I frequently think about the contextual or program aspects of DMA. For example, I wonder where, if anywhere, the DMA course fits into the context of the Undergraduate Academic Program (which is the equivalent of an abbreviated Liberal Arts portion of the BFA degree students work towards at UNCSA). That's one type of questioning I do --but don't get the wrong idea. This is not an existential, angst-filled line of questioning, it's an enjoyable part of my reflective process, and it feeds my design and re-design process.
As noted in the previous post on this blog, which focuses on the work of Andrea Lunsford, and in other posts where I recount aspects of what I'm doing with the course, I have assembled a cluster of provisional answers to the above pleasantly existential line of self-questioning. The cluster boils down to this:
I basically see DMA as a composition course devoted to helping students advance their skills in reading/decoding/interpreting and writing/encoding/creating in a variety of media including but not limited to text. At its base, I see DMA as a 21st century composition course which teaches and combines the skills and tools of the theoretician, rhetorician and technician.
I also do a different, futuristic type of questioning. Assuming DMA and media studies could one day become a focus, area-concentration, or minor for some students at our institution, what advanced-level courses would build well on it? Along these lines I am always on the lookout for clues to how folks are building successfully on the foundations of a rhetoric-based approach to education (that's the Lunsford piece) to capture and advance some of the insights and knowledge-product options new-media makes available to all of us.
Several new-media related electives have been offered at our school, including a course on Generative Art (co-taught with my esteemed colleague Dean Wilcox), another one entitled Theory and Practice of New Media Art (which I offered solo), and one currently underway called Virtual Worlds (also co-taught with Dean Wilcox).
At the recent NC Symposium on Teaching Writing I met a pack of people with clues about the future --even about the possible future of our own Virtual Worlds elective, in that they mentioned ideas, references, and software with potential to augment our VW course next time it's offered. The panel of presenters (whose varied perspectives are represented below in audio recordings) focused attention around the title Virtual Worlds: Pedagogies of Play.
Their perspectives vary nicely from theory-centered looks at virtual worlds to technically-centered looks. I would underscore, though, that all of the presenters blended theory and technology --which also underscores Tom Boellstorff's notion in Coming of Age in Second Life that we are in an age of techne, an age in which thought and technology are conjoined.
The symposium sessions were not being recorded or archived, so I made my own 'bootleg' audio recordings (using a first-gen, now-antique iPod with a microphone attachment) of the presentations. The recordings, each preceded by a short annotation, are embedded below.
Stephanie Boluk insightfully and provocatively traces the historical arc of the Little Red Riding Hood story from early oral beginnings to a recent computer game treatment:
Patrick LeMieux describes a fascinating array of game genres emerging in non-commercial, artistic, and/or DIY sectors, and says a bit about tools/platforms that students can use to create their own examples:
Patrick Jagoda focuses in a very astute and engaging way on the intellectual capacities that professors can help students build, in order to help them optimize their now-direct and pervasive involvement in the production and sharing of media-infused knowledge-products:
Victoria Szabo insightfully describes the critical skills students need in order to engage in media decoding and encoding with maximum awareness and impact, and uses examples from a series or cluster of courses devoted to the history of virtual worlds:
A question and answer session includes yours truly asking about the possibility that while professors may aim for things like transdisciplinarity, students may be inhabiting post-cognitive universes, characterized more by affective markers:
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