Book Review: Alternative and Activist New Media

The contemporary political unrest flaring across North Africa has made Leah A. Lievrouw’s recent book, Alternative and Activist New Media, essential reading for anyone attempting to conceptually frame the dynamic role that communications technology plays in activating popular dissent. Seismic shifts currently rupturing this region’s geopolitical landscape are, essentially, examples of Lievrouw’s discussion of “mediated mobilization” in action.

Read the full review.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Education versus “learnification” what’s at stake?

Will the effects of pandemic pedagogy accelerate learnification?  Gert Biesta ,  Dutch-born education philosopher  who is associated with the reclaiming teaching movement,  highlights that the discourse of “education” has become disconnected from “learning.” This shift began during the 1980s, accelerated as a consequence of the proliferation of educational technology over the past twenty years, and is likely to increase with data-gathering and extended reality becoming ubiquitous within educational systems. Biesta makes the point that language constructs reality and that the language of learning has privileged process , but has excluded questions of purpose and content and relationships within dynamic human interrelationships that should define teaching and learning (Biesta, 2012). The sole concern of learnification becomes the individualistic process of learning, rather than the purpose , context , and relationships that are central to education as both a humanistic and holistic
Read more

The Teaching Portfolio in Principle and in Practice

"Changing the status of the  problem  in teaching from terminal remediation to ongoing investigation is precisely what the movement for a scholarship of teaching is all about." (Bass, 1999: 1).  A: From "scholarly teaching" to "scholarship of teaching (and learning)" Ernest L. Boyer (1990), advocated that the idea of scholarship in higher education needed to be broadened to include teaching as well as the dimensions of discovery, integration (later changed to engagement), and application. Boyer made a strong case for a “scholarship of teaching”, but he never clearly defined the term. Pat Hutchings and Lee Shulman (1999) made the following distinctions: 1.  Excellent Teaching : i nvolves teaching well, engaging students, and fostering important forms of student learning. 2.  Scholarly Teaching : in addition to the characterises of excellent teaching, scholarly teaching  entails practices of formative assessment and evidence gathering, is informed not only b
Read more

A matter of conviviality: a note on the "Big Tent" metaphor in the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL)

Image
  Big Tent Debate in SoTL Center for Engaged Learning  Elon University, North Carolina, 18 September 2013. The “big tent” metaphor has thus far characterised much of SoTL’s thinking about its inherent diversity. Huber and Hutchings (2005) identify the “teaching commons,” as the process of coming together to encourage discourse within and outside of our disciplines about how we teach and how students learn. These Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching colleagues encourage scholars to make their inquiries not private but communal enterprises that cultivate discipline-specific methodologies in an ongoing pursuit of deepening our understanding of teaching and learning. They urge us to create a “big tent” for SoTL (Huber & Hutchings, 2005, p. 30).  Mary Huber & Pat Hutchings with Tony Ciccone (2011, p. 9) clarified the "big tent" debate in SoTL as based on a distinction made between advocates of constructionism . Constructionist learning is the creation by lea
Read more