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Spreadable Media and Rethinking Pedagogical Approaches
A range of thinkers working on changing pedagogical practices throughout all forms of education have been engaging with—and providing useful extensions to—many of the ideas in Spreadable Media. Learn about a few of these projects—and how they engage with the book—in the following places:
- A group called “The 21st Century Collective” published a collection in 2013 called Field Notes for 21st Century Literacies: A Guide to New Theories, Methods, and Practices for Open Peer Teaching and Learning, available via the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory (HASTAC). The co-authors of the second chapter (entitled “From Open Programming to Open Learning: The Cathedral, the Bazaar, and the Open Classroom”), Barry Peddycord III and Elizabeth A. Pitts, write that Spreadable Media “eloquently” describes the shift from one-way models of producing and distributing messages to a more collaborator model where audiences can “create, remix and share information.”
- In Joanne Larson’s Radical Equality in Education: Starting Over in U.S. Schooling, she draws on Spreadable Media to evoke the shift “into many-to-many participation structures in which the social relations between production and consumption are blurred, if not erased” and emphasizes that “children and youth are not ‘playing’ at something they will grow out of; these are the language, literacy, and knowledge production practices now.”
- In her presentation at the Networked Learning Conference in Edinburgh, UK, in April 2014, entitled “Taming Social Media in Higher Education Classrooms,” Ryerson University School of Professional Communication’s Wendy Freeman uses Spreadable Media to help set the landscape for communication in today’s society before launching into the results of a study based on in-depth interviews with postsecondary educators and how they use social media as part of their pedagogical approach.
- Stefano Bonometti of the Università degli Studi del Molise in Italy draws on Spreadable Media to help explain the current online environment of “sharing and participation” which is driving some experimentation with online multimedia learning. See his short paper, entitled “A Cross-Media Environment for Teacher Training,” published as part of the proceedings for the Interaction Design in Educational Environments (IDEE) workshop in June 2014 in Albacete, Spain.
- In her 2013 dissertation for Pennsylvania State University’s College of Education, entitled Tensions of Teaching Media Literacy in Teacher Education, Nalova Elaine Ngomba-Westbrook references Spreadable Media as an example of a media literacy study that takes a “process focus,” looking at “the democratizing opportunities inherent” in the potential spreadability of media texts.