Course Overview
This class works as a knowledge community to investigate various themes relating to knowledge media and their role – or possible role – in support of learning and instruction in the classroom, on the playground, in the museum, online, or anywhere else that learning may happen. We make connections to research from the learning sciences and other disciplines: How do people learn? Why should technology be considered as a means of expediting learning or knowledge construction?
Working collectively, we explore a series of themes, building on materials left by students from previous years. In exploring these themes, we will actually use the various media, to get the feel of wikis, social tagging, immersive environments, or tangible and embodied forms of learning. We engage in the relevant forms of media practice, in order to gain insight into the kinds of interactions they can support for learning. For each theme, a small group of students designs and leads all course activities, advancing a media-enhanced pedagogical design. All the activity designs from previous course enactments, recorded by the students who designed them, can serve as a “knowledge base” to inspire your own designs.
Over the duration of the course, we will discuss a 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.
Course Syllabus (Page for each week - activities, homeworks, etc)
About the course
- How the course works.
- Our process, reflections, and evolutions
This is the digital home for the "knowledge community" that began in fall 2006 as part of a graduate course in the Knowledge Media Design Institute, cross-disciplinary program. With students from 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 wiki serves as a knowledge base for future iterations of the course, offering resources and reminders, and hopefully inspirations. As you make use of the wiki, remember that you are also leaving it behind, improved from your own engagements, for those who will come next.
Previous Syllabus Pages
Meta level brainstorms about the course, technology platforms, etc
brainstorm of 2010 course design
brainstorm of 2009 course design