The brief.
In our first Intellectual Production, we first needed to address a specific understanding of what makes up a media ecology while considering how it might help us ask the right questions. Then, we needed to evaluate the epistemological goals of education (broadly conceived) and describe what an educational media ecology has to include using specific elements of the ecology.
The definition.
First, we’ll consider how Strate and Lum (2000) conceive of media ecology via the work of Lewis Mumford.
In Mumford’s explanation of civilization as broken down temporally into ages of technology, we find that society and its surrounds are shaped by changes in technology, rather than the other way around.
Then, those existing in society and its surrounds can only truly be understood via the entirety of their context. We don’t usually have a perspective that allows us to view our complete surrounds creating the effect of the ‘invisible city’.
Finally, a media ecology can be considered as an ideology, coming from a clear perspective, idea, or approach and with a goal in mind by considering machines’ effects rather than their form.
The right questions.
Media ecology shows us that we need to zoom out in order to grasp the reality of the effects of our technological advances, giving us a chance to pose new questions, like:
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How can we create more "stable, sustainable, and equitable living arrangements"?
Strate and Lum, 2000, pg. 74
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How can progress be re-directed toward improving the "human condition"?
Strate and Lum, 2000, pg. 75
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How can we lay bare the ideological goals of technology within ecologies we cannot fully see?
This one’s all me.
An educational meta-media ecology.
Education clearly has both epistemic and non-epistemic goals, like media ecologies have ideological ones. These goals can and have spanned several domains from the political and economic, to the ethical, to actual education in creating a reflective, curious and critical society (Pritchard, 2018). School is its own media ecology and perhaps contains smaller ecologies within it (classrooms), as well as belonging to larger ecologies in a network of schools. As a result, the question of what education really is in a time or place might come down to what epistemic goals and resulting ideas get communicated in that site, at that time, how and why (Lum, 2000).
Media also have different epistemic values based on their inherent biases (Lum, 2000). I think this might be what gets us to the level of meta-theory: the educational media ecology has epistemic goals that may or may not align with the epistemological biases inherent in its media. This meta-level problem becomes more problematic when we consider the overlap between the concern of media ecologies’ biases and constructivism. The biases in the educational media ecology create the structures (symbolic, environment, cognitive) that students use to construct meaning and achieve equilibration when boarding new information (Fosnot & Perry, 2005; Lum, 2000).
Ideally, education is an endeavour with understood and mitigated biases, that helps students become who they want to be and achieve their own epistemic goals. It is place-based, rooted in community, equitable, and sustainable.
Learning management systems.
Here, I’d like to take a focus on the ‘container’ in which I am building my ecology in order to control for the number of variables to consider. The See project found that when they polled for how noisy a physical space was, the participants’ perceptions of the sights and sounds in the space had more to do with the context of their experience, their purpose for being there, and their cultural expectations (de Castell et al., 2014). Using the physical space of a school with classrooms as an analogy for an LMS, we might find that an LMS section for a class, acts like a closed-door classroom without a corridor, or view to the outside. Its epistemic goals are misaligned with mine.
Place-based, community driven, equitable and sustainable.
By using a new analogy - that of site-specific artwork, we could get closer to a better educational media ecology in the LMS. Site-specific art is both place-based and temporally bound. It is completely situated in the context of its environment and subject to its media which is why I think it’s relevant here.
Artifacts:
In our LMS media ecology, learning artifacts could be created by both teachers and students. Each term, new learning artifacts might be created, generating even more site-specificity as the students come and go. One would never have the same learning experience twice.
Community:
Increasing the place-based presence of the LMS, we might want to find a way to circumvent the ‘closed-door classroom’ nature of the LMS. A school could decide on opening groups in the same course rather than sections that completely divide students, or have an open space on the LMS for shared wikis or blogs. We might be able to tag and hyperlink course features so that they connect with the wider internet, knocking down barriers isolating the ecology from the broader community.
Alternatively, we might tear out the old LMS architecture and make something new with our epistemic goals in mind.
References:
de Castell, S., Droumeva, M. & Jenson, J. (2014). Building as interface: Sustainable educational ecologies. MedienPädagogik, 24. https://www.academia.edu/8301131/Building_as_Interface_Sustainable_Educational_Ecologies
Fosnot, C. T. & Perry, R.S. (2005). Constructivism: A psychological theory of learning. In Fosnot, C.T. (Ed), Constructivism: Theory, perspectives, and practice (2nd ed., pp. 8-38). Teachers College Press.
Lum, C. M. K. (2000). Introduction: The intellectual roots of media ecology. New Jersey Journal of Communication, 8(1), 1-7. https://doi.org/1080/15456870009367375
Pritchard, D. (2018) What is this thing called knowledge? Fourth Edition; Routledge.
Strate, L. & Lum, C. M. K. (2000). Lewis Mumford and the ecology of technics. New Jersey Journal of Communication, 8(1), 56-78. https://doi.org/1080/15456870009367379