Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

4.28.10 | How can educators use social media tools to help students develop traditional and digital media literacies? Spotlight talks with professors at Huston-Tillotson University about their work engaging students with social media tools.

“There is a mindset that suggests that an English department is all Shakespeare and grammar,” said Mike Hart, an assistant professor of English and communications at Huston-Tillotson. “What educational institutions are increasingly finding out is that English departments become a very important site in terms of engaging the language of technology and the language of new and emerging media.”

Hart, who spoke at a forum on Digital Literacy in Networked Learning Environments held at Huston-Tilloston in March, showed examples of students taking advantage of tools such as Google maps to present information in a way that is more visually engaging and dynamic than a traditional English paper.

The forum was part of a series on digital media and learning in multicultural contexts presented by the Macarthur Foundation and the United Negro College Fund.

Forum attendees also heard from Katynka Martinez, assistant professor of Raza studies at San Francisco State University, and S. Craig Watkins, associate professor of media studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

Additional faculty members at Huston-Tillotson also conducted a showcase of their work with digital media. They talked with forum participants about how critique of more visual mediums such as film can translate into skills analyzing and producing written work. They also demonstrated projects using Google maps to display and share historical information, including slave narratives from the early 1900s.

Projects like these allow students to “access history that is not in their history books but can be available to them in a digital format,” said Carol Adams-Means, professor of communications.

View more videos about the forum:

Digital Literacy in Networked Learning Environments: The United Negro College Fund and the MacArthur Foundation hosted a public forum on digital media and learning in multicultural contexts in March at Huston-Tillotson University in Austin. It was the second in a series of forums taking place around the country.

Self-Narration in Video Game Design Environments: How can Latino teenagers in Los Angeles re-invent Pac-Man? Katynka Martinez, an assistant professor of Raza studies at San Francisco State University, spoke recently at a forum on digital literacy about her research on how teaching game design to young people can help them challenge inaccurate representations of themselves and their communities in dominant media.