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.

 

Emerging Educational Metaphors: Network, Amplifier, Media Arts

Recently, I’ve been seeing some understandable and reputable backlash to increasing technology infusion in education. LAUSD’s iPad debacle became a pivotal issue in LAUSD school board elections; an Atlantic article by Toyama titled, “Why Technology Alone Won’t Fix Schools”, cites a variety of supporting research; several recent high-profile reports have disputed the viability of the “flipped classroom”, “personalized learning”, and “blended learning” models.

And then, yesterday, June 8, 2015, the LA Times published this article by Michael Godsey in its print edition, “Traditional Teaching Faces a Cyberthreat From School Model”, which critically examines “Altschool”, a new and rapidly expanding online education program that describes the new teacher role as a "facilitator". Godsey states that teachers cultivate “wisdom” and cannot be replaced by technology. He cites John Hattie’s, “Visible Learning” which synthesizes more than 800 meta-analyses and 50,000 smaller studies”, finding that “‘direct instruction,’ and ‘quality of teaching’ were all significantly more effective than ‘individualized instruction,’ ‘matching teaching with learning style,’ and ‘computer-assisted instruction.’.

Although I am a technology-based educator and artist, I am certainly not a technophile, and I wouldn’t claim technology itself as a panacea that will replace teachers. My friends know that I have been very critical of technology in general, and particularly of its misuse in educational settings. I agree with Toyama that technology is basically an amplifier. To some degree, it will reflect the school situation in which it is placed, good, bad or mixed.  

With that introduction, this is my unedited, responding letter to the editor, which at least has been published on the website, if not tomorrow’s print edition.

Dear LA Times Editor

After using technology and media in the classroom for over 25 years, I can say with confidence that its proper usage will significantly advance education and learning, shifting the teacher’s role to facilitator and coach. You can simply look at the world around us to see how the average citizen has been empowered to learn and create through technology’s increasing access and sophistication. Traditional education is still based on an antiquated “factory” metaphor, with corresponding methodologies and curricula, which do not necessarily benefit from the mere insertion of technology.

The emerging metaphor for education is the “network”, with accompanying redesigns in infrastructure, curricula and methodology. The student is then empowered to produce and design anything imaginable within a virtual lab, within enriched, authentic contexts that support the real world application of core content. Beyond the either/or propositions in the article, traditional, networked and progressive instructional approaches are incorporated. This supports both the usual acquisition of facts, formulas and literacies, as well as “enactive” and “constructivist” pedagogy, whereby the student has an active role in constructing his or her own meaning, through projects for connected local and global communities. Thus, the 21st Century educational focus is on the mastery of the “student-sourced” learning and creating processes themselves. The national advent of “Media Arts Education”, through the recent development of voluntary K12 standards and assessments will contribute to this transformation.

We need to stop thinking of technology as a tool that one simply inserts into schools just as they now are, as a kind of magic pill. The system has to be redesigned around our new understandings of learning and technology. Technology is more of an ecosystem, with this potentiated virtual space and interconnectivity, which should be available to students for active creativity and learning. Technology requires specialized skills, abilities and circumstances to manage well, and schools need to begin thinking from the perspective of the student who is empowered to access an infinite, and self-originating learning and creating process that is the innate capacity of human beings.