The Digital Utterance: A Crossmedia Approach to Media Education

This chapter draws on Bakhtin’s term ‘heteroglossia’ to help sketch out a new conception of crossmedia practice, which while recognising distinct media as ‘utterances’, also celebrates a renewed dialogism between them. We will suggest that media that were once seen as separate, have always been intimately connected, and that a study of the texts produced by this connectivity (such as adaptations and paratexts) can illuminate complex interactions. Recent developments in digital media have resulted in a great deal of crossmedia innovation. With shifts towards synchronous media consumption, and its immersive multi-attentional possibilities, through to transmediality, and the way it reshapes both producer and user practices, crossmedia extends the very idea of ‘media’; in many ways, it could even be said to have become textual itself. These changes have significant pedagogic implications, with a medium specific view of media being myopic and limiting in what it can offer students in an increasingly crossmedia world. Media education privileges existent academic silos, and curricula are therefore skewed toward a particular medium. We will suggest this distorts critical perspectives of crossmedia; a film studies scholar for example will view crossmedia through the historical and theoretical lens of cinema, yet cinema as an industrial practice now revels in its crossmediality. Even those that recognise the collapse of the normative media paradigm (e.g. Bennett et al. 2011) expend their energies discussing industrial or audience transformations, yet fail to acknowledge the need for parallel changes in media education. Drawing on current industry practices, this chapter will call for a new pedagogy which allows for a position whereby crossmedia events are not seen as an array of loosely connected and interrelated texts, that are examined within now outmoded academic silos, but as a type of ‘digital heteroglossia’ where different media are seen as ‘utterances’ (or voices)

"I wanna be a SHIT-head!" Accepted and radical pedagogy

Ostensibly a college-comedy, mobilising familiar tropes of slacking and drinking, Accepted (Steve Pink, 2006) actually constitutes a more or less coherent critique of Higher Education and a utopian proposition for curriculum reform. Perhaps with a nod to Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, Justin Long’s Bartleby Gaines embodies implacable resistance to conventional college education (albeit, after having been rejected by all that he applied for), and through his fake institution, the South Harmon Institute of Technology, creates a diverse, pedagogically innovative community. In this community the curriculum is created by the students and, as Bartleby later claims to the accreditation board, “the students are the faculty”. This project of ‘deschooling’ chimes with Bennett, Kendall and McDougall’s “rhetorical provocation” of “a pedagogy of the inexpert” (2011) in which the power of “subject expertise” is ceded to/shared with the students. It also makes a plea for passion and creativity in learning, thus echoing Ken Robinson’s notion of the ‘element’ (2013). Despite the romantically triumphant finale, the film inevitably leaves tensions unresolved regarding the meaning of learning, the marketisation of Higher Education, and the conditions of possibility for a truly radical pedagogy

The method of fluxions and infinite series; : with its application to the geometry of curve-lines

An unfinished posthumous work, first published in the Latin original in v. 1 of the Opera omnia (Londini, J. Nichols, 1779-85) under title: Artis analyticae specimina, vel Geometria analytica. Another translation, without Colson\u27s commentary, appeared London, 1737 as A treatise on the method of fluxions and infinite series. The commentary consists of annotations on the introduction, and on the first and second problems

Children's cross-platform media preferences: a sense of kindness and a want for learning?

Cross-platform media practices have moved from being something of an under-considered side show, to a strategic necessity. A development vision that attempts to transcend historic platform delineation is becoming the norm in many areas of media production, yet cross-platform media, as an over-arching conceptualisation, is still sparsely mapped. Children’s media in particular can be said to have long spanned platform, yet there is little research that addresses media in this sense, and even less that attempts to bring together the voices of children with those that make media for children. This study sets out to explore children’s cross-platform media within the UK; with children’s media preferences acting as a trigger to dialogue. The study’s original contribution to knowledge is said to sit within its multi-method interdisciplinary design, which as well as foregrounding participant voice, operates in a tactual and reflective fashion. The study looks to explore children’s preferences within media made for them, but also to question the extent to which producers of media for children understand these preferences; with the researcher himself having a background within children’s media practice. To establish the foundations from which to consider these questions, the thesis begins by contextualising and conceptualising cross-platform media, before it moves on to address how children are positioned within media research. Argument is made that media should be seen not as distinct, or platform bound, but as utterances within a cross-platform dialogue, and similarly the study is orientated towards operating across a dialogic phenomenology in which it becomes difficult to locate the unitary, fixed and finalised. It is hoped that through engaging in dialogue on children’s preferences within cross-platform media that this study will impact on practice within the field. Analysis of the research interactions suggests that producers of children’s media share an understanding with children on the ways in which they appear averse to media that they see as unfair, unkind or in which others come to harm. Yet when it comes to the place of learning within children’s media, something child participants appear particularly comfortable with, practitioners seem less in tune with the preferences of children

What ‘children’ experience and ‘adults’ may overlook: phenomenological approaches to media practice, education and research

This paper argues that each utterance of media should be seen as in dialogue with each other utterance, and that children, being the phenomenological hub to their lived media experience, should be recognised as engaging with media holistically. Argument draws upon two recent qualitative studies with children between six and eleven years of age. These studies, although separate, shared certain phenomenology orientated conceptual underpinnings and arrived at relatable findings. Notably that participating children tended to address media in a platform agnostic manner and offered little sense that they saw the media platform itself as being of overriding significance to their holistic media engagement. Ultimately, if children’s lived media engagement is dialogic and holistic, then focusing on only one discreet media utterance (like television for example) can be said to become deeply problematic to those within children’s media practice, education and research

How developing world concerns need to be part of drug development plans: A case study of four emerging antiretrovirals

Clinical trials are usually designed to meet registration requirements in developed countries, and do not always address key concerns for use in developing countries. Four late-stage investigational new drugs - rilpivirine, etravirine, raltegravir and maraviroc - show potential to improve antiretroviral therapy. However, a number of issues could limit their use in developing countries, including dose selection, treatment strategy, combination with other drugs, use in specific populations and reliance on expensive tests. Key research questions relevant for developing countries need to be answered early in the drug development process to ensure maximum benefit for the majority