Page 40 - Campus Technology, August/September 2017

C-Level View
Campbell: I have, for decades now, been working on ways to understand digital opportunity more richly myself, and to foster learning opportunities for my colleagues that would empower all of us to think more richly about digital opportunities as a community. My two ways forward have been: first, to read extensively and try to get a broad
Campbell: The reading that has been most influential
for me, initially, was about the kinds of conceptual frameworks people had very early in the development of computers, where they were thinking about the computer as a communications device — a medium that had certain properties that we really had never seen before.
CT: What is a “real” digital opportunity?
Campbell: A real digital opportunity is one that presents
the learner with an entirely new medium, a metamedium within a global light-speed telecommunications network. An opportunity to help weave the web through narrating, curating and sharing one’s thoughts. An opportunity to create meaning through hyperlinking, a skill my younger students appear not to have anymore.
So, my work led me to identify things within the learning ecosystem that I could examine in this context.
CT: What is perhaps your best, or favorite, example? Campbell: Blogging. It requires certain habits of mind
and public exposure, and it takes true advantage of the web. My endeavors with student blogging have led me to think long and hard, over a period of years, about the open web — some of my inquiries are actually just now coming into better focus.
CT: What are a few questions you are asking yourself?
Campbell: I’m very interested in how valuable and productive a medium is: Does it promote certain kinds of recreated content? Does it incorporate readily
“A real digital opportunity is one that presents the learner with an entirely new medium,
a metamedium within a global light-speed telecommunications network. An opportunity to help weave the web through narrating, curating and sharing one’s thoughts. An opportunity to create meaning through hyperlinking.”
sense of what some options for conceptual frameworks could be, while thinking about what some of the best questions to ask could be; and second, to try different things in my own practice as a professor.
I’m always looking for that Archimedean point of leverage, because I have seen in my work with my own students, that there are moments that call us to ourselves, if you will. These moments represent deep insight. The opportunity then, is to discover how to propel more, and greater kinds of learning from that insight.
CT: What was some of your most productive reading?
CT: Did you translate that reading into specific things to try in your classroom?
Campbell: I looked hard at several, specific points of practice within a classroom or course. Then I picked a compelling task and asked, “What if we changed — or added — just this one thing?” What would happen if that represented a decisive and really useful intervention?
Another way to put all that is: What if we have an encounter with a real digital opportunity? We need to discover the genuine ones.
40
CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY | August/September 2017