MEDIA ARTS CAN MAKE EDUCATION MULTIMODAL!

Dain Olsen

President & CEO, NAMAE

Author: "Media Arts Education: 

Multimodal Cognition, Holistic Learning, and the Techno-Embodiement of Education" 

Publisher: Routledge (forthcoming)

Human cognition Is Multimodal

Not ‘text-based’!

Sound familiar?

 

That’s because AI is now ‘multimodal’, and moving beyond text-based!

AI is now trained on media arts: images, text, video, speech, graphics, sound, etc.

'Multimodality' has caused a quantum leap in AI’s ability to mimic human thinking,

Resulting in greater capacities for empathy, generative multimedia, and generalizing intelligence.

 

Similar to the 'old' AI, our educational system is text and language-based, not multimodal.

Students learn indirectly, through the code of academic language, and book study,

Which makes the learning less interesting and engaging, and more abstract and hard to understand.

Because our cognition is multimodal, all students learn better through multimodality.

Media Arts Education (MAE)

Is highly multimodal, multisensory,  direct, interactive, and embodied

Across all of these forms: photo, video, sound, animation, graphics, web design, social media, 3D design,

AI supported, game design, e-journalism, interactive and virtual design

Which makes MAE creatively unlimited!

Students can produce, construct, and design anything imaginable!

Furthermore, MAE is 'transparent' to all contents, across both arts and academics.

Which means, MAE can use these forms to translate, represent, 

and simulate text-based content in multimodal projects

Therefore, MAE can make all learning more multimodal, engaging, 

interactive, and understandable!

APPLIED TO MATHEMATICS, STUDENTS OF MAE CAN PRODUCE:

photos of math in the world: clock, sign, schedule, geometric shapes, money, etc.

Graphic designs for sales showing discounts

Cooking shows, measuring ingredients

Short dramatic videos enacting word problems

Digital game designs that exercise mathematics skills

Stock market analysis webcasts with percentages, graphs 

and analysis using algebra

3D physics animations using algebra to explain and predict angles of a thrown ball

3D bridge designs and engineering using geometry and calculus

3D animations showing space travel simulations of trajectories 

using calculus and trigonometry

Algebra and calculus in programming algorithms and UI design for app design

TRANSDISCIPLINARY EXAMPLES:

Video game designs that exercise programming, mathematics, design thinking, engineering, marketing, etc.

Interactive 3D animated models that exhibit 

understanding of scientific or historical concepts

Interdisciplinary projects that combine all arts and academic disciplines 

in live and multimedia presentations

This leads to a new MAE-centered model of education, 

which is more 21st century, student-centered, effective, engaging, flexible, and inclusive.

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.

Catalyzing Educational Transformation

In its full implementation, Media Arts Education (MAE) can serve as a central, inter-connective content area and versatile “makerspace” that is capable of shifting paradigms of student learning and advancing systemic 21st century educational transformation.

Traditional education is based on an industrial factory model, whereby, in general, students still passively acquire standardized content within fixed, subject area sequences. This regimented process is teacher and content centered, reduces the relevance and authentic application of content, and does not support diverse student abilities, interests and flexible learning pathways. This system ultimately does not adequately prepare students for 21st century conditions.

In our media arts-based world, we are increasingly learning, creating and connecting through rapidly evolving and decentralized forms of interactive multimedia. As with media arts in the world, MAE is highly versatile in its digital forms and capacities, conceivably forming an interconnective “virtual laboratory”, or networks of laboratories, which provide students the ability to produce or design and share any product, expression or experience imaginable. The full potential of MAE is the incorporation of this “virtual plasticity” of media arts production and design within the traditional educational system to foster its pedagogically coherent, student-centered, 21st century transition.

MAE replicates media arts’ diverse forms and capacities within classrooms, supporting interdisciplinary, project-based learning experiences based in students’ interests and responsive to community needs. MAE essentially forms an adaptable virtual laboratory for all students to apply content knowledge towards mastery. With its enriched contexts and varied forms, tools and methods, students can authentically enact various roles as artists, designers, inventors, scientists, mathematicians, historians, entrepreneurs, producers, managers, manufacturers, and technicians. Thus, students of MAE are empowered to become active cultural participants and producers of knowledge, while gaining the competencies necessary for 21st century academic and career success.

