Ratheesh Kaliyadan
Research Scholar
Assam University
Silchar
Prof. (Dr.) K.V. Nagaraj
Pro Vice Chancellor
Assam University
Silchar
Abstract
Information
Communication technology programmes revolutionized almost all walks of human
life including the education sector. To address the political and cultural
challenges, a new strategy is needed. The fifth estate provides a platform for
innovative style of learning. The Mediavist approach will help to tackle the
cultural impacts. This approach is an intervention of media in education sector
with a critical outlook. To assure learner autonomy in learning in a highly
sophisticated mobile application environment, Learner Responsive Pedagogy is
needed. This pedagogy is a practical implication of mediavism. The Mediavist
approach and Learner Responsive Pedagogy enhances to meet the challenges of
edupolises, the public private partnership model promoted by capitalists.
Key
words: Mediavism, Learner Responsive Pedagogy, Mobile learning applications,
Edupolis
MEDIAVISM IN FIFTH ESTATE PLATFORM
Ratheesh Kaliyadan
Research Scholar
Assam University
Silchar
Prof. (Dr.) K.V. Nagaraj
Pro Vice Chancellor
Assam University
Silchar
Introduction
Information
Communication Technology (ICT) scrawled on the ground of education in its first
phase with a purely negative potential for
teaching-learning. The curriculum has been limited to basic computer literacy
that focusing on operating system and office suite which have little pedagogical
relevance and transacted by 'computer teachers'. Thus the first generation of Information
Communication Technology bypassed the regular teaching staff in the school. The
second generation has a wide acceptance in almost all sectors including
education.
Educationists have been involved in
designing second generation Information Communication Technology programmes.
Now Information Communication Technology programmes serve to achieve larger
educational goals, rather than being an end in them, curriculum pertains to regular
mainstream subjects, transacted by regular school teachers and teacher
educators. During the first generation operations, there was a fog of fear that
this technology may expel the teachers from class rooms and appoint some
technical operators. The fear vaporized in the second generation developments
which exposed its strength in class room interventions. The Information
Communication Technology trainers did not undermine the chalk-talk method used
in classrooms, but rather encouraged the use of Information Communication Technology
programmes as an additional tool for teaching-learning. Politically the popularization
of Information Communication Technology developments has its own agendas. Critical media and adult education scholars have argued
that the media, through the ways they portray characters and issues, both
reproduce and challenge hegemonic relationships of race, class, gender, sexual
orientation and ableness (Tisdell and Thompson 2007).
Towards the Fifth Estate
The second generation developments in
Information Communication Technology opened up a new avenue of linkages.
Network is the major characteristics of this generation. The networked
individuals play crucial role in the invisible net. It gave way for the ‘fifth
estate’ as William H. Dutton named. ‘Networked individuals’
can move across, undermine and go beyond the boundaries of existing
institutions. This provides the basis for the pro-social networks that compose
what I am calling the ‘Fifth Estate’. These self-selected, Internet-enabled,
networked individuals often break from existing organizational and
institutional networks that are themselves being transformed in Internet space(
William H. Dutton, 2007).
Transformation in all sectors is the major contribution
of the fifth estate. It challenged the autocratic and authentic boasts of the
fourth estate. Citizen journalists, bloggers, researchers, politicians,
government agencies, Non Government Organisations, Right To Information
activists and more are putting information online. This information provides a
novel source of news as a competing alternative to the Fourth Estate. There are
several examples as of Salam Pax, the now famous ‘Baghdad Blogger’ that
challenged the authenticity of mainstream media. The blog reports helped to
change the media agenda in Iraq war by casting net of a local Iraqi
perspective. These kinds of interventions are relevant in education which I may
call as mediavism.
Mediavism
on the Road
Mass media content is not an innocent revelation. It is a
consciously manufactured cultural product. This product plays a key role in
creating public opinion and power substitutes. To educators it is a means to
equip learners to read their surroundings and cultural notions. Henry A Giroux (2004) observes cultural
studies becomes available as a resource to educators Cultural studies,
pedagogy, and responsibility who can then teach students how to look at the
media (industry and texts), analyze audience reception, challenge rigid
disciplinary boundaries, critically engage popular culture, produce critical
knowledge, or use cultural studies to reform the curricula and challenge
disciplinary formations within public schools and higher education.
