Through four pivotal online media platforms, Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook, and WordPress, Professor Alice Lesnick, Director of the Bi-College Education Program, has invited her students at Bryn Mawr and Haverford to critically engage with these tools in order to understand how they play important, complex, and contested roles in education within and beyond classroom contexts. For each online media platform, a different guest speaker in Lesnick’s Education, Technology, and Society course spent time working with groups on learning one platform and applying this platform into the context of their field placement. For example, students who worked with high school students in a Philadelphia charter school read the Wikipedia entry on charter schools in order think about what needs to be added or changed. Prof. Lesnick noted:
The purpose of this project is to have students think more critically and creatively about their consumption and experience of online media so that they will become better decision makers and have the digital literacy to understand usability as well as the complexities behind these tools.
VIDEO CLIP
Bryn Mawr College Tech Talk: Education in the Age of Social Media
The project was developed at Bryn Mawr via a Mellon “Developing a Liberal Arts Curriculum for the Digital Age” seed grant by Alice Lesnick, Director and Term Professor in the Bryn Mawr/Haverford Bi-College Education Program with support from Esther Chiang and Elizabeth Reilly, Post-Bac Educational Technologists.
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