monomodal method), MAE empowers students to actively analyze, construct, and present meaning in their own terms by producing educational multimedia such as documentaries, animations, or interactive simulations. This process, referred to as "multimodal translation of academic content into aesthetic cultural artifacts," allows students to "empathize" with content through various senses and aesthetic processes, leading to deeper and more lasting understanding. This is a "holistic process of learning that is deep and resilient".

• Development of "Webs of Knowledge" (WOKs): MAE fosters the growth of "holistic networks of associated understandings" (WOKs) that are resilient, interconnective, and adaptive, enabling students to apply knowledge flexibly in diverse contexts and build upon their understanding over time. This is in stark contrast to TE's focus on the "retention of discrete, disconnected pieces of information", which often results in superficial and short-term knowledge that is quickly shed if unused.

• "Content Retention As Necessary" (CRAN) vs. "Total Content Retention" (TCR): MAE shifts the focus from TE's "Total Content Retention" (TCR)—the traditional emphasis on memorizing all curriculum content—to "Content Retention As Necessary" (CRAN). CRAN strategically delivers abstract, technical content just when needed for immediate application in meaningful, project-based contexts, ensuring relevance and deeper integration into students' WOKs. This is a key departure from TE's "simplistic and underperforming" approach to learning, which often results in isolated knowledge.

• Holistasis and Embodied Cognition: MAE is founded on the concept of "holistasis," Olsen's term for "a state of thriving, or surplus of energy toward future perpetuation for individuals and collectives". It aligns with embodied cognition, recognizing that learning is natural, pervasive, intrinsic, and emerges from students' direct interactions with their environment. TE, conversely, is often seen as controlling and forcing a passive process of content retention, constraining the full, biological learning process.

2. Enhanced Cognitive Development and Metalearning:

• Beyond Rote Learning: MAE cultivates higher-order thinking skills, including critical analysis, ethical judgment, complex problem-solving, and nuanced creative expression. It promotes "rounded cognitive development" that is deep and lasting, rather than temporary "knowing" or retention of disconnected information. TE's mechanistic approach to learning is prone to negative outcomes such as shallow learning and weak problem-solving skills.

• Metalearning (Learning to Learn): A core objective of MAE is "metalearning"—the ability of students to understand and manage their own learning process, making them independent and self-directed learners. This includes understanding how to leverage external resources and technology as "cognitive extensions". TE generally does not facilitate this level of metacognitive ownership or self-direction.

• Creative Intelligence: MAE aims to cultivate human "creative intelligence". While AI can generate novel combinations, human creativity fostered in MAE involves original ideation, envisioning new possibilities, expressing unique personal perspectives, and the "indomitable intention" described by Olsen. This is distinct from AI's pattern-based generation, which lacks intentionality and lived experience.

3. Preparation for a Digital, Evolving Society:

• Relevant Skills for the 21st Century: MAE updates the educational program to reflect our current digital society and projected workforce needs. It provides diverse competencies and literacies, including deep multimodal content mastery, creativity, adaptability, communication, collaboration, critical thinking, design thinking, computational thinking, and media/tech/digital literacies. TE's methods are seen as simplistic and inadequate for preparing students for current societal conditions and challenges.

• Critical Thinking and Ethical Discernment in the Age of AI: MAE uniquely develops critical thinking by engaging students in analyzing, interpreting, and evaluating diverse media, including AI-generated content. It provides a crucial space to grapple with ethical dimensions, such as misinformation, deepfakes, algorithmic bias, copyright, and authorship. This is indispensable in a world "awash with information, much of it algorithmically curated or synthetically generated". TE, if not adapted, risks using AI merely to amplify its existing flaws in content retention.

• Empowering Students to Direct Technology: Rather than being passively led by technological progress, MAE empowers students to direct AI's and technology's evolution and implementation. It teaches students how to strategically use AI-generated content as resources within larger creative, analytical, and communicative projects, fostering "adaptive experts" who can apply knowledge flexibly. MAE "grounds technology's disembodied nature in aesthetics, culture, learning, and ethical standards".

