Nam June Paik and Avant-Garde as Pedagogy: Promoting Student Engagement and Interdisciplinary Thinking in the Undergraduate Humanities Classroom

This dissertation demonstrates how avant-garde methods can be employed as pedagogical methods in the undergraduate Humanities classroom to promote student engagement and interdisciplinary thinking. The study first addresses pedagogy and avant-garde art within their historical contexts as separate, but related disciplines. Subsequently the study fuses pedagogy and avant-garde art and provides examples of in-class activities and out-of-class assignments that illustrate the ways in which avant-garde methods function as practical teaching and learning methods. Further, the study presents artist Nam June Paik, whose work exemplifies the theoretical and practical underpinnings of avant-garde art as pedagogy. The dissertation champions the pedagogy of John Dewey, who called for a progressive educational system. It also argues for Paulo Freire\u27s critical pedagogy and the Jesuits\u27 Ignatian pedagogical paradigm, both of which serve as necessary complements in achieving Dewey\u27s goal of an experiential educational environment. Dewey believed education should co-exist with life and should not be treated as a preparation for it, and thus his theories on aesthetics, in particular, argued that art is not severed from life, an idea shared by four avant-garde movements discussed in this study: Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, and Fluxus. Each of these movements sought to change the political and cultural environment, while maintaining that art and life are on equal ground. These pedagogies, aided by avant-garde methods, encourage and challenge students to engage with and think critically about the world around them

Constructing the Learning Environment in Classroom Convivial Computer Tools for Higher Education

New education technologies are coming on stream, enabling connectivity among teachers, facilitators and students. Students have to learn how to access Managed Learning Environments each time they move to different course websites. These barriers can hinder the real understanding of the subject matter for a course. This research calls for a rethink of pedagogical process towards blending together commonly used emerging social software and legacy educational tools rather than developing new tools for the classroom. Indeed, a learning tool should fit well to the learning model and philosophy of that course. Three case studies were conducted through different courses in the Digital Media master program and Informatik program at the University of Bremen, Germany. Students worked in small groups to design digital media and learning portal that should make learning more interesting and meaningful for them. At the end, this research proposes the concept of Constructing the Learning Environment in classroom and Convivial Computer Tools for higher education, where students and teachers, via dialogues in the class, can negotiate to deploy a set of selected tools and functions to match their learning needs. It is also to show that a tool with too many functions can cause confusion, rather than enhance effectiveness. To empower collaborative, interactive and personal learning, this work proposes the blended learning and classroom procedures for a convivial selection of educational tools. At the end, our innovative attempt is to bring constructionist learning into the higher education context

NMC Horizon Report: 2017 Higher Education Edition

The NMC Horizon Report > 2017 Higher Education Edition is a collaborative effort between the NMC and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI). This 14th edition describes annual findings from the NMC Horizon Project, an ongoing research project designed to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have an impact on learning, teaching, and creative inquiry in education. Six key trends, six significant challenges, and six important developments in educational technology are placed directly in the context of their likely impact on the core missions of universities and colleges. The three key sections of this report constitute a reference and straightforward technology-planning guide for educators, higher education leaders, administrators, policymakers, and technologists. It is our hope that this research will help to inform the choices that institutions are making about technology to improve, support, or extend teaching, learning, and creative inquiry in higher education across the globe. All of the topics were selected by an expert panel that represented a range of backgrounds and perspectives

Enhancing Free-text Interactions in a Communication Skills Learning Environment

Learning environments frequently use gamification to enhance user interactions.Virtual characters with whom players engage in simulated conversations often employ prescripted dialogues; however, free user inputs enable deeper immersion and higher-order cognition. In our learning environment, experts developed a scripted scenario as a sequence of potential actions, and we explore possibilities for enhancing interactions by enabling users to type free inputs that are matched to the pre-scripted statements using Natural Language Processing techniques. In this paper, we introduce a clustering mechanism that provides recommendations for fine-tuning the pre-scripted answers in order to better match user inputs

Eye on Collaborative Creativity : Insights From Multiple-Person Mobile Gaze Tracking in the Context of Collaborative Design

Early Career WorkshopNon peer reviewe