If you subscribe to the Chronicle of Higher Education, you might want to click over to "YouTube Youniversity" by Henry Jenkins. I don't have an account and had to settle for a version of the piece passed around through e-mail, which makes me want to revise my earlier comments about e-mail--the added relative privacy of e-mail probably has its advantages.
Jenkins's piece makes a number of points regarding media and teaching. There is the familiar call to move beyond analysis if we hope to provide relevant instruction in new media:
In such a world, the structural and historical schisms separating media
production and critical-studies classes no longer seem relevant. Students around
the country are pushing to translate their analytic insights about media into
some form of media production. And they are correctly arguing that you cannot
really understand how these new media work if you don't use them yourself.
And, then of particular interest to someone with my background in literature and college writing instruction is the observation that,
Before we started our master's program [in comparative media studies], I went on the road to talk with
representatives of more than 50 companies and organizations. They told me that
they value the flexibility, creativity, and social and cultural insights liberal-arts majors bring to their operations. They also shared a devastating list of concerns--liberal-arts students fall behind other majors in terms of teamwork, leadership, project completion, and problem solving. In other words, they were describing the gap between academic fields focused on fostering autonomous learners and professional contexts demanding continuing collaborations. Those desired skills were regularly fostered in other disciplines that have laboratory-based cultures that test new theories and research findings through real-world applications.
Here, I must draw a connection with the service-mentality that in many ways dominates thinking about college writing instruction. On one level, the thinking goes that writing courses need to prepare students for the work they will do in other disciplines, with a nod to the idea that a flexible understanding of discourse communities will translate into preparation for work beyond college as well. Initially, I sense a celebration for writing classes, which do feature lots of collaboration. But then I realize that leadership, problem solving, and project completion (beyond single compositions) get little play in many writing classes, really. I
wonder doubt whether the energy put into easing students into academic discourse communities is as well spent as it would be setting up lab/studio-based courses where students merely study and practice new media composition.
And then there is this call for yet another extension:
At such a moment, we need to move beyond preparing our students for future
roles as media scholars, wrapped up in their own disciplinary discourses, and
instead encourage them to acquire skills and experiences as public
intellectuals, sharing their insights with a larger public from wherever they
happen to be
situated. They need to be taught how to translate the often challenging
formulations of academic theory into a more public discourse
Yes. Jenkins makes this point in the opening of the essay with the notion that media studies needs to be more comparative, less boxed in with boundaries that in the latest Web landscapes are for the most part permeable. This makes me chuckle, finally, at how easily we might substitute students with scholars or faculty in the above quotation.