• Equity and Inclusion: MAE's adaptable nature provides diverse means of instruction and support, accommodating the diversity of learners, including those with socioeconomic, linguistic, or cognitive challenges. This supports the system as a whole to become more student-centered, flexible, and inclusive. TE's "factory model" often fails to educate the majority of students to proficient levels, and achievement gaps for socio-economically disadvantaged students and students of color have remained largely unchanged for decades.

4. A Flexible and Adaptive Educational System:

• Systemic Transformation: MAE is proposed as an "antidote" to TE's mechanistic, objectivist methods, forming an adaptive, interconnective, and flexible educational system aligned with current learning and cognitive science research. It envisions education as a "living, evolving, cognitive network". TE, in contrast, is described as fixed, rigid, and resistant to substantial institutional reform due to its interlocking components and operations.

• Invigorating School and Community: MAE is capable of invigorating the school community through multimedia production (e.g., news broadcasts, yearbook, documentaries) and connects students with the larger community and world. It can foster an "immersive and intensive linguistic experience" for English Language Development learners, making language acquisition engaging and accelerating fluency.

• Emancipatory Education: Ultimately, MAE liberates learning and education from current limitations, enabling self-development and actualization for students. It supports "the true promise and futuristic, boundless potential of education" to become "imaginable and achievable".

In essence, while traditional education largely operates as a "factory model" focused on the mechanical delivery and retention of discrete information for standardized testing, a fully developed MAE program offers an organic, student-centered, and deeply engaging ecosystem that cultivates adaptive expertise, critical thinking, ethical judgment, and creative intelligence, preparing students not just for tests, but for active and meaningful participation in a complex, technologically advanced society.

AI + MEDIA ARTS = HOLISTIC EDUCATION

By Dain Olsen 

Media arts is the perfect complement to AI because it is holistic, embodied, social and project-based. It is becoming clear that AI can support basic academic instruction and personalized learning. AI can function as a tutor to scaffold the student’s understanding, and correct any misunderstandings through friendly and nonjudgmental responses and exercises. It could eventually supplement that with a range of interactive multimedia, such as graphics, animations and videos.

This ultimately means that classroom instruction can move to higher orders, beyond basic skills, where students are more active in actually applying their learning in real world contexts. As per cognitive and learning science, these are enriched contexts that can deepen the learning so it is more resilient and transferrable.

Media arts provides these types of active learning situations, where students themselves produce multimedia illustrations, stories and models of the content. Essentially, media arts communications, design, interactivity and virtuality are at the center of our society because they serve this function. Schools and teachers are in the business of explaining content to students so that they understand it. In media arts, students take on this role of explaining or demonstrating the content.

Media arts puts students in the position of teaching a topic to the student audience. They go through a series of multimodal processes in order to do this, which deepens their own understanding. They research the topic and begin to understand it in their own terms. They brainstorm what ways to explain and illustrate that topic. They organize it by writing scripts and developing storyboards. They act it out or represent it in their narrations, dialogues, stories, scenes and soundtracks. They produce it in their animations, 3D models or video games. They analyze their production and evaluate its effectiveness. Such project management requires a wide range of abilities and competencies, such as communication, coordination, management, logistics, negotiation, scheduling, etc.

This is an aesthetically and multimodally holistic process, which develops students' rounded skills, competencies and cognitive development. Media arts versatile and adaptable studios and laboratories can support these sorts of collaborative, active, community connected processes, where the standard classroom cannot.  AI needs media arts in order to advance education to a new, student-centered and 21st C. model. 

Unfortunately, the emphases in AI is on its narrow support for traditional approaches to instruction. This often leads to the use of AI to bypass difficult academic tasks and critical thinking. In the case of media arts productions, some edtech companies are even suggesting that students use AI tools to produce any multimedia. They would not have to go through the rigorous, holistic processes described above to do this. They can just state a prompt and AI produces the multimedia. Consider what students are missing when they overuse AI.

