Research Proposal: Best Practices for Emergent Media Education

Problem:

Emergent Media education is a field that is both new, yet rapidly changing and evolving. A framework for education, combined with an online resource center should be created to help educators collaborate on establishing best practices for media literacy in the 21st century.

Proposal:

To develop a curriculum or "best practices" for graduate level Emergent Media & Future Studies education, that will be made available to share and annotate online.

Relevant contexts:

Technological development is accelerating at an exponential rate. In order for new media education to be valid, it will have to have the ability and flexibility to adapt strategies to rapid change.

The way we interact with each other via collaborative environments is still in development, and so our understanding of the societal and cultural implications of this are also evolving.

Being able to understand short and long-term effects of emergent media requires a level of future studies education - strategic foresight development, systems thinking, etc

Staying up do date on information to be integrated into the education will require a collaborative effort, not only interdepartmentally, but ideally on a national or even global level. Part of understanding the new media landscape is to use the tools of the environment.

Students need to be able to create media that illustrates their ability to communicate strategically, not just create aesthetic design.

Similar projects:

New Media Literacies Community Site - Project New Media Literacies (NML) is a research initiative funded in part by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and based within MIT's Comparative Media Studies program to explore how we might best equip young people with the social skills and cultural competencies required to become full participants in an emergent media landscape and raise the publics’ understanding about what it means to be literate in a globally interconnected, multicultural world.
(This site is geared toward youth education, not graduate level, but provides a tremendous amount of applicable content.)

Handbook of Emerging Technologies for Education

The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education

Competition:

I envision this to be an open source project, so there's not really "competition". Any similar or relevant material out there is a resource.

Approaches to design:

I imagine a social network like ning.com would be a good platform for building the knowledge network, combined with a wiki to build the database. And it will have to be pretty.