Media ecology is the study of how media and technology function as environments that shape human perception, communication, and understanding. It looks not just at content, but at the structures and systems we build and are surrounded by, from language to smartphones, and how they shape what we can think, say, and do. Like an ecosystem, these media interact with one another and with us, constantly reshaping our cultural and intellectual “habitat.” Media ecology asks the right questions because it recognizes that anything that impacts our communication or interaction provides limits and biases to what is possible. Without recognizing the impact of these impositions we risk mistaking the shape of our media environment for the shape of reality itself.
This definition aligns with Strate’s (2000, as cited in Strate and Lum, 2020) argument that media ecology is a perspective; “a way of seeing”—that treats media as environments rather than just channels. Neil Postman (as cited in Lum, 2000) similarly calls media ecology “the study of the cultural consequences of media change that affects our social organization, cognitive habits, and political ideas” (p. 4). In other words, it is not enough to examine what media say; we must examine what they make possible and what they make difficult to imagine.
Strate and Lum (2000) situate media ecology within a tradition that is ecological, interdisciplinary, and activist, drawing on Patrick Geddes’ view that intellectuals must act as shapers of environments, not just observers (p. 60). This implies that media ecology cannot belong neatly to one discipline. It is necessarily intersectional, combining insights from communication studies, history, sociology, semiotics, and philosophy. Thinking ecologically means remembering that, as Miller (1989) puts it, “no living organism can be understood except in terms of the total environment in which it functioned” (as cited in Strate & Lum, 2000, p. 68).
Mumford’s historical schema illustrates how environments structure society over time. His three phases—eotechnic, paleotechnic, and neotechnic—mark shifts from renewable energy to industrial extraction to machine-human symbiosis, with each stage reorganizing labor, power, and social classes (Strate & Lum, 2000, pp. 63–65). These phases demonstrate that technological environments are not neutral: they define the “rules of the game” for entire cultures.
Lum (2000) further explains that media have both physical and symbolic dimensions, each with distinct biases. These biases can be temporal, spatial, sensory, political, social, metaphysical, or epistemological (p. 2). To do media ecology is to surface these biases and ask what forms of knowledge, attention, and relationship they enable—and which they foreclose. This is why media ecology “asks the right questions.” It does not merely catalog media; it interrogates how each medium privileges some possibilities and silences others.
Model of Educational Media Ecology
A still of my completed vision of educational media ecology.
References
Lum, C. M. K. (2000). Introduction: The intellectual roots of media ecology. New Jersey Journal of Communication, 8(1), 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1080/15456870009367375
Strate, L., & Lum, C. M. K. (2000). Lewis Mumford and the ecology of technics. New Jersey Journal of Communication, 8(1), 56–78. https://doi.org/10.1080/15456870009367379
Digital Storytelling and Skills; reflecting on the process
What I love most about researching is that often the thing that you start out to find is just that – a starting point. One question leads to another and then another as you continue your winding path through your sources. It’s part of the reason that I was so drawn to social history during my undergrad years – we live our lives within the confines of what we know to be true, but the world is so vast and we are so small that there is so much out there that we don’t even know that we don’t know.
Pie chart of what you know, as adapted by myself from a less safe for work Reddit post, here
In some ways that is comforting, in others terrifying. But for the first time in our existence, almost half of the world has access to the internet and the tools and apps that come with it. What we don’t know that we don’t know doesn’t have to be such a scary idea any more, and what matters instead is instilling connection, critical thinking, creativity, communication, curiosity, and the various literacies that students will require to access that knowledge – whether from connecting with others around the world, searching through the databases provided by the local public library, or listening to the stories of others on YouTube, podcasts or through social media.
My goal was to focus my research on ways of encouraging fostering digital connection, along with a toolkit of strategies to help students manage working with technologies that are almost deliberately distracting. My initial list of search terms was the following:
– Multimodal digital storytelling
– Benefits of digital storytelling
– Empathy and storytelling
– Empathy development and technology
– Storytelling apps
– Digital storytelling tools
– Cognitive Load Management theory and skills
– Open source educational software
What ended up shifting
I ended up dropping some topics (like empathy and storytelling, empathy development and technology, and open source technology) because I felt that with them my topic wasn’t as focused, and that empathy was briefly discussed in the materials I had found about digital storytelling already. It also made sense, as I wanted my focus to be more practical than theoretical. I had significant success pulling together materials on digital storytelling and the applications and other tools that can be used in their creation. Cognitive load management, however, was the most troublesome topic. I left the experience feeling that the two divides of philosophy in education about technology referenced by Richardson in Why School? eight years ago are still alive and well today.
