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.  

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.