Can you teach new media?

by Amy Sample Ward on July 31, 2008

Marshall Kirkpatrick post a great article today for ReadWriteWeb considering the questions: Can New Media Be Taught in Schools?  What do you think?

Tests on Twitter, wiki-style study groups, students quizzed on yesterday’s most popular YouTube videos and the biggest hits on Del.icio.us/Popular – is this what the future of education is going to look like? In some journalism schools around the US, it just might be. Would that really be so bad? Though many may disagree with us, we think there is some merit to teaching new media in journalism and other schools.

Marshall even quoted me, as I described just one example from my experience as a student of new media in college.  There are many comments over on the article, go check it out and weigh in on the conversation!

How do you learn new media?  Do you think it can be taught/learned in a ‘classroom’ or do you lean towards personal investigation and experimentation?

Tagged as: education, marshallk, newmedia, readwriteweb

  • http://design.sliverofice.com Erica McGillivray

    For me, new media has been completely self-taught. Someone points to it and I checked it out to see if I want to invest my time in learning and using. Plus, I will continue to use it or drop it quickly.

    I think the teachers may be resistant to adding new media to their classroom given how quickly things tend to change. What technology future teachers are using/learning may not even be relevant by the time they’re teaching. I do think that it’s worthwhile for teachers/professors of all levels to be aware (at the very least) of what technology their students are using.

    I think certificates or other secondary, technical types of education are going to be more adapt to adding new media to their courses, given how quickly they can change curriculum and hire new professors/teachers.

    More traditional secondary universities will probably have a harder time given how stringent course requirements can be. You can always teach Chaucer, but will Twitter be around in 3 years?

  • http://amysampleward.org Amy Sample Ward

    Erica – I completely agree that one of the biggest hurdles to social media being ‘taught’ is that it is different or out-dated by the time the teacher could create a curriculum. That’s why I like the idea of teachers and students learning together. Even if Twitter isn’t around in 3 years, there are very obvious community best practices and lessons learned, with awesome case studies, that a teacher could apply as lessons alongside whatever next tool for conversations and microblogging becomes popular – that way learning the tools together but the teacher still has the references and historical side to contribute as well. Thanks for the great points!