December 6, 2007 presentation: Brett Atwood

LEARNING IN VIRTUAL WORLDS

New digital education spaces are emerging through the use of popular virtual world technologies, such as Second Life. These 3D platforms enable participants to cooperate and collaborate on shared learning initiatives using real-time voice, text chat and visual-spatial reasoning skills. Several leading academic institutions, including Harvard and Stanford, have already created globally-networked, 3D “classrooms” that connect students with their instructors via both traditional lectures and unconventional learning exercises that are held “in-world.” This presentation will include a live demonstration of Second Life and a virtual walk-through of some of the more popular education uses, including: distance learning tools, inworld presentation tips, experiential and cooperative learning exercises, in-world research projects and product simulations.

Brett Atwood is a print and online journalist, whose writings have appeared in Billboard, Rolling Stone, Vibe, Hollywood Reporter and other publications. During his five-year stint as new media editor at Billboard, he was among the first reporters to document the development of Internet-based digital downloading and streaming media technologies. His expertise in this area has resulted in numerous analyst and commentator appearances at several national print and TV outlets, including Fox News Channel, MSNBC, CNN, CBS Evening News, USA Today and Wall Street Journal. Brett has held managing editor positions at both Amazon.com and RealNetworks, where he managed and developed editorial content for various Web-based initiatives. In addition, he co-founded Internet music service Rolling Stone Radio with Rolling Stone magazine. He is currently working with Linden Lab, maker of online 3D virtual world Second Life, on various Web initiatives.

November 8, 2007 presentation: Susan Kilgore

VISUAL PEDAGOGY: USING ART AND IMAGE TO TEACH CRITICAL THINKING

Using Images to Promote Critical Thinking Raised as they have been on a steady diet of computer games, the internet, cell phones, videos, dvds, cds, and other forms of electronic technology, contemporary college students have spent less time reading books than any college generation before them. In fact, even as college graduates, they will have spent approximately half as much time with books as they have playing video games, and about 1/4 as much time reading as watching tv.

All this exposure to images has created learners whose preferred learning style is image-based, a preference so extreme that it is increasingly difficult to use more traditionally based texts. Yet, if these students are reputed to be "much more visual" than students in the past, their "visuality" and preference for learning from images over books does not translate into higher degrees of visual literacy nor into greater critical thinking abilities about other types of text. Evidence and experience seem to indicate greater exposure to images has not yet fostered greater visual sophistication.

Susan Kilgore proposes a discussion of how to use images in college classrooms to 1) promote critical thinking through critical viewing of images, and 2) to explore the academic uses of images to consider traditionally difficult abstract ideas of cultural theory. Please come.

October 11, 2007 presentation: Pauline Sameshima

CHALLENGING LEARNING SPACES WITH COMPLICIT DESIGNS

The art of learning is the act of gathering text, image, and experience into a connection that adheres to one’s personal frame of reference. The use of visual-spatial reasoning skills to conceptualize ideas and then the transferal of those ideas into a rendered presentation concretizes that learning. Artful teaching is thus a sharing of that personal rendering which unlike closed curriculums, opens doors to complicit designs for knowledge production and acknowledgment.

Pauline will offer insights into the construction of her dissertation, Seeing Red, which challenged the form of the traditional research format. Pauline wrote a fictional epistolary novel (book of letters) incorporating poetry and 17 pieces of art. The work, now published, won national level American and Canadian awards in the fields of Arts Based Educational Research and Teacher Education, as well as the Ted. T. Aoki Prize in Curriculum Studies.

Pauline teaches in the WSU College of Education and heads the Arts Integration Courses. She is the associate editor of the International Journal of Education and the Arts and author of Seeing Red: A Pedagogy of Parallax, published by Cambria Press.

Click here for the 22MB PowerPoint.

September 27, 2007 presentation: Greg Turner-Rahman and Jayme Jacobson

VISUAL REASONING

Can reasoning be visual? What are the implications of trying to improve visual-spatial skills across the curriculum? How do we go about doing that? Please join us for a brownbag presentation/discussion to hash out these questions.

