Knowing with New Media

A Multimodal Approach for Learning

Lena Redman

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9789811313615
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Scienze della comunicazione

This cutting edge book considers how advances in technologies and new media have transformed our perception of education, and focuses on the impact of the privatisation of digital tools as a mean of knowledge production. Arguing that education needs to adapt to the modern learner, the book's unique approach is based on a disassociation with the deeply ingrained attitude with which people have traditionally viewed education – learning the existing symbolic systems of certain disciplines and then expressing themselves strictly within the operational modes of these systems. The ways of knowledge production – exploring, recording, representing, making meaning of and sharing human experiences – have been fundamentally transformed through the infusion of digital technologies into all aspects of human activity, allowing learners to engage with their immediate natural, social and cultural environments by capitalising on their individual abilities and interests. This book proposes a new approach to teaching and learning termed 'cinematic bricolage', which involves generating knowledge from heterogeneous resources in a 'do-it-yourself' manner while making meaning through multimodal representations. It shows how cinematic bricolage reconnects ways of knowing with ways of being, empowering the individual with a sense of personal identity and responsibility, helping to shape more aware social citizens.

© The Author(s) 2018

Lena RedmanKnowing with New Mediahttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1361-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Lena Redman¹

(1)

Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Lena Redman

End Abstract

1.1 Self

This book is based on a doctoral study that sought to develop a method of knowledge construction that could be appropriate to embrace the complexity of the twenty-first century world. Boulton et al. (2015) argue: ‘Complexity at its essence is not a model or method or metaphor, it is a description of the way things are’ (p. 27). The perpetual technological changes of the modern era provoke even more complexity, ‘messiness, variation, diversity and fluctuation’ (p. 26). In such conditions, knowledge of the Self appears to be foundational to all other types of knowledge. People must know the Self to address the turbulent circumstances and variety of content with which today’s technology bombards our global village. Self-reflective knowledge opens one’s eyes to recognising the possibility of and constructing a path through the shifting sands of what only recently appeared to be the bedrock of life. Seeing the path, one gains confidence and resilience with which to meet the changeability of existence. What they also discover is that their pathways are threads, tightly interwoven into the fabric of their environment, circumstances and the paths of others.

It is only through taking a walk and weaving the way for each new step that people enter true communion with the physicality of their surroundings. Through experiencing and reflecting, people develop a conception of other minds and begin to act with appreciation of other travellers both near, far and unknown. The Self and Others are the dynamic forces that stitch through the fabric of reality, spin and clash in the virtual tapestry of minds, continuously forging new patterns.

After spending the last few years studying the literature concerned with new directions in education, I could not help noticing the recurring pattern of the emphasis on the term ‘self’. For example, in relation to learning and knowledge production, such terms as: ‘self-taught’ (Thomas and Seely Brown 2011); ‘self-representational’, ‘self-reflexive’, ‘self-authored’, ‘self-produced’ (Potter 2012); ‘self-creating’, ‘self-transformative’, ‘self-governing’, ‘self-autonomous’, ‘self-generative’, ‘self-motivating’, ‘self-realising’, ‘self-monitoring’, ‘self-paced’ (Kalantzis and Cope 2012; Cope and Kalantzis 2015); ‘self-regulative’, ‘self-organising’ (Boulton et al. 2015), ‘self-blending’, ‘self-directed’, ‘self-controlled’ (Bull 2017), and so on, are frequently encountered.

This orientation towards a self-prefix may suggest a scholarly consensus that in searching for the new approaches to learning, the Self requires a revised position in a number of ways. This also implies that the informal learning of everyday life has already taken care of this important aspect of Self in a going-without-saying way, while in institutionalised education, the Self keeps knocking at the door with little to show for it. Formal education still alienates the Self from learning and ‘does not fully engage the identity, interests and motivations of the learner’ (Kalantzis and Cope 2012, p. 51).

1.2 Human/Technology Enmeshment

In the last twenty years, rapid advances in technology have caused a dramatic transformation in the dynamics of experiential structures. The traditionally constructed, carefully crafted practices and social categories that survived for centuries have entered into the zone of turbulence, and the traditional meanings of many practices have been challenged. The practice of reflexive self-identity’s interpretation is one of those. It has acquired new technological tools, a modified context and an altered perspective. This situation exemplifies Marx’s premise, as interpreted by Leontiev (1978), that through contact with the tools and objects of their activities, people ‘test their resistance, act on them, acknowledging their objective properties’ and change themselves.

Today, the learner is presented with digital tools as personalised means of knowledge production in the context of everyday life learning. Like breathing warm air on a frozen window, the screens of computers and mobile devices ‘thaw’ portals and reveal a vision focused much further than the immediate surrounding. Providing people with facts, perspectives, instructions for activities, and links to the networks of their personal interests, the portals of new vision form personalised systems of consciousness that reconnect individuals with their innate virtues. Advanced opportunities excite new curiosity, foster new motivations and encourage new participation in weaving new patterns of knowledge. Within the formally organised system of education with a deliberately designed curriculum and ‘centralised and hierarchical control of educational institutions and the knowledge they distribute’ (Kalantzis and Cope 2012, p. 284), the personalised conscious portal systems are rendered irrelevant.