The third party reading or observation
will not help learners properly to address the issues. The learners should be
equipped to be part and parcel of the media interventions by using the same
tools. Here a critical approach is necessary in finding subjects, choosing
information, stating the problem and present it in a platform. This ‘news
making’ process will not be an impartial attempt. Instead it is a conscious
immersion in media world through education. It is an alternate way for
expression. In an interview, Henry A Giroux claimed that “The educational force
of the wider culture is now the primary site where education takes place, what
I have called public pedagogy—modes of education largely produced, mediated,
and circulated through a range of educational spheres extending from the new
media and old broadcast media to films, newspapers, television programs, cable
TV, cell phones, the Internet, and other commercial sites. Ideologically,
the knowledge, values, identities, and social relations produced and legitimated
in these sites are driven by the imperatives of commodification, privatization,
consuming, and deregulation. At stake here is the creation of a
human being that views him or herself as a commodity, shopper, autonomous, and
largely free from any social obligations. This is a human being without ethics,
a concern for others, and indifferent to human suffering. And the pedagogy that promotes these
values and produces this subject is authoritarian and ruthless in its
production of savage economic relations, a culture of cruelty, and its
deformation of democratic social bonds. One could say that capitalist culture
has produced a predatory culture of control and cruelty that promotes vast
forms of suffering and repression and it does this increasingly through
cultural apparatuses that promote widespread symbolic violence”.
I hereby coin the term Mediavism to explain
the educational interventions in media scene by combining two words viz. media
and activism. The activist mode and mood of content generation is the prime probability
of this approach. The Mediavist approach enables students to post logical queries
and familiarise them with private debates as precursors to public engagement as
critical questioning skills are mastered. More so, this user-friendly ambience
renders informing possible through presentation of queries, which would not
otherwise be raised in educators due to perceived psycho-social, cognitive, and
semiotic fragilities like feelings of alienation, limited self-confidence, and
constrained linguistic competence.
The politics of
education become active here. “Politicizing education cannot decipher the
distinction between critical teaching and pedagogical terrorism because its
advocates have no sense of the difference between encouraging human agency and
social responsibility and molding students according to the imperatives of an
unquestioned ideological position. Politicizing education is more religious
than secular and more about training than educating; it harbors a great dislike
for complicating issues, promoting critical dialogue, and generating a culture
of questioning” (Henry a Giroux).
The Fifth Estate paves a platform for such an
intervention for educators to create and share critical thoughts. John Dewey, one of the founders of The New
School,emphasized that education does not only take place in schools and that
it ought to prepare learners for democratic citizenship. Institutional learning
should not foster individualism but rather emphasize community development,
which is the basis for the improvement of society. Ivan illich also observed
that we have all learned most of what we know outside school. For Freire,
pedagogy was deeply connected to social change.
Informal social networks are crucial in that process, connecting
students with their peers and with teachers.
Mediavism is the
way for sharing the critical perspectives in a mediated environment. Mediavism
never neglect or undermine the traditional strategies like chalk and board,
lectures, hand written assignments, group discussions or group works. All these
attempts are complementary to this approach. The
advent of the World Wide Web brought about an information revolution (Web 1.0).
The Web 2.0 is characterized by social collaboration and user-customization
with the social networking sites. The canvas of collaborative and
cooperative learning is expanded from a small group inside the class to a
global network. Even a highly introvert
student get a chance to express feelings and share views through the fifth
estate platforms. The mediavism style will shift from desk tops to mobile
applications very fast. Jackson (2012) argues that
there will never be a Web 3.0 because the next paradigm shift of the Internet
is mobile rather than desktop browser-based.
Learner Responsive
Pedagogy
To
practice the mediavist approach in class rooms through mobile applications, a
pedagogical stand is a necessity. Assurance of learner autonomy and freedom is
the heart of this approach. Learners are responsible for all sharing where they
get an authenticity. It also enhances every learner to make responses. “Pedagogy is not simply about the social
construction of knowledge, values, and experiences; it is also a performative
practice embodied in the lived interactions among educators, audiences, texts,
and institutional formations. Pedagogy, at its best, implies that learning
takes place across a spectrum of social practices and settings” (Henry A
Giroux).
Learner
Response Pedagogy is the strategy to safe guard the learner autonomy in a more
personalized educational environment. Mobile applications enhance the learner
to gather information and share them constantly with an intimate feeling. Just as the post-modern society emerged out of
modernism, we are experiencing a transformation of Web 2.0 into post Web 2.0
mobile social media. This “brings the potential to appropriate new pedagogies
that harness the potential of mobile social media to create powerful situated,
authentic, and informal learning experiences and bridge these into formal
learning” (Vavoula, 2007).
