Political Science 101 - Participatory Media And The Pedagogy Of Civic Engagement
Dan Brown teaches an intro political science course at Cerritos College. He has always been a media buff and believes that the way people use and produce new media will significantly influence and ultimately transform civic engagement, community service and education. In his Participatory Media course, he wishes to engage students in an understanding of how production of new media can lead to social, cultural, economic, and political changes in the ways people communicate.
He is new to Sakai and has heard that there are limited ways of engaging students in the types of participatory media his course emphasizes, such as:
blogs, wikis, RSS, tagging and social bookmarking, music-photo-video sharing, mashups, podcasts, and videoblogs. He wonders whether he might plug in other applications to provide ways of teaching and using these new media in his class.
His online curriculum combines texts that address the social, political, economic, and cultural aspects of participatory media with practical instructions in the use of each medium.
Pedagogical challenges to address in the online environment:
¿ Course exercises need to combine theory and practice
¿ Use of student Blog design to help students develop a public voice and contribute to critical discourse about issues
¿ Use of Wiki to teach students the basics of collaborative peer-production as well as the mechanics of online group authoring
¿ Use of Social bookmarking and media-sharing to give students a preliminary understanding of the economics of commons-based peer production
¿ Use of Podcasts or vlogs that connect content with the rhetoric of spoken word and/or online video production.
¿ Use of Social networking software to enable broader, faster, and lower-cost coordination of activities and groups of individuals with similar interests.