Beyond Wikipedia and Google: Web-based literacies and student learning

The Educause Horizon Report (http://wp.nmc.org/horizon2009/) argues that while web-based tools are rapidly becoming standard in education and in the workplace and technologically mediated communication is the norm, fluency in information, visual, and technological literacy is not formally taught to most students. In the light of this we need new and expanded definitions and paradigms of academic digital literacy that are based on mastering underlying concepts of critical thinking and enhancing these paradigms within the digital environment. This chapter attempts to test the assumption that entrants to the humanities (in this case art history) are information or data literate. This is an assumption often made yet it largely goes unchallenged. This study reflects on the strengths and weaknesses of a series of information literacy workshops currently being delivered in History of Art, University College Cork (http://eimagespace.blogspot.com/). The use of dynamic web tools, like audio and video podcasts, has given dyslexic students attending the workshops alternative entry points to learning

Digital utopia or dystopia: can educators assume ICT literacy?

It is often assumed that undergraduates entering higher education are fully ICT (Information Communications Technology) literate. This survey paper draws upon case studies from History of Art and Adult Continuing Education, University College Cork, to question this assumption. It argues that students, both undergraduates and lifelong learners, greatly benefit from an ICT workshop programme supporting disciplinary teaching and learning. Support workshops assist in developing confident researchers and assist in developing transferable work-life skills. The paper will explore the following topics: the role played by emoderation in knowledge construction; cyber ethics, especially understanding intellectual property; barriers to full participation as expressed by ‘digital divide’ issues and building disciplinary Communities of Practice

Excavating the future: taking an 'archaeological' approach to technology

This is an invited essay review of titles and new editions on media culture published by MIT Press. The titles are Caleb Kelly Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction (MIT Press, 2009); Paul Virilio The Aesthetics of Disappearance (MIT Press, 2009); Carrie James Young People, Ethics, and the New Digital Media (MIT Press, 2009). The leitmotif threading the three texts under review is the socio-cultural impact of technological mediation on the processing and dissemination of information. Technologies are tools of transformation both through practical usage and ideological construction. For Caleb Kelly, turntablism mediates the expanded soundscapes so emblematic of the twentieth century's 'sonic turn', for Paul Virilio, hypermodernity is played out via the cinema screen through immersive moments of accelerated vision, while, for Carrie James, the computer screen is the locus for questioning constructions of the networked self. Already in the first decades of the twenty-first century we are on the cusp of a proliferation of enhanced participatory cultures mediated through user generated content -- a digital hive mind. The experience of technology is not neutral it changes the rate and flow of information and in so doing it changes us in many imperceptible ways. Adopting an 'archaeological' lens challenges deterministic approaches to media history and may even assist us in mapping alternative futures

A Pedagogy of Slow: Integrating Experiences of Physical and Virtual Gallery Spaces to Foster Critical Engagement in SoTL

This article makes a case for SoTL practitioners to engage in what we term a pedagogy of slow. Here, “slow” connotes with waiting and patience. It takes time to learn and acquire the skills that a SoTL scholar needs. “Doing SoTL” we therefore argue, requires a pedagogy that takes time and sees time as an ally instead of as an opponent. In what the university has become, there seems little room for a pedagogy of slow that both offers and allows for time. In this article we present a case for considering engagement with the visual arts as part of a pedagogy of slow and the development of SoTL. By making the familiar strange, we acknowledge the implications of visual thinking strategies for social engagement by highlighting teaching and learning as relational. Working with colleagues in the context of continuing professional development, we collected data via focus groups and written reflections within physical and virtual gallery spaces to glean insight into participant experiences of slow looking as the antithesis to fast-paced and pressurised environments. We highlight how learning to become a SoTL scholar is an iterative process that requires time and generates what we term “productive friction.” This is the iterative process which creates dislocation and uncertainty within participants, but which also has the capacity to nudge towards a transformation of the professional self

UCC enters Cork Prison: Transformative pedagogy through arts education

This paper makes explicit processes of collaboration in a learning community partnership between Cork Prison and University College Cork (UCC). Cork Prison is a closed, medium security prison for adult males. It is a committal prison for counties Cork, Kerry and Waterford. The learning partnership has two objectives: firstly, to foster critical thinking strategies influenced by UCC’s application of the Project Zero Classroom, Harvard Graduate School of Education; secondly, to support student voices by promoting conversations on creativity resulting in the production of artworks exhibited during summertime on Spike Island, Cork Harbour, communicating prison as community in society