Jessica Irish in the essay, Learning on
Mobile Platforms argue: While
I do ask my students to turn off their phones in class, many of my favorite
ways to use technology in teaching embrace the ubiquity of the contemporary
cell phone. Learning happens equally, if not more, outside the classroom, and
finding a way to have students begin to use their phones towards their broader
learning seems a worthwhile effort.
Smart phones through mobile applications have
relevance in education sector. This tool could be utilized fruitfully in media
education and in other disciplines. The Learning and
Teaching Development Fellows (LTDF) Journalism Communities of Practice
(COP) led to
reinventing the case study approach to modeling the use of mobile social media
in class. The intention was to get
students to collate, curate, and critique actual source content around a mobile
social media incident in Journalism.
Students chose a breaking incident of mobile
social media and used Storify.com either on their iPads or laptops to collate
and comment upon Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Flickr and other mobile
social media, creating an annotated rich media story of the event or incident.
The assignment question became: “How if at all have social media altered the
way journalists and public relations practitioners interact? Use real examples from at least three social
media platforms as well as academic sources to back up your arguments”
(Assessment schedule 2012). This was then either published to their own blog,
or their own Storify.com site for their lecturer to mark.
Students interacted directly with rich mobile
social media, developing creative rich-media stories that required
metacognitive critiques. There was a considerably higher level of critique and
creativity evidenced in the Storify.com project in comparison to that evidenced
in previous essay versions of the assessment. Students used Storify to express
and create very personalized critiques of the impact of social media on
Journalism. The best essays made the most of the platform and the freedom to
include multimedia examples.
These students also altered their style and
the way they wrote into the examples to make their essays fit the medium.
Further, by using a mixture of books, journal articles and discussions on
social media, these students were able to explore the question far more deeply
than most of those who stuck to the more traditional format. Initial feedback
from students suggests they enjoyed the opportunity to explore social media in
a way other that for social purposes. Most also realize the need to be
confident using social media for their future role as professional
communicators. (Cochrane, T.,
Antonczak, L., Gordon, A., Sissons, H. & Withell, A. 2012).
Learner
Responsive Pedagogy has two tier implications. First, the learner can
share feelings and findings through mobile applications as the above quoted
experience narrates. Second, the educators can create a data bank to transfer
specific information or curriculum needs. Teaching notes and texts could be transferred.
Edusanchar designed by Dr. Mangesh Karandikar is an example for transferring
media education content through mobile application. Redefining mobile learning
is their motto. The mobile application provides the concepts, key terms for
media and communication related studies.
Mediavism through Learner Responsive Pedagogy
is a threat to edupolises which are the power house of capitalistic education
in a public private partnership flagship. “As I have stressed
repeatedly, academics, teachers, students, parents, community activists, and
other socially concerned groups must provide the first line of defense in
protecting public and higher education as a resource vital to the moral life of
the nation, and open to people and communities whose resources, knowledge, and
skills have often been viewed as marginal” (Giroux, 2004) .
Implementing mobile technology tools into
curricula is more difficult than desktop web-based tools because the industry
enforces individual ownership of devices, complicating the purchase of devices
and service plans. Educators
need the community to donate labor to open-source tools. Governments could
design public-interest profit incentives (e.g., tax breaks, community access
funds, discount subsidies) so carriers and manufacturers donate plenty of
bandwidth and devices to non-profit learning institutions (David
Carroll). The next education will be focused upon mobile applications with the
advent support of the users and designers
Coharane Thomas, A. L. (2012). Hentagogy and mobile social media: post web 2.0 pedagogy. ascilite, (pp. 204-214).
Dotton, W. H. (2007).
Through the Network ( of Networks)- the Fifth Estate. Examine schools,
University of Oxford .
Giroux, H. A. (2004).
Cultural Studies, Public Pedagogy and the Responsibilities of Intellectuals. Communication
and critical/Cultural studies , 59-79.
Kaliyadan, R. (2012).
Principles of Mass Communication. Koyilandy, Kozhikode, Kerala: Media
Analysis & Research Center.
Trebor, S. R.
Learning through digital media . In S. R. Trebor. Newyork 10011: The
Institution for Distributed Creativity.
Wright, R. R. (2009).
Wright, Robin Redmon and 'Popular culture, public pedagogy and perspective
transformation: The Avengers and adult learning in living rooms',. Wright,
Robin Redmon and Sandlin, Jennifer A.(2009)'Popular culture, public pedagogy
and perspective transformation: The AvenInternational Journal of Lifelong
Education,28:4 , 533-551.