This is the ultimate dilemma for AI in education. What cognitive processes should it replace in instruction? Media arts production presents a comprehensive multimodal and holistic range of cognitive processes. In this regard, Einstein said,  “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”

AI and Media Arts Education: Holistic Educational Transformation

By Dain Olsen

Media arts is defined as the "creative, machine-based manipulation of aesthetic phenomena for meaning; an aesthetic synthesizer for forming, capturing, processing, simulating, and distributing products and experiences" (Olsen, 2024). AI falls within this category, making it a major, emergent media arts form. AI's exponential development will have manifold impacts on our society, arts, and education, both positive and negative. Efforts are underway to manage and regulate the negative outcomes, but success is not guaranteed. We should aim to be proactive, holistic, and wise in our responses to AI. I will present media arts education’s (MAE) critical role, in conjunction with AI, in forming an educational system that can address these problems.

Understanding AI's Impact

AI's ‘explosive’ development is a radial, 360-degree expansion across all domains and dimensions of society. It's not just a tool we can choose to use or put away, but a systemic, technological force with unpredictable organic characteristics. Like social media, and any other technological leap, AI will likely have both positive and negative effects on society, as well as unintended consequences. Nevertheless, AI is here to stay, so we will need to learn to work with and manage it as it progresses and proliferates.

AI has shown impressive and breakthrough results in various applications across societal sectors, such as accelerating scientific discoveries, advancing industrial efficiencies, and supporting greatly increased individual productivity and capabilities. Yet, it will also eliminate major sectors of employment, can exacerbate criminal activity, and is demonstrated to be unreliable and prone to errors. Artistically, AI can support more students to produce more sophisticated products, for example in verbal prompts to create entire video games. It also can enhance creativity and invention by generating compelling variations that humans might not have considered. On the other hand, its autonomous creative expression tends to be conventional, slick and fairly ‘soulless’. 

Theoretical improvements to AI in Generalized Intelligence and Superintelligence are arguably far off or even infeasible. There is also the possibility that AI will fail to fulfill the hype that usually accompanies new technological breakthroughs.

AI in Education

In education, AI could provide personalized tutoring along with illustrative multimedia graphics, support teachers in lesson preparation and assessment, and help manage bureaucratic processes. However, the overuse of AI might also lead to decreased student motivation and a tendency to skip difficult cognitive processes and critical thinking. In fact, some edtech companies are suggesting that it replace arts and media arts instruction. Furthermore, it raises the question of whether we will use it in innovative new ways to truly advance education, and limit it to improving traditional methods.

Major Concerns

Despite its profound benefits, AI also raises these serious reservations:

• It's an experimental technology with unpredictable consequences

• There's a risk of becoming completely dependent on AI, and even an imperative in every aspect of society, 

• AI may further amplify societal disparities and inequalities

• AI is limited by our own mindsets and habits

• It is an energy hog, which is already challenging our grids and our CO2 reduction goals

• It is unclear whether governmental regulations and educational policies will be fully effective and ahead of the curve in monitoring, preventing and solving AI’s problems

A Media Arts Education (MAE) Perspective

MAE presents a primary means to improve and transform education, particularly in combination with AI, which can ultimately address these larger negatives. Essentially, MAE supports the core content and STEM concepts to become multimodally plastic, flexible, and versatile, so that they come alive with artistic and design capacities. Thus students, through engaging collaborative projects, can apply, represent and simulate the abstract content through combinations of image, sound, story, graphics, interactive and virtual forms (e.g. 3D animated, playful models of physics, mathematics, cell division, weather, etc.; science or history videos; video games, immersive XR environments, etc). Students would manipulate, adjust, and play with these multimedia models until they fully and tangibly understand those concepts, and then transfer them to varied applications and situations. This results in deeper, more resilient learning, aligned with current learning science and cognitive research.

Thus, students gain flexible, diverse inquiry pathways for actively applying, demonstrating, and sharing their academic proficiency, beyond standardized tests. Also, students are in the position of directing their own learning, based on their own interests and needs. No other subject area has the capacity to form such holistic, transdisciplinary, culturally meaningful and community connected forms of creative inquiry and productive interaction. This is the perfect embodied, social, holistic complement to AI’s relatively narrow, intellectual capacities for instructional support.

