Given the theme of block 1, Cyber culture and the increasing role digital media plays as part of popular online culture the question arises to what extent academic discourse is currently tends to be largely text-based is going to be affected by rapid digital innovations.
It is a wide-spread assumption, often associated with Marc Prensky’s proposition of the Digital Native that young people are digitally literate, and atuned to the rich choice of media available to them online.
As part of our Fresher’s VLE induction session I wanted to find out to what extent this assumption would apply to students at Harper Adams University College and their learning given that a large propostion of the cohort comes from a conservative and very traditional land-based background.
To shed light on this a question was put forward to them using the Feedback tool of Moodle:
How do you learn best?: 323 students replied and the outcome is shown below (y-axis in %)
The results obtained were found to be highly relevant in the context of the debate about the use of media in academic teaching.
Only 14% of the respondents stated that the learn by reading, a figure undercut only by those who like Maths. A clear majority of 42% showed a preference for visual/pictorial content, whilst a bit more than 20% preferred aural teaching (talks/presentations) and marginally fewer preferred movies/animations, an even richer visual environment.
Combined 62% of all students prefer visuals (pictures or video) for learning if not ‘being’ and this has been described in many publications who attribute this to a ‘visual turn’ as a consequence of the mass consumer markets in Western societies (Mtchell, 1994, and Mirzoeff, 1998).
Sadly most lecturers either deny this fact and/or ignore it outright and hence do not take sufficient account of visual media in their teaching; instead their teaching styles are likely to be read/write (text)-based as evidenced by the abundance of print-based resources (pdf-files) they deposit on the VLE.
What does this mean in regards to the debate over academic discourse and its reliance on text?
There is a large barrier amonst academic staff to make effective use of popular digital culture in their teaching, for a variety of reasons.
Promotion in academia tend to be based on (written paper-based) publications and most publishing houses tend to hold on to these formats if only to keep their current subscription based business models in place.
There is also the additional cost in time and effort to master the technology and apply it in a meaningful way as part of their teaching.
And then there is the assumption that students want ’serious traditional” teaching and no ‘edutainment’-type provision.
However there are notable exceptions to this attidude with Michael Wesch serving as the prime example. He has managed to create, apply and share well designed digital media to get his students excited about learning and in the process has created something like a ‘personal brand’. As an invited speaker across many conferences he is a prime example that dissemination of non-text based and media-rich content can enhance an academic’s career.
Will there be others who will follow him?
Ref.:
Mitchell, WJT Picture Theory (Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1994)
Mirzoeff, N. An Introduction to Visual Culture (London, Routledge 1998)