What I couldn’t find
My initial search terms were connected, but they were not necessarily things that a person would find all in the same place, although to successfully work in the Digital Storytelling medium you would need to have some sort of understanding of all of them. The one that didn’t make it into my Part B assignment was anything that had to do with Cognitive Load Management. Most articles that I could find, either through the UBC library, Google Scholar, or just a plain old Google search tended to be very academic and slightly off topic; instead many focused on cognitive load theory. Most zeroed inon successful retention in e-learning or more traditional teacher-led learning methods, not with hands-on learning experiences, and how to deal and sort between loads of incoming information. When I used quotation marks to search for “cognitive load management” + children my results plummeted from 110 069 to 54. The most frequently cited articles focused on strategies for persons with autism. I did happen to find one promising article on how “Eye-closure enhances creative performance on divergent and convergent creativity tasks”, but that and was research on one very specific cognitive load management task – not the practical toolkit of strategies and skills that I was looking for.
Searches through UBC Library Databases on cognitive load management skills were less successful than envisioned.
There is so much more room for research on this area. As mentioned previously, as I struggled with finding materials I was reminded of Richardson’s claim that there were two visions for the future of education – one of them for teaching the old curriculum with new tools, and the other looking to discover (2012, Loc 265). Eight years after writing Why School? these search results make me worry that academic and research choices have for the most part chosen to stay with the status quo. Ultimately, I suppose it is not surprising that materials on the topic of cognitive load focus more on how to reduce the effects and effectively instruct someone to have them retain more information. However, with a transformative view of educational technology, I think it becomes more and more important for us to be able to TEACH students these strategies, rather than use them solely to manipulate their understanding of instructed materials. Kids need these strategies in their toolkits.
What went well
I felt more at home in my research on the topic of digital storytelling. During my first course in the LIBE program, I stumbled across the 1994 Manifesto of the Public Library from the IFLA. That list, although 25 years old , made clear to me why being a Teacher-Librarian was something I was so interested in. So many of those missions of the library connect beautifully with digital storytelling:
…3. providing opportunities for personal and creative development; 4. stimulating the imagination and creativity of children and young people; 5. promoting awareness of cultural heritage, appreciation of the arts, scientific achievements and innovations;… 7. fostering inter-cultural dialogue and favouring cultural diversity; 8. supporting the oral tradition;… 11. Facilitating the development of information and computer literacy skills…
from the 1994 Manifesto of the Public Library by the International Federation of Library Association
I also thought it was particularly telling that the titles and abstracts of research papers and articles about the topic were sprinkled with words that seem lifted right from 21st century learning skills: words like co-creating, creativity, citizenship, culture, multilingual, modalities and connections to name only a few. When compared to results from my search for cognitive load management, results seem to come from a wider swath of the globe. Some results were focused on Indigenous Education or referenced specifically the importance of storytelling to other indigenous world cultures. Just this week, while sharing my focus for this class with a divisional colleague (who is currently working on their PhD in education in the area of the intersections between educational experience and race), I was forwarded two other journal articles that focused on the task of digital storytelling as a just way of working towards reconciliation, and as a way of respecting Indigenous oral traditions (Castleden et al, 2013, p. 495). This is important to me. I need what I do to bring voices to those who have not had them amplified historically. In digital storytelling I can provide 21st century skills alongside social justice.
In terms of results, I had fewer for digital storytelling than I did for cognitive+load+management+children (just over 50 000), but the quality of the results and their applicability to my topic of study was significantly higher. I also had more luck with searches on Twitter and Google. Results tended to be more connected to my given topic, and more readable; I suppose that’s not surprising for a topic about storytelling.
Applications
When reading through the literature about Digital Storytelling, I realized that there are probably hundreds of ways to develop this into projects and activities for the library and in my work with other classrooms. There definitely isn’t a one size fits all approach. In an ideal digital storytelling project situation, students are coming up with their own focus points, choosing from a wide range of tools and apps and troubleshooting as they go. It becomes impossible for a teacher to know all the answers, and I think matches up nicely with Richardson’s section entitled “Discover, don’t deliver, the curriculum”, in which he describes teachers as those who ask questions and guide the students along the different paths of their own learning (2012, Loc 426).
“Kids want to be inspired by this idea that learning is important. But they don’t see it in schools.”
In the TEDx talk above, Azul Terronez tells us the things he has learned by surveying students about what makes a good teacher great. The more I learn and think about DST, the more I think that it helps us get to know and build relationships with students, while hitting curricular outcomes and teaching other important skills as well.
Conclusions
I left this assignment feeling like I had a good handle on the who, what, when, where, why of digital storytelling. How was a bit murkier, but with the shared examples of others and the benefits of time and experience I think that will come together. I found examples being created in many different courses and on many topics, which I hope will help me promote this method of learning and creation with my peers.
This is a scary shift for many people, especially those of us who probably succeeded at the game of school – and let’s be real, many teachers are likely teachers because school was a comfortable place for them, and the source of some of their best memories. This isn’t a bad thing – but sometimes it puts blinders on us when we need to make changes. And so, this is often the spot that I find myself coming back to – how do I transition to this model? That’s the resource that I want to exist out there somewhere in a database. I want a how-to guide! I think I’m doing so now, but the going is slow. Coming into classes, sharing tools, asking