Consider one example of this MAE-based approach: Students produce a transmedia mental health campaign,  which supports all students to produce, share and interact in socially beneficial and empowering ways. Students produce diverse events, broadcasts, and interactions for varied outputs and audiences. They apply statistical analysis to measure algorithmic processes and their impacts on the school and community. All students gain critical media literacies for verifying, analyzing and evaluating multimedia information and processes, and collaboratively nurturing a civil digital society. 

Media Arts + AI = Holistic Educational Transformation

We need to prepare youth for a rapidly changing world, supporting them to ensure that AI is designed and utilized effectively and strategically to address a convergence of global challenges, including AI itself. AI’s support for individualized skills mastery and teacher efficiency means that schools can begin to shift to higher-orders of instructional implementation, such as MAE can offer, which foster student-centered initiative, ownership and motivation. It is important to appreciate that the human, embodied mind, and our collective minds, are tremendously more powerful and potentiated than AI is, and perhaps ever will be. An advanced educational system can begin to fulfill that potential, ultimately benefiting society in extraordinary ways.

Factory Model: regimented, assembly-line, one-size-fits-all, top-down, cognitively narrow, no-context

MAE Model: flexible, adaptive, inclusive, student-centered, cognitively expansive, enriched contexts 

In conclusion, this results in a flexible and interconnective educational system which actuates students’ personal inquiry process into boundless possibilities, and infuses the system as a whole with a collective drive towards continual adaptive improvement and learning about learning.  It allows students to actually practice management of their digital society, including AI and other literacies (e.g. media, digital) towards ethical, equitable and holistically grounded objectives. This transformed model provides the means by which our society learns to manage AI and address our converging global challenges. 

Olsen, D. (2024). Media Arts Education: Transforming Education Through Multimodal Cognition, Holistic Learning, and Techno-Embodiment. Taylor & Francis.

CONVERSATIONS WITH AI: Media Arts (Education) and Artificial Intelligence (AI): A Symbiotic Relationship (AI Generated Notes)

CONVERSATIONS WITH AI

Media Arts (Education) and Artificial Intelligence (AI):

A Symbiotic Relationship

Dain Olsen:

Media Arts is the machine-based, multimodal, aesthetic synthesis of meaning. Media Arts Education is the embodied enactment and understanding of media arts production and design processes.

AI:

Media arts and artificial intelligence are inextricably linked, sharing a common ground in their manipulation of aesthetic meaning and experience through machine-based processes.

Here's a breakdown of their relationship:

1. Tool for Creation:

• Automation: AI can automate repetitive tasks, freeing artists to focus on creative concepts.

• Generative Art: AI can generate new artistic content, expanding the possibilities of expression.

2. New Mediums:

• Interactive Art: AI enables the creation of interactive experiences that respond to user input.

• Virtual and Augmented Reality: AI plays a crucial role in creating immersive virtual and augmented reality environments.

3. Challenging Definitions of Art:

• Computational Creativity: AI raises questions about what constitutes art and who can be considered an artist.

• Human-Machine Collaboration: The collaboration between humans and AI blurs the lines between creator and tool.

4. Ethical Considerations:

• Bias and Fairness: AI algorithms can perpetuate biases present in the data they are trained on.

• Ownership and Authenticity: Questions arise about who owns AI-generated art and whether it can be considered authentic.

In essence, media arts and artificial intelligence are mutually beneficial. AI provides new tools and possibilities for artistic expression, while media arts pushes the boundaries of AI and challenges our understanding of creativity and technology. As these fields continue to evolve, we can expect even more innovative and thought-provoking works to emerge.

Media Arts Can Transform Learning and Education

Media arts can advance the antiquated factory educational model (mechanistic, linear, regimented, top-down, content and testing-centered, and culturally biased), into a 21st century model (cognitive network and ecosystem, non-linear, adaptable, student centered and directed, flexible and equitable).

