Course Overview
This class works as a "knowledge community to investigate various "themes" relating to particular knowledge media. We try to uncover the implications for learning and instruction in the classroom, on the playground, in the museum, online, or anywhere else that learning may happen. We try to make connections to the theoretical foundations from the learning sciences and other disciplines - What is known about how people learn? Why should technology be considered as a means of expediting learning or knowledge construction? Each week, we explore a new theme, building on course content left from previous years. In exploring these themes, the class tries to take on the actual media practices that characterize various knowledge media - from wikis to social tagging, to immersive environments, to technology-enhanced learning environments. We then meet and try out some of these practices during class, and discuss the range of issues and opportunities:
- What should be happening in the culture of today's classrooms, and how can technology make an impact? What should the role of the teacher be in such classrooms? How can we develop "smart" educational content that helps teachers with assessment and helps scaffold students in otherwise challenging pedagogical scripts?
- How much information about my health care practices should be available to my smart home?
- Can I interact deeply with others in multi-user virtual environments? What kinds of interactions are best suited for such spaces?
- How can podcasts and streaming video add to my experience in the grocery store, cafe, city streets or classrooms?
- What kinds of applications can we imagine for layered information systems (aka "mash-ups") like Google Earth?
Finally, pairs of students work to define a "Design idea" that applies one of the powerful media we have investigated in a potential application that would serve a particular knowledge community.
These are the themes that we have worked with in previous semesters. Each one contains a Theme overview, with discussions of the related knowledge media and communities, then links to specific "Implementation Pages" that capture the specific course activities for a particular class meeting.
Here is a wiki page that captures our growing synthesis of all the varieties of knowledge media, and the communities that may connect to them.
As a progressive culminating design activity students worked in groups to develop a theoretically grounded lesson using technology-enhanced media. Design pages illustrate the collection of ideas and approaches to design and develop knowledge communities for a variety of purposes. Design projects are in different levels of implementation and some of them may have the capacity to be picked up and further developed in future KMD2003 classes.
During the course students and the instructors introduces various resources to the class and mostly included papers and websites. To make these resources more usable for other students who might be interested in the discussed topics, students have provided information about each resource.
Note- there are also considerable numbers of resources linked within the actual theme pages and even within the implementations. So - we obviously have more work to do here, in defining the best solution for course resources.
- How the course works.
- Our process, reflections, and evolutions
This is the digital "home" for the "KMD2003 Knowledge Community" that began in fall 2006 as part of a graduate course in the Knowledge Media Design Institute, cross-disciplinary program. With students in diverse home programs such as Information Science, Education, Architecture and Engineering, we felt it was important to capture the concepts, resources and activities explored in each section of this course. This is an attempt to represent the various perspectives concerning knowledge media and learning that were achieved in the duration of the course. However, we envision this community to evolve beyond its inception, and grow with new input from future members.