Students of MAE can master core academic and arts content through engaging experiences that instill creative problem solving, effective communications, team collaboration, and critical thinking. They also gain critical literacies in media, technology and digital culture essential to becoming informed, discerning and engaged citizens. A sequential and multifaceted MAE program provides ample opportunities for individual exploration and growth, which support the student’s development of self-directed inquiry and lifelong learning.

Furthermore, MAE can be implemented across traditional school divisions and with external community partners. Across collaborative networks, learning experiences and creative products can be produced and shared locally and globally. Thus, MAE could become an expanding network of centers for innovation in learning and creating, catalyzing systemic educational transformation.

Remedying the Blind Spots in Education

Education is capable of having blind spots, and certainty the area of media arts is one of them. But how does education become aware of, and adapt to the areas of need of which it is unaware?

With the ever increasing influx of technology into schools and in our world, all educators should address and include some digital media in their instruction. Media Arts Education would support that institution-wide transition with standards-based cohesion and coherence towards rounded, rigorous and relevant competencies for career and college.

With this technological shift, it is especially important that Media Arts Teachers begin to be hired in schools in order to teach the aesthetic, cultural, and literacy aspects of media, that connect, inform and persuade us in the 21st Century. This is literally how we make sense of and take action in the world. Students never examine the media arts world that surrounds them, and remain unaware of its influence and power, let alone their own latent capacity for utilizing it effectively.

Surprisingly, even with the pervasiveness of media in our culture, there is no institutional recognition of the need to teach with and about these essential forms of communication in the K12 system. Schools do not have the internal means for recognizing or acting on a need that doesn't already exist as a formal category, such as English Language Arts, or Physical Education. Establishing a whole new content area is a very unusual proposition. And of course, there are not enough Media Arts Teachers or Specialists already existing to point out and push this need. So how does this start?

That is why the inclusion of Media Arts Standards at the state level across the U.S. is such an important first step, and why we then need strong and continuous public demand to bring this to full formal establishment as quickly as possible. This need for external pressure is exemplified by the decades-long battle for the separate dance and theatre credentials that were recently authorized in California. It must not take forty years to include Media Arts and media literacy in the 21st Century curriculum!

This is why we have initiated the Media Arts Education Coalition, in order to galvanize the community around this momentous opportunity to institute a transformative arts discipline for 21st Century education!

All supportive individuals and organizations are urged to sign-on at this website now!

SIGN-ON TO SUPPORT THE FORMAL ESTABLISHMENT OF MEDIA ARTS EDUCATION IN CALIFORNIA K12 SCHOOLS!

Media Arts Education - Learning Amplified

MEDIA ARTS EDUCATION: K12 Arts Education for the 21^st Century

We live in a “media arts” centered world. We know and learn about, and create our contemporary world through media arts tools, forms and processes. Our 21st C global culture has moved from text-based to multimedia-based modes of communication and interaction. Particularly in California, media arts has a long historic and cultural legacy, and accounts for a substantial and increasing portion of our  $375 billion “Creative Economy”.

It is essential that all students become versed in these new modes to become empowered citizens, effective communicators, and to develop innovative solutions to contemporary challenges.

"Media Arts Education" is a relatively new categorization of K12 arts education, alongside of the traditional disciplines of Dance, Music, Theatre, and Visual Arts. It encompasses the digital media arts of imaging, moving image, sound, interactive and virtual design.