Media arts is an emergent K-12 arts content area, now initiated through standards in 39 states, consisting of the familiar communications forms of photo, film, video, animation, sound, graphics etc. Its less familiar forms extend into interactive and 3D design, as well as AI, virtual, augmented and mixed reality (XR). These forms are creatively unlimited in capacity, so that students are able to produce and simulate any product or experience imaginable. This affords students the capacity to learn anything possible and gain comprehensive competencies in enriched, real-world contexts.

Imagine a media arts laboratory where students are designing their ideal future city. Using 3D design software and 3D printing for actual scale models, they tackle urban renewal and design, sustainability principles, and the real-world application of mathematics, engineering and construction concepts.

In an augmented reality (AR) project, student groups design an interactive historical scavenger hunt for their neighborhood. Layered over their real-world environment, they mark significant points of interest and community resources, along with linked information, socially relevant murals and sculptures, and local stories and interviews.

In an international collaboration, two media arts classes collaborate on a live broadcast showcasing various arts and academic presentations and interactions. Each class displays their local culture and academic curriculum through their chosen media and arts forms, with accompanying social media feeds, and communications exchanges.

Media arts students design a video game based on a popular sci-fi novel, integrating complex physics simulations and lively, science-based narratives. The project also integrates advanced mathematics, English in project narratives, texts, and scripts, and engineering through game mechanics.

Students produce a transmedia mental health campaign. They support students to produce, share and interact in socially beneficial and empowering ways. Students produce diverse events, broadcasts, and interactions for varied outputs and audiences. They apply statistical analysis to measure their impacts on the school and community. All students gain critical media literacies for analyzing and verifying multimedia information, and collaboratively nurturing a civil digital society.

Media arts' versatile, multimodal (multi-sensory, multimedia) tools support students to interact creatively with the educational curriculum and to apply it to real world experiences. For example, they can create interactive, 3D animated models that demonstrate science concepts, such as cell division, the digestive system, or weather systems. Students are then able to manipulate, construct, and play with these multimedia models until they fully and tangibly understand those concepts, and then transfer them to varied applications and situations. This becomes a holistic process of learning that is deep and resilient, and more engaging, rewarding and relevant. MAE's capacity to multimodally ‘plasticize and animate’ the curriculum extends across all contents, concepts and applications.

Through media arts' diverse productions, the core curriculum comes alive for students, who can begin to have a leading, active role in the creative inquiry process. These adaptable projects can be scaled and tailored to students’ personal interests, learning levels and pathways. As a result, assessment becomes more diversified, flexible, and authentic, where more students can demonstrate and achieve academic success in many more ways. This advances equity and inclusion for all students, including those who are socioeconomically disadvantaged, English learners, and those with special education challenges. This liberates all students to the boundless possibilities of their own learning capacities, with implications for systemic educational improvements and transformation. Ultimately, the system gains the attributes of a cognitive network and augmented learning ecosystem.

 

Emergent Media Arts - Transforming Learning, Creating and Education: Multimodal Learning Systems and Self-Directed Learners

 Emergent Media Arts - Transforming Learning, Creating and Education: 

Multimodal Learning Systems and Self-Directed Learners

• Media arts makes learning more engaging, effective, meaningful, and purposeful.

• Media arts can support education to become more student centered, interactive, flexible, equitable, and inclusive. 

Imagine a media arts laboratory where students are designing their ideal future city. Using 3D design software and 3D printing for actual scale models, they tackle urban renewal and design, sustainability principles, and the real-world application of mathematics, engineering and construction concepts.

In an augmented reality (AR) project, student groups design an interactive historical scavenger hunt for their neighborhood. Layered over their real-world environment, they mark significant points of interest and community resources, along with linked information, stories and interviews.

In an international collaboration, two media arts classes collaborate on a live broadcast showcasing various arts and academic presentations and interactions. Each class displays their local culture and academic curriculum through their chosen media and arts forms, with accompanying social media feeds, and communications exchanges. 

Media arts students design a video game based on a popular sci-fi novel, integrating complex physics simulations and lively, science-based narratives. The project also integrates advanced mathematics, English in project narratives, texts, and scripts, and engineering through game mechanics. 

