Teaching and learning with digital media: learning ecologies and digital pedagogies

2014-08-06This study highlights ways in which educators can employ extant pedagogical knowledge and develop innovative instructional practices that leverage the shift from print‐based literacy to digitally inflected multiliteracies. The explosion of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and digital media, especially the Internet in the 1990s, has changed the way students read, write, and learn. In an effort to expand knowledge about teaching and learning with digital media, this case study of curriculum and instruction at Tomol University’s Department of Digital Media (DDM) (a pseudonym) examined the changing nature of literacy in the Digital Age. To shed light on this phenomenon, students, faculty and administrators were purposefully selected from the DDM’s population. Data were collected from curriculum documents, interviews with faculty and administrators, a student survey, and artifacts of student work and instructor feedback. Qualitative analysis elucidated how the DDM’s instructional practices supported the advancement of students’ digital multiliteracies, media‐rich project skills, and Digital Age communication fluency. The theoretical framework, grounded in pragmatic meliorism, critical realism and the education research literature, provided an analytic and interpretive approach that led to the study’s findings and recommendations for educational practice and future research