Based on a paper presented at the Global Conference for Visual Literacies at Oxford this summer, we argue that students need to develop visual reasoning skills to engage with emergent ideas that are often highly complex, abstract, and multidimensional. We note that passive analysis provides insufficient training for visual-spatial reasoning. Unfortunately, a major roadblock to improving visual reasoning through praxis is the age-old prejudicial distinction of “thinking” as intellectual and “doing” as vocational. In the academy, fundamental misconceptions about the cognitive strategies required for visual production, combined with simplistic disciplinary boundaries, create barriers to sharing problem solving strategies across disciplines. This week, we hope to prompt a discussion around how to create visual reasoning assignments that support multidisciplinary collaboration, engage students, and improve learning.

Greg Turner-Rahman is a professor of New Media Studies in the College of Art and Architecture at the University of Idaho; Jayme Jacobson is an Learning Design Consultant at the Center for Teaching, Learning, & Technology at WSU.

September 13, 2007 presentation: Ayad Rahmani

KAFKA AND ARCHITECTURE

"Kafka and Architecture" is a presentation that is just as much about Kafka as it about architecture; on the one hand, looking at architecture to analyze Kafka's central concerns in language and psychology, while on the other, appropriating the author's work as a way to explore new theories in architecture. To Kafka, architecture represented more than a means with which to locate his characters, giving them, say, a place to call home and a city to access friends and work; rather to him architecture offered a kind of obstacle course whose hurdling gave his characters, along with his readers, a way to become more aware of the world and their role in it. The presentation is in reference to a book by the same name and will travel more or less in parallel with it, briefly exploring each of its chapters and ultimately weaving a connection between architecture and literature.

Ayad Rahmani is a professor in the Washington State University School of Architecture and the author of the book, Place Meaning and Form in the Architecture and Urban Structure of Eastern Islamic Cities.

April 5, 2007 presentation: Kelley Racicot & Chuck Pezeshki

BRIDGING THE GAP: from students’ visual competence to the thought processes of a liberal education

How do we build on students’ visual and technology skills—and their need to create—to cultivate higher-order thinking and analysis in the classroom? Using examples from engineering and liberal arts, Pezeshki and Racicot explore student and faculty colloquial knowledge starting points and the benefits and challenges of transitioning between literacies in a wired world.

Chuck Pezeshki is a professor in the School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering and director of the Capstone Industrial Design Clinic.Kelley Racicot is a graduate student in Teaching and Learning and the Global Engineering Design Center coordinator for the School of MME.

March 29, 2007 presentation: Brian Clark

GRAVITY'S CHILDREN: Observations and Anecdotes from a History of Motion

An act of intellectual tourism, “Gravity’s Children,” based on a work in progress of the same title, is a romp through history looking for stories about motion and sense of place. The talk includes a virtual fist fight between Diogenes and Zeno, a dancing skeleton, a view of the Andes as seen by Quecha speakers, and a briefly sketched conception of narrative as landscape with applications for teaching critical thinking.

Brian Clark is a novelist, poet and musician. He taught literature and humanities for several years and is now a writer and web master for the College of Agricultural, Human, and Natural Resource Sciences at WSU.

March 8, 2007 presentation: Michael Hayes

NEW DOCUMENTARIES: Visual Culture as Pedagogy and Scholarship

Currently, Michael Hayes’ research focuses on issues related to media and visual culture as forms of pedagogy. In particular he is developing a perspective on visual culture, media and education in a global society. He has been making documentary films on topics of social concern in a local and global context, including “My Town,” an examination of a controversy in Moscow, Idaho that is relevant to national “culture wars,” “With Hands Hearts and Bells,” a film on the Sacred Heart Mission Indian boarding school on the Coeur d’Alene reservation.
Michael Hayes is a Professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning at Washington State University.

March 2, 2007 presentation: José Ramón Alcalá

NEW THOUGHTS, NEW VISION - NEW VISIONS, NEW THOUGHT: Vision in Electronic Culture at the Beginning of the 21st Century

The transition from analogical to digital culture is creating the challenge of shaping newly invented worlds into recognizable form. This is a difficult job if it is conceived as individual work. Scientists, technologists, and artists, etc. are connecting in interdisciplinary communities to contribute their specialized skills and knowledge to an integrated whole.

Dr. Alcalá is the Director of the International Museum of Electrography (MIDE) and Professor of New Technologies at the University of Cuenca, Spain. He is a visiting exchange professor in the Department of Art and Design at the University of Idaho