Students produce a transmedia mental health campaign. They support students to produce, share and interact in socially beneficial and empowering ways. Students produce diverse events, broadcasts, and interactions for varied outputs and audiences. They apply statistical analysis to measure their impacts on the school and community. All students gain critical media literacies for analyzing and verifying multimedia information, and collaboratively nurturing a civil digital society.             

Media arts education (MAE) can transform learning and education through multimodal facility and plasticity

MAE is much more than making movies, graphics and animations. Its versatile, multimedia (multimodal, multisensory) tools support students to interact creatively with the educational curriculum and to apply it to real world experiences. For example, they can create interactive, 3D animated models that demonstrate science concepts, such as cell division, the digestive system, or weather systems. Students are then able to manipulate, construct, represent, and play with these multimedia models until they fully and tangibly understand those concepts, and then transfer them to varied applications and situations. This becomes a holistic process of learning that is deep and resilient, and more connective and relevant. MAE's capacity to multimodally ‘plasticize and animate’ the curriculum extends across all contents, concepts and contexts. 

Through media arts productions, the curriculum comes alive for students, who can begin to have a leading, active role in the creative inquiry process. These pliable projects can be scaled and tailored to students’ personal interests, learning levels and pathways. As a result, assessment becomes more diversified, flexible, and authentic, where more students can achieve and demonstrate academic success in many more ways. This advances equity and inclusion for all students, including those who are socioeconomically disadvantaged, English learners, and those with special education challenges.  

Digital Literacy as Creative Empowerment Through Media Arts Education

In a media arts-centered culture, we are all dependent on multimedia texts and experiences for our understanding of and ability to participate in and contribute to our culture and society. The importance of educating all students in forming, analyzing and negotiating digital environments is crucial to their wellbeing, as well as for our culture and democratic society.

Media arts standards-based education serves a proactive, leading role in developing all students’ capacity for critical independence. Critical independence is defined here as the autonomous ability to discern the value, veracity, methods, and intentions of multimedia experiences. A significant aspect of this quality is conveyed through media arts production processes and the student's resulting cultural agency. The creatively empowered student knows her way around the digital environment, is grounded in her own culture and is confident in being able to assert her own perspectives. This creative empowerment of all students would alleviate many of the negative aspects of digitally immersive environments that younger generations will increasingly encounter, including media misinformation, propaganda and influence, as well as digital abuse, addictions, and social misconduct.

This is another beneficial outcome of a distinct and fully established media arts education discipline, combined with the mutually strengthening interrelationships between all of the arts and academics. The entire educational system should be unified in positively supporting students' creative empowerment, critical independence, and cultural agency. Such an emotionally and socially enriched situation, that is also culturally relevant and responsive, would go a long way towards providing the inner creativity, resilience and self-determination that students need to remain healthy in mind and body in the digital environment.

We can describe these core objectives with more detail across their artistic processes:

Creating - Constructing media arts experiences is the means to analytically deconstructing them, in any format or context. As students build multimodal experiences, they gain the vocabulary and cognitive syntax to fully understand their operational conventions and social objectives. The multimedia experience is essentially demystified. The student is empowered with the capacities to effectively create and interpret meaning within culture and contribute to her world.

Producing - Creative empowerment across embodied multimodalities implicitly builds inner resilience to the plethora of intermedia messaging, and a grounding appreciation for aesthetics, the arts and culture. As creative masters of multimedia, technology and systems, students can see themselves as equal participants and contributors in all cultural forums.

Responding - Media literacy is the critical deconstruction of media artworks and the determination of their technical methods, underlying values, intentions and messages. As she can ‘read’ and critique the variety of multimedia experiences, she is fluent in their sources, influences and systems. She is aware of how designed experience intends to manage her experience, which actualizes her power to inform herself and make her own determinations and assertions.

Connecting - With these inner capacities for creative inquiry, acquiring knowledge and designing experience, the student can become proactive and strategic in her relationships to technology, multimedia and virtual environments. She gains cultural agency in this emerging, co-created and interconnective society.