Proceedings

Conference Overview

Call for Participation

Track Sessions

Advisory Committee

Featured Speakers

Important Dates/Deadlines

Conference Agenda

Pre-Conference Workshops

Workshops

Registration Form

Payment Information

Hotel Information

Travel Information

Exhibit Information

Previous Conferences

itconf@mtsu.edu

Abstract

Gleaning from experiences offering an online course in Mass Communication, integrating a WiFi wireless network component into our Survey of New Media class, and using focus groups to access faculty responses to instructional technology, certain recurrent themes have emerged relating to issues of communication and collaboration. From observations of new forms of creativity among students, to basic theoretical clashes among scholars concerning IT, to a deeper understanding of inter-departmental dynamics in convergence forms, new opportunities and barriers to communication are evolving. Come find out about the specifics, the theoretical stress that makes IT problematic for some while a boon for others, and potential solutions to the barriers in the academy.

Description

We have mixed feelings about instructional technology in the academy. We learn collaborative processes that promise to enhance instruction, but sometimes worry that a new form of interactive education is driving the marketing of online courses, the netting of students, as it were, without much concern about critical thinking. Also the influx of information, its shape and processing via digitization, makes acquisition and implementation of knowledge more accessible but also more daunting than ever. E-portfolios bring coherence to disjointed academic wanderings, and encourage rhetorical skills, while simultaneously changing teaching strategies. This is more than realignment of old content; or a means of mastering content; it a new form of social interaction, of computing, of art, of commerce, and of communication.

For the students, this means new ways of approaching learning based on some already comfortable forms. Gleaning observations from the introduction of online coursework and wireless devices into mass communication classes, part of this talk will revolve around the observation of new forms of creativity among students, and how they use location-based experiments to fulfill their assigned tasks, develop nontraditional leadership skills, and simultaneously fostering their own interests.

The other, more detailed prong of exploration will involve discussion of inter-departmental dynamics and how to encourage discussion between divergent groups. After conducting several focus groups and other research explorations, certain concerns became evident regarding cooperation and communication within the academy. Risk-taking, experimentation, and
collaboration are the new hallmarks for creativity; yet the definitions of those terms vary from department to department, and even in specific disciplines within departments. If cooperation and competition are part of the academic landscape, how do we overcome the emphasis of the latter to encourage the former? More importantly, how do we find the right balance? If altruism and cooperation are essential in what Diane Coyle calls a weightless economy, and employers want fluid skill-sets, this cannot be accomplished with too much competition. But what of too much cooperation? How do you engage an interdisciplinary curriculum in linguistics, mass communications, art, English, computer science, engineering, business, architecture, philosophy, biology and math WITHOUT promulgating what Cornell's Frank H. T. Rhodes calls the pulverization of knowledge to a degree inappropriate for undergraduates.? On another level, the foundations of disciplines create barriers to even basic forms of synergy. Mass Communications is rife with ideas about Manovich, cultural studies and McLuhan, but visit Education, where they discuss Vygotskian and activity theory, or move on to Instructional Technology where they are immersed in best practices and distributed cognition, then examine the Engineering Department, where the focus is signal processing and information theory, and try to find commonalities. We aren?t a community that talks to one another very well. Further, there are practical reasons for this: some of us are technology-driven disciplines, others more abstract and theoretical; some quantitative, some qualitative. This means that we often fail to understand or even recognize the other?s world, and find ourselves lost concerning topics that are curiously at the center of many discussions - or balk when we receive templates from instructional technology.

Looking at theorists and writers such as Christine Ogan, Peter Drucker, Nicholas Negroponte, Neil Postman, Roger Fidler, and Lev Manovich, what do authorities in new media see as emergent trends that can inform learning technologies, and how can we incorporate them into our theoretical base? What do faculty themselves have to say about collaboration and learning
environments? And, most importantly, how do we operationalize our ideas? There are powerfully opposing views of the learning environment in the academy, so how do we find commonalities (there are some) and, more importantly, ways of broaching the differences in (among others) the prescriptive, phenomenological, empiricist, and functionalist models that
run through the academy?