Teaching with a ‘digital mindset’
Bryn Ludlow
If you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.
Toni Morrison (1931–2019)
A lot has changed since I wrote the blog, “Using media to teach media”. On March 11th, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a pandemic due to the novel coronavirus “COVID-19”. Globally, thousands of people have lost their lives to this virus. Government officials speak every day to ask everyone to flatten the curve and stay home to reduce transmission of the virus. A month is a short period to experience and witness so much change. It is a worrisome time, and health care workers are feeling anxious too (Ofri, 2020).
Within two and a half days, schools and universities shifted to teaching courses online only. Indeed, remote learning, and online courses are not new, and the act of teaching and learning online, instead of face-to-face, reflects the concept of “Virtuality” by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (Barroso, 2019). As Barroso (2019, p. 142) notes, the “[v]irtual represents the necessary conditions under which real experience is actualized”. Before the pandemic, students used their personal devices and online tools in my tutorials, to read and respond to in-class exercises. Yet, we still had the opportunity to talk and reflect in person about their experiences of completing the exercises. All we can do as students and educators now, is “keep calm and videoconference on” (Delić, 2015)!
Teaching with a digital mindset
One of the ways that we can keep calm is to teach with a “digital mindset” (Kerr, 2016). A digital mindset expands on the key principles of a “growth mindset” (Dweck, 2016), and it involves the use of digital technology in a transformative way (Kerr, 2019). Those who have a digital mindset are open to using a multitude of technologies that are available online; they are interested in using technologies to disrupt dominant ways of teaching and learning; and they are willing to learn from mistakes and spontaneous discoveries along the way (Kerr, 2019). In this blog, I will share how teaching with a digital mindset enabled me to use media to teach media, in “Sport Media” at York University (Prof. Estée Fresco).
In my Sport Media tutorials this year, students responded to case studies, short documentary videos, and they created E-Sport games and advertisements for mega sporting events, such as the Olympics. In this “Communication Studies” course, most of the exercises that students completed in my tutorials were case study analyses about current events, for example, Colin Kaepernick’s protest against shootings of unarmed black people in the U.S. Using the “Worksheet” template on “Google Forms”, I facilitated a few different case studies with my students, using cases from “The Media Ethics Initiative” (Stroud, 2019).
Each case study from The Media Ethics Initiative comes with a list of reflection questions. In teams of 3-5, students chose one question to respond to. As a way to connect the exercise to a real-world work scenario, they respond to three “briefing note” prompts. Like a real briefing note that is commonly used in the government, the briefing note analysis includes three questions:
- What are the key considerations of the issue in the question that you chose?
- What are three ways that you could address the issue effectively? Rank them from 1–3.
- What would be your recommendations for how to address the top-ranked issue (see question 2 above)?
Depending on the topic of the case, the final case study question asks the teams to imagine if they were presenting their recommendations to a Member of Parliament (MP), Member of Provincial Parliament (MPP), or to board members of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), for example.
To access all of the web-based exercises, students used their phones to scan a QR code that I created, which links directly to the exercise worksheets. The first time that they did this, I placed the QR code over an image of a basketball net, so when students scanned the code, it was like they were “shooting hoops”. You can create your own QR code on this website: https://qrcode-monkey.com.
Observations
When designing their E-Sport games and Olympic advertisements, some students looked up information from the scholarly readings or other web-based articles from the course, while other students who were confident in design worked on the visual presentation. This scenario mirrors what happens on a communications and marketing team: with a tight timeline to deliver outputs, it is essential to collaborate, delegate, and prepare engaging presentations.
While working in teams, I noticed that many students took initiative to access the web-based exercises on their devices so they could follow along with their teammates. This effort demonstrates that students found their own intuitive ways to actively engage with the exercises. They also shared examples of alternative applications that they could use to create their products, such as the event posters. There are many different tools available online for students to use to create engaging presentations. I think that instructors should be flexible when suggesting how to create, so students can feel encouraged to be creative.
The tutorials that I facilitated this year ended on March 13th, shortly after the pandemic changed our lives. It's even more essential now than it was before, to use technology in creative, and productive ways. In these times, Morrison's comment is more relevant than ever. The skills that you learn now while teaching with a digital mindset will empower your students and your peers. My teaching philosophy involves thinking with a digital mindset, and teaching students how to approach their use of digital technology without fear.
It has been a phenomenal experience working as a Tutorial Leader at York University this year! I am grateful to the students for their participation, and I am looking forward to participating in future teaching opportunities to teach with a digital mindset, and to use media to teach media. If you are interested to know more about how to create and facilitate any of the practice-based sessions that I’ve shared in this blog series with your own students, write to me at bludlow@yorku.ca.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Dr. Estée Fresco for your wonderful teaching supervision, and for encouraging me to write about my teaching experiences in “Sport Media” at York University this year!
References
Barroso, P.M. (2019). The reality of the virtual in Deleuze’s Transcendental Empiricism, In J. Braga (Ed.), Conceiving Virtuality: From art to technology. Springer.
Crisp, T. (2014). 17 Collaborative Learning Methods: Encouraging Student Engagement &
Participation. Berkeley Writing, Retrieved 28 Aug, 2019 from http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:546YKiA0IBUJ:writing.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/CWP_ClassParticipationHandout.pdf+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca&client=opera
Delić, S. (2015). Keep calm and videoconference on! Padlet. Retrieved (6 Apr 2020) from https://tr.padlet.com/suzana_deli/r62w5sm7ycrx
Dweck, C. (13 Jan. 2016). What having a growth mindset actually means. Retrieved (28 March 2020) from https://hbr.org/2016/01/what-having-a-growth-mindset-actually-means
Kerr, J. (1 Apr. 2019). Today's Best Leaders All Share These 5 Traits: A Digital Mindset. Lead: Inc. Retrieved 11 Mar 2020 from https://www.inc.com/james-kerr/every-business-leader-needs-a-digital-mindset-to-succeed-and-it-starts-with-these-5-things.html
Ofri, D. (20 Mar. 2020). Why Doctors and Nurses Are Anxious and Angry. The New York Times. Retrieved (6 April 2020) from https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/20/opinion/sunday/coronavirus-hospitals-doctors.html
Stroud, S. (2019). The media ethics initiative. Retrieved (6 April 2020) from https://mediaethicsinitiative.org/