This can be described in terms of Marx’s (1844) theory of alienated labour, where he sees the product of labour being objectified—‘labour’s realisation is its objectification’ (loc. 1250). In this way, learning realisations can also be seen as their objectification. That is, the learner embodies the product of their learning into an output that is exchanged for the grades they earn by passing their standardised tests. The product of learning therefore becomes a commodity, whose production is chiefly motivated by the need to be sold for the required points that will determine the learner’s further progression. This concept can be encapsulated into the notion, ‘pass and forget’. As Kincheloe and Steinberg write (1998): ‘Once the test is over most students no longer have any use for such information and quickly forget it’ (p. 5). The product of learning will only be remembered if it has further practical application in real life. Otherwise, the realisation of learning ‘appears as loss of reality’ (Marx 1844, loc. 1250), decontextualised information that holds no significance to the learner (Kincheloe and Steinberg 1998, p. 5). Such learning, Girox (2011) asserts, ‘celebrates rote learning, memorisation, and high-stakes testing, while it produces an atmosphere of student passivity and teacher routinisation’ (p. 10). Learning loses its intrinsic value because the numerical appraisal is its ultimate aim. The learner becomes more interested in generating an impressive numerical ‘account’ rather than being the producer of personally authentic practical knowledge.

1.3 Alienated Learning

As a rule, in traditional education, the learner begins their project with sources and materials constructed not from their immediate environment, daily interactions, or interests but from someone else’s abstraction of reality. These outside notions, sets of ideas, skills and techniques reflect someone’s belief about what the learner should master in the domain of knowledge. Thus, the situation of the learner’s estrangement from their learning projects begins from being fed by someone else’s idea of what the learner should know about the world they inhabit.

Marx (1844) states: ‘The worker can create nothing without nature, without the sensuous external world. It is the material on which his labour is manifested, in which it is active, from which and by means of which it produces’ (loc. 1279). If we replace the word ‘worker’ with the word ‘learner’, we can say that mainstream formal learning occurs outside of being part of the sensuous external world. The experience of being in the world is abstracted and embodied into artificially resourced materials from which, and by means of which, the learner acquires their knowledge.

Marx argues: ‘The direct relationship of labour to its produce is the relationship of the worker to the objects of his production’ (loc. 1298). Again, it can be said that the direct relationship of learning to its product is the relationship of the learner to the objects of their learning. The learner learns in order to pass a test with the goal of exchange the product of their learning for grades. For standardised testing, the learner’s personal interests, applied effort, curiosity, risk-taking, and innovative tendencies, as well as the ability to construct their own knowledge, is not only unnecessary but counterproductive. Within the confines of the traditional curriculum and standardised testing, the relationship between the learner and their essential creative forces can be characterised as estranged.

Marx continues: ‘If then the product of labour is alienation, production itself must be active alienation, the alienation of activity, the activity of alienation’ (loc. 1312). In comparing this to formal education, it can be said that the learner is in the position of alienating their learning from their own self, similar to the worker described by Marx, who faces ‘the product of his activity as a stranger […] Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labour is shunned like the plague’ (loc. 1312). In contemporary education, this can be compared to school breaks and holiday homework, which is usually seen as a grievous misfortune.

1.4 Reconnected Learning

The digital revolution has brought about a change in position between power-holding institutions, teachers and individual learners alike and levelled them into the same category in terms of their possessing the means of knowledge-production. This is a historically unique circumstance that has caused a shift in the agency of knowledge-production processes, spreading it evenly between the three main actor-groups: society, teachers and learners. In this regard, the task of digital literacy, as an educational discipline, must be oriented not only towards the development of technological skills and the accumulation of a variety of attractive learning proficiencies but also to the historical-sociocultural alterations that are at work at every junction of contemporary life. This leads to challenging the deeply ingrained attitude with which people have traditionally viewed education: learning the existing symbolic systems of certain disciplines and then expressing themselves strictly within the operational modes of these systems.

This book proposes that by virtue of having the means and tools of accessin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Paradigm Shift: From Far-Ends to Circularities
• 3. Mind-Cinema and Cinematic Writing
• 4. Writing a Subtext
• 5. Culture of Webworking: Knowing with an Endless Catalogue of Resources
• 6. Complexity of the World: Circular Interconnectedness
• 7. Cinematic Bricolage as Reconnected Learning
• 8. DIY Creativity: Culture of Self-Sufficiency
• 9. Engine Room of Creative Software
• 10. Assessment, Learning and Sociological Imagination: From Word-Count to the Value of Learning
• 11. Probes’ Review Decoding Symbols and Making-Meaning with Others
• 12. Conclusion
• Back Matter