Knowledge Media and Learning

 Course Overview

This class works as a knowledge community to investigate various themes relating to particular knowledge media. We investigate 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? How can technology expedite 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 will emerge as the "culture of classrooms" in the 21st century, and how will technology make an impact? What will the role of the teacher be? How can "smart" educational content and classrooms enable formative assessment and scaffold students in challenging pedagogical designs?
• How much information about my health care practices should be available to my smart home?
• How can we learn with others in multi-user virtual environments?
• 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, students work in teams to define a "Design idea" that applies one of the powerful media that we have investigated.

Course Themes

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.

Knowledge Community Design Ideas

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.

2010 - Winter course offering

tentative syllabus, 2010

brainstorm of 2009 course design

Knowledge Communities that we like

About KMDI 2003

• 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.