Media Arts Students can:

• Produce and design anything they can imagine, including photos, graphics, animations, movies, special effects, motion graphics, video games, 3D designs, virtual worlds, interactive apps, etc.
• Design 3D models of sustainable communities on Mars, complete with agricultural and energy production, and designs for architecture, transportation, tools and clothing
• Investigate the local community for “hotspots” of interest, history, social engagement, or urban and environmental challenge, and then propose transformational designs, investigations and promotions of these hotspots
• Produce videos that present their vision for school change, submitted to their local school board for the (LCFF) district budget decision-making process
• Create 3D game designs addressing a social or environmental issue that exercise every level of mathematics, code, virtual physics, engineering, and game theory, as well as core content
• Design digital and physical 3D models of cities, mega spaces, and everyday objects, such as kitchen utensils and phones, while studying the omni-presence of design
• Analyze and debate presidential election advertising through media literacy methods  
• Exercise their language skills (especially English Language Learners) through producing videos such as news, cooking, travel, stories, talent, social issues, etc., by developing scripts, rehearsing segments, analyzing media, and collaborating in diverse production activities
• Exhibit their productions in “multimedia events” that integrate all arts disciplines for the school and local community, including: video yearbooks, streaming arts and news broadcasts, multimedia theatre, screen exhibitions, film festivals, video and DJ dance experiences, international cultural exchanges, etc.
• Evaluate and design multimedia tools and products for the enhancement and universal access of learning in English, Mathematics, Science, and History

These actual classroom projects demonstrate Media Arts Education’s capacity to:

• Cultivate 21^st Century Skills in Communication, Collaboration, Creativity and Critical Thinking
• Promote student-centered, inquiry-driven learning that is relevant and self-directed
• Engage students in real world activities and problem solving with purposeful results
• Advance core academic and arts achievement through their effective integration in cultural and community projects
• Empower student voice and civic engagement, and foster essential literacies in arts, media and technology
• Support all students towards academic success, including those with special needs, limited language proficiency, and at risk of academic failure

Media Arts Education in these various forms provides rich and rigorous arts content in the instruction of media production and design, and forms a unique space of innovation and invention for 21st C education. A “Media Arts Lab”, incorporating a variety of digital media and design tools and forms, can serve as a virtual “makerspace” within the school, where students can create any expression, production or design they can imagine.  

This virtual laboratory supports integrated and holistic forms of learning that can "dissolve the walls" of classrooms, supporting students to become the researchers, inventors, entrepreneurs, designers and artists of their own futures. By engaging in a broad range of processes and activities in sequenced study, students can master 21st Century and Media Arts Standards-based competencies that prepare them for both college and career:

Multimedia Communication                                Technical Production

Design Thinking                                                      Innovation and Adaptation

Inquiry/Research                                                    Organization/Development

Media, Tech, Arts Literacies                                  Critical Analysis/Evaluation

Self-agency/Community-Interaction                   Contextual Awareness

Synthesis/Metacognition                                      Learning about Learning

Currently, in California, media arts educators do not have specific standards for their instruction, so they have to turn to other sets of standards in order to meet district and school requirements for “standards-based instruction”. Nor do media arts educators have specific pre-service training, program support, or ongoing professional development. Also, media arts courses and teachers may fall under other categories in their districts and programs, such as computer, technical, visual arts, theatre, etc.

In order to move Media Arts Education towards educational establishment, the adoption of standards by the state allows any interested educators to form commonality in practice and outcome. Then, as the discipline gains recognition and support, districts and the state may begin forming specific courses and a credential for authorized instruction. Only with its complete institutional implementation can the promise of Media Arts Education be fulfilled.

Media Arts Education is endorsed by all national arts organizations and their affiliated partners in the National Coalition for Core Arts Standards, and is endorsed by: the National Association of Media Arts and Culture, the National Association of Media Literacy Education, the National Endowment for the Arts, the College Board, and is included as a core content in the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). National Core Media Arts Standards are currently being adopted or adapted across the U.S. Media Arts is a key recommendation in the CREATE CA “Blueprint for Creative Schools”.

Media Arts Education is now forming a broad-based community of support of educators, parents, industry and community organizations, etc., seeking to formally establish the discipline in U.S. K12 schools. 
See the Media Arts Education Coalition website for more information.
SIGN-ON HERE TO SUPPORT THE FORMAL ESTABLISHMENT OF MEDIA ARTS EDUCATION IN CALIFORNIA K12 SCHOOLS