Session Organizer: Michael R. Gibson, University of North Texas
Media studies in communication design curriculum
Anne Galperin, State University of New York, New Paltz | PDF
The Delta metaphor: The future of design education in McLuhan's electric whirl
David Cundy, Iona College
Reaching inside each other’s virtual junk drawers—play, personalization, and collaboration as narrative tactics for motion design with beginning students
Kermit Bailey, North Carolina State University
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This session invites proposals that critically explore, challenge or offer new means to instigate and sustain meaningful dialectic in learning situations wherein students are challenged to use dynamic media as a means to promote effective communications. Presentations are sought that analyze and examine either theoretical or practiced methods for sensitizing learners in these classrooms that the demand for them to learn why a particular course of action should be pursued is as important as how it should be realized in a given interactive or kinetic environment.
The fact that contemporary time-based, intermedia design classes tend to be populated by students who have been trained rather than educated to passively receive and reactively respond to information presents a serious array of pedagogic challenges to the educators who must attempt to teach these myopically informed learners. The majority of their previous educational experiences have conditioned them to perform rather than contribute, to accept rather than analyze, and to consume rather than make. This causes the task of engaging in the kind of eclectically informed decision-making processes necessary to create useful, usable and extrinsically compelling dynamic media very difficult to meet. It demands that the individuals charged with teaching these learners possess the ability to synthesize the conceptual and formal ideas their students present them with on a daily basis so these ideas might be critically questioned and assessed according to how well they satisfy a broad array of well-defined parameters. It demands that these individuals assess their student's work not in terms of what they "like" or "don't like," but in terms that reflect how effectively they feel that work meets its fundamental objectives and delivers it intent.
In light of these factors, presentations given during this session should address one or more of the following questions. How should design educators attempting to teach in dynamic media classrooms instigate and sustain a high level of earnest, objectively argumentative discourse with students in these types of learning environments? What proven or theoretical strategies for design project-planning and execution should be implemented to foster the kind of constructive critical exchanges among students that are couched in terms of which operations, narrative deliveries and interface structures are more or less effective in light of given criteria? How should different critical methods be presented to and then employed by different levels of learners in dynamic media classrooms? What must occur during an effectively analytical, eclectically informative critique in these types of learning situations?
