A MITH Digital Dialogue
Tuesday, April 3, 12:30-1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

“Visible Evidence of Invisible Learning”
by RANDY BASS (Georgetown University)

Faculty and practitioners who work with digital pedagogies know, at
least intuitively, that student learning is significantly transformed
in new media environments. As all of higher education wades deeper
into the learning paradigm, it is increasingly important to move our
understanding of new media learning beyond generalizations about
engagement, interaction, and collaboration. The Visible Knowledge
Project was a six-year project engaging about 60 faculty from 21
institutions, in order to explore the impact of technology on
learning, especially in the humanities. This presentation will give an
overview of the broad findings from the project, and look specifically
at one strand of that faculty-driven research: Digital
stories/narrative. The scholarship of teaching and learning that was
produced by the project focuses us in part on the expansion of our
conceptions of “expertise” in student intellectual development, and
the roles that new media pedagogies play in that expansion. An
expanded conception of expertise might be critical to recognizing how
digital pedagogies often produce forms and symptoms of learning that
are elusive–if not invisible–in traditional assessments or frameworks
for understanding student development. This presentation will open up
some of the questions about what we recognize as learning, and
especially the ways that new media pedagogies and literacies invite us
to expand our recognition of learning.

RANDY BASS is Assistant Provost for Teaching and Learning Initiatives
at Georgetown University, and Executive Director of Georgetown’s
Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS), a
campus-wide center supporting faculty work in new learning and
research environments. He has been working with a number of pedagogy
and technology projects since 1986, including serving as Director and
Principal Investigator of the Visible Knowledge Project, a five-year
scholarship of teaching and learning project involving 70 faculty on
21 university and college campuses. He is also a Consulting Scholar
for the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancment of Teaching, where he
served, in 1998-99, as a Pew Scholar and Carnegie Fellow. In 1999, he
won the Educause Medal for outstanding achievement in technology and
undergraduate education. Bass is Associate Professor of English and a
member of the American Studies Committee at Georgetown University. He
is the author of Border Texts: Cultural Readings for Contemporary
Writers (Houghton Mifflin, 1998), and with Bret Eynon, co-editor of
Intentional Media: The Crossroads Conversations on Teaching and
Technology in the American Cultural History Classroom (double issue of
Works & Days). He is currently, also with Bret Eynon, co-editing a
volume of essays and findings from the Visible Knowledge Project,
entitled, The Difference that Inquiry Makes.

Coming up @MITH, April 10: Kate Murray (University Libraries),
“Developing Digital Curation Policies in a Local Context.”

View MITH’s complete Spring Speakers Schedule here:

http://www.mith2.umd.edu/programs/mith_speakers_spring_2007.pdf

Contact: Neil Fraistat, Director, MITH (www.mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 5-8927).