ETEC565B:META-theory: New Materialism meets the History of Educational Media

Course: Fall 2022, Online
Instructor: Prof. Jen Jenson
Office hours: Online by Appointment
Email: jennifer.jenson@ubc.ca

UBC’s Point Grey Campus is located on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam) people. The land it is situated on has always been a place of learning for the Musqueam people, who for millennia have passed on in their culture, history, and traditions from one generation to the next on this site. As teachers and learners here, we bear a responsibility to honour that tradition and contribute to its restoration. 

Course Description

As every MET student knows particularly keenly, it matters a lot what medium educational communication happens in. This course is about how educational technologies, past, present and future, shape curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment. Its also about how to understand the changes and challenges educational technologies have catalyzed, and about the theories we have developed to research,  describe, analyze and explain how they ‘work’. That’s the ‘meta’ part.

We’re especially interested in the relations of tools to educational ideas, to people, and to other biological and physical beings that educational theory has typically disregarded or overlooked.  We will reach out to other places and times in exploring the technologies people used and use in trying to ‘educate’, look especially at the forms of pedagogical communications those tools made and make possible (and suppress), and how “knowledge” was—and is—conveyed, understood, and mobilized in the contemporary educational media ecologies we now inhabit.

Instead of the more usual approach of reading about the history of educational ideas, or even charting the development of educational media and technologies, Metatheory is, perhaps improbably, a “making” kind of course. Rather than prioritizing academic texts (we’ll also have plenty of these, not to worry!) as a way to think about theory, we are going to focus on the making of “things”, on the design and development of useful tools and purposeful digital artifacts, and to ground “theory”— which a lot of people think of as an alienated, terrifying, autocratic and remote spectre haunting the academy—in a larger networked ecology of assemblages and adhesions that extend well beyond humans, and which can be best explored through productive engagements with “things.” To accomplish that, you will tackle three kinds of ‘making’:

 First, you’ll be engaged, individually, in intellectual production, where you grapple with making theory yourself, based on a set of texts and resources, classic and contemporary, and mobilizing both traditional and new media forms to extend and communicate your growing understandings through the course.

The second kind of ‘making’ will be a small adventure in original research, specifically a mini internet research project to discover what “doing theory” looks like when it’s re-mediated through Twitter. This mini project involves you in both ‘making research’ and ‘making theory’ from that research.

Third is the final project: the (small scale) design and production of an educationally useful tool. This can be a searchable archive, a lesson, a game or quiz, a way of recording student progress, an online survey, or other digital tool that supports your educational work. The purpose of this assignment is to experience thinking and working as designers and creators, not merely users and consumers, of technologies for education, and in that process, encountering more explicitly the mostly un-acknowledged ‘parliament of things’ that goes into getting anything done.

In this course, then, we will examine the educative possibilities for new and emergent digital media, asking whether and how what we know and how we know is re-shaped, re-mediated and invariably altered by education’s technological affordances. Focusing on the design, development and practical implementation of learning tools, we will explore technologies for education as necessarily constructive, rather than receptive, media.

Please note that when your activities require an online group discussion,  you and your group members can set that up yourselves on zoom or teams or whatever you choose. You can also ask for a one-on-one, or group tutorial with the prof, to respond to specific questions that have arisen for you.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this course, if you invest the effort to read through the whole set of texts, not just those you chose to complete graded assignments on,  you will be able to:

• Understand and explain paradigmatic theories of education, from its earliest beginnings to the present
• Identify, describe and situate in time and place the main ideas of the architects of those theories, from the standpoint of their concurrent, and subsequent, educational tools and technologies.
• Gain sufficient familiarity with the tenets of new materialism to understand and explain, with specific examples, what and how this perspective contributes to educational technology theory, research, design and assessment.
• Use, thoughtfully and effectively, a variety of media/forms in the completion of assignments
• Crowdsource with your classmates! Share your educational technology case study (IP#2) and your educational paradigm case study (IP#3)
• Create a digital artifact that has a clear purpose and a defined real-world educational use in your own practice. (this can be solo or collaborative work, up to 4 in a group).

Evaluation:

1. Individual Intellectual Productions: 5 out of 10 assignments, each worth 8%   (40%)
2. Twittering Theory Task: Theory network analysis (individual or collaborative)    (10%)
3. Final Project: (Solo or Group)
   • • project completion to proof of concept.           (35%)
     • Group Project Proposal                                        (5%)
     • Group Project Presentation/Demo (live)            (5%)
     • Individual Final Project Reflection.                      (5%)