New Media as a Teaching Asset

What is New Media?

•New media is to old media as Wikipedia is to Webster’s•Old media:•Books, video, audio, etc...•Static (non-interactive)•Non-immersive

What is New Media?

•New media is digital•Networkable•Portable•Interactive

•Examples include websites, computer programs, video games, digital multimedia, social media platforms like Youtube and Facebook etc...•Deployable upon several digital platforms, including computers, tablets, smartphones, and video game consoles

New Media

Use it!

New Media is Multi-Platform

•Computers

•Tablets

•Online delivered content

•Easy translation to old media platforms

•Smartboards

Smartboards

•A perfect platform for interactive content

•A host of easy, free resources and communities available online

•Smartboards + Flash content

The Great Education/Social

Media Debate

• Just about everybody has a facebook

•Social media is intended as just that: Social

•Facebook has inherent features (groups, bulletins, etc...) that can be useful without being invasive.

•Content filter sites like StumbleUpon can be set to search for educational content

A Paradigm Shift

Two new fundamentals of education

A Paradigm Shift

One: Innovation requires economic consideration

A Paradigm Shift

Two: Retention is meaningless in the age of Google

Teaching Students to Teach

Themselves• Information and data is everywhere

•The ability to process large quantities of information for relevance is far more valuable today than rote memorization.

•Not all students learn the same; Digital content can be tailored seamlessly to fit individual student’s learning patterns.

Moving to a Digital Platform

Vs.

Lightweight

Interactive

Can access nearly all recorded human data

ExpensiveCan hopefully find their

homework in all that clutter

Telepresence •Increases student audience

•International telepresence teaching programs could help shape students into future citizens of the world

Augmented Reality

•Multiple definitions of augmented reality: Pure data overlay, geo-locational, and glyph based tracking

•Allows students to learn through real interaction

• Interactive, 3d content layered over the real world is about as immersive as one can get

Taking the Next Step in Applying Multiple

Intelligence•EEG technology has come into the

consumer price range, and new products like the Epoc Emotiv have open APIs for development

•We can actually see what learning mediums activate the students brains

•Educational content should be polymorphic, and adaptable to each students aptitudes.

Games as a Teaching Tool

•Video games are a very immersive platform

•Playing video games has been proven to increase cognitive and reasoning abilities

•High engagement = Easier learning

•Educational games have found a very wide market (i.e. Sid Meier’s Civilization series, Age of Mythology, WolfQuest)

•Not applicable to all topics

Learning From the Cloud Model

• Integrating and centralizing school networks

•Allows convenient transfer of digital content

•Structure school information in an easily digestable “social media” platform that students are already accustomed to using (i.e. students can send and recieve messages to teachers, recieve assignments in an “update” format, etc...)

In Summation...•Use Google, teach Google

•New media platforms give us new tools to create highly immersive, engaging educational content, much of which is available for free online

•New technologies are changing the way that we learn, and we have to adapt with them

•Economics is the new language of Education, and technology can help keep the costs of modernization affordable.