A MITH Digital Dialogue
Tuesday, April 3, 12:30-1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135
“Visible Evidence of Invisible Learning”
by RANDY BASS (Georgetown University)
Faculty and practitioners who work with digital pedagogies know, at least intuitively, that student learning is significantly transformed in new media environments. As all of higher education wades deeper into the learning paradigm, it is increasingly important to move our understanding of new media learning beyond generalizations about engagement, interaction, and collaboration. The Visible Knowledge Project was a six-year project engaging about 60 faculty from 21 institutions, in order to explore the impact of technology on learning, especially in the humanities. This presentation will give an overview of the broad findings from the project, and look specifically at one strand of that faculty-driven research: Digital stories/narrative. The scholarship of teaching and learning that was produced by the project focuses us in part on the expansion of our conceptions of “expertise” in student intellectual development, and the roles that new media pedagogies play in that expansion. An expanded conception of expertise might be critical to recognizing how digital pedagogies often produce forms and symptoms of learning that are elusive–if not invisible–in traditional assessments or frameworks for understanding student development. This presentation will open up some of the questions about what we recognize as learning, and especially the ways that new media pedagogies and literacies invite us to expand our recognition of learning.
RANDY BASS is Assistant Provost for Teaching and Learning Initiatives at Georgetown University, and Executive Director of Georgetown’s Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS), a campus-wide center supporting faculty work in new learning and research environments. He has been working with a number of pedagogy and technology projects since 1986, including serving as Director and Principal Investigator of the Visible Knowledge Project, a five-year scholarship of teaching and learning project involving 70 faculty on 21 university and college campuses. He is also a Consulting Scholar for the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancment of Teaching, where he served, in 1998-99, as a Pew Scholar and Carnegie Fellow. In 1999, he won the Educause Medal for outstanding achievement in technology and undergraduate education. Bass is Associate Professor of English and a member of the American Studies Committee at Georgetown University. He is the author of Border Texts: Cultural Readings for Contemporary Writers (Houghton Mifflin, 1998), and with Bret Eynon, co-editor of Intentional Media: The Crossroads Conversations on Teaching and Technology in the American Cultural History Classroom (double issue of Works & Days). He is currently, also with Bret Eynon, co-editing a volume of essays and findings from the Visible Knowledge Project, entitled, The Difference that Inquiry Makes.
Coming up @MITH, April 10: Kate Murray (University Libraries), “Developing Digital Curation Policies in a Local Context.”
View MITH’s complete Spring Speakers Schedule here:
http://www.mith2.umd.edu/programs/mith_speakers_spring_2007.pdf
Contact: Neil Fraistat, Director, MITH (www.mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 5-8927).