Towards new understandings of silence

Eye & Mind research seminar, History of Art‘Fruit of Silence’, a reflective case study by American writer and teacher Marilyn Nelson (2006), considers the role of silence/meditation, what she terms as ‘contemplative pedagogy’, as a learning tool in teaching a literature class to cadets being trained at West Point followed by cadet responses to silence during their military service in Iraq during the Second Gulf War (2003--). Through letters, two former West Point cadets, who subsequently became Black Hawk helicopter pilots, communicate how they used silence as a tool to centre themselves in times of anxiety while on campaign in a theatre of war. One used free writing (writing non-stop for a set period of time) as a way of clearing his mind and seeing where and who he was. Another camouflaged meditating by sitting on his cot wearing unplugged headphones. As officers, both related how they had positively integrated silence as a coping mechanism as, for instance, when one of their soldiers was killed or wounded and they were expected, as officers, to show composure before their soldiers (Nelson, 2006). Nelson aims to transform attitudes: silence is practiced as a tool to promote reflection (‘musings’) in order to encourage the development of more sensitive awareness. The result has an incidental, yet not insubstantial, role to play in peacekeeping within a Kurdish village. In Northern Ireland, with its memories of conflict, Anthony McCann, University of Ulster, is interested in exploring a ‘politics of gentleness’ (http://www.craftinggentleness.org/) where reflective silence, plays a part in peacemaking in ways resembling Nelson’s attitudes. Such approaches owe a debt to uses of silence in a political sense, as for example, Satyagraha (non-violence), devised by Mohandas K. Gandhi, and influential on the civil rights activism of Martin Luther King, Jr. Satyagraha owes much to Jainism, India’s traditional religion, where silence (mauna) is perceived of as a way to gain inner peace. To Jesuit theologian, William Johnston, Eastern and Western meditative experiences hold a common regard for silence as an agent in the transformation of the self -- Nelson’s metaphorical ‘fruit of silence’

A reluctant pacifist: Thomas Merton and the Cold War Letters, October 1961 – April 1962

Thomas Merton believed nuclear war was the single greatest threat facing humanity, whereas American Catholic commentators considered that nuclear war was winnable or at least survivable. What made him a reluctant pacifist was the tensions he faced between speaking frankly without being partisan. Merton had an intellectual duty to his readers to both fairly and accurately set out his position on nuclear pacifism. In order to evaluate whether he did this with integrity as a writer it is necessary to set his declared motivations against his actions and to evaluate what the tensions between his views and his actions reveal about him as a writer. Merton’s pacifism is evaluated through archive research at the Thomas Merton Center, Bellarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky, and supported by a substantial secondary literature. Research for this dissertation highlights previously unacknowledged associations between Merton’s Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky and radical pacifism of the Catholic Worker movement. Merton’s pacifism is evaluated in five chapters through examination of his character, cloistered life, and correspondences within the institutional context of Merton’s tussles with his superiors and censors in reaction to the resumption of atmospheric nuclear testing by the Soviet Union in September 1961 and the U.S. in April 1962. He represented himself through correspondence as being a writer who was committed to a central American Catholic ideal that America was good for Catholicism and Catholicism could save America. He was committed to a consistent ethics of life. The few mainstream readers who engaged with Merton’s ideas were shocked and confused that he reduced political reality to symbols of moralism that rejected all war, not just nuclear war. The broader significance of Merton’s pacifist writing was as a bellwether of a broader cultural shift in American Catholic life from American Catholic triumphalism to prudential judgement in the responsible exercise of the democratic life

A Pedagogy of Slow: Integrating Experiences of Physical and Virtual Gallery Spaces to Foster Critical Engagement in SoTL

This article makes a case for SoTL practitioners to engage in what we term a pedagogy of slow. Here, “slow” connotes with waiting and patience. It takes time to learn and acquire the skills that a SoTL scholar needs. “Doing SoTL” we therefore argue, requires a pedagogy that takes time and sees time as an ally instead of as an opponent. In what the university has become, there seems little room for a pedagogy of slow that both offers and allows for time. In this article we present a case for considering engagement with the visual arts as part of a pedagogy of slow and the development of SoTL. By making the familiar strange, we acknowledge the implications of visual thinking strategies for social engagement by highlighting teaching and learning as relational. Working with colleagues in the context of continuing professional development, we collected data via focus groups and written reflections within physical and virtual gallery spaces to glean insight into participant experiences of slow looking as the antithesis to fast-paced and pressurised environments. We highlight how learning to become a SoTL scholar is an iterative process that requires time and generates what we term “productive friction.” This is the iterative process which creates dislocation and uncertainty within participants, but which also has the capacity to nudge towards a transformation of the professional self

The secret world of shrimps: polarisation vision at its best

Animal vision spans a great range of complexity, with systems evolving to detect variations in optical intensity, distribution, colour, and polarisation. Polarisation vision systems studied to date detect one to four channels of linear polarisation, combining them in opponent pairs to provide intensity-independent operation. Circular polarisation vision has never been seen, and is widely believed to play no part in animal vision. Polarisation is fully measured via Stokes' parameters--obtained by combined linear and circular polarisation measurements. Optimal polarisation vision is the ability to see Stokes' parameters: here we show that the crustacean \emph{Gonodactylus smithii} measures the exact components required. This vision provides optimal contrast-enhancement, and precise determination of polarisation with no confusion-states or neutral-points--significant advantages. We emphasise that linear and circular polarisation vision are not different modalities--both are necessary for optimal polarisation vision, regardless of the presence of strongly linear or circularly polarised features in the animal's environment.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, 2 table