Digital Ethnography

Academic Commons just released a great collection of essays on New Media Technologies and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, edited by Randy Bass with Bret Eynon.  I have been very impressed with depth of thought and the insights expressed not only in the other essays, but even in the comments and questions sent to me by Randy and the other editors as I was working on my essay.  The issue precis included this wonderful line:

… new media pedagogies (as with other emergent pedagogies) often lead to forms of learning that do not neatly fit into traditional frameworks of disciplinary learning and cognitive and critical skills, such as emotional and affective dimensions, capacities for risk-taking and uncertainty, creativity and invention, blurred boundaries between personal and public expression, or the importance of self-identity and self-understanding to the development of disciplinary understanding, etc..

The essays start from here and take on what the editors call a “dual challenge: to understand better the changing nature of learning with new media, and the potential of new media environments to make learning–and faculty insights into teaching–visible and usable.”

I’m still working my way through all the essays, and so far I have been completely enthralled - feeling both inspired and challenged by the ideas.

Here’s the abstract for my piece:

“This is a social revolution, not a technological one,” says Michael Wesch, “and its most revolutionary aspect may be the ways in which it empowers us to rethink education and the teacher-student relationship in an almost limitless variety of ways.” Looking at higher education as a whole, as well as his own teaching, Michael Wesch argues that we have had our “why’s,” “what’s” and “how’s” of teaching and learning turned upside down, and that the most compelling consequence of this moment is that it has sent us into a new “question-asking, bias-busting, assumption-exposing environment.”

I think it is this “bias-busting” time we are in that allows such a great set of essays to emerge.  This is going to be a great morning as I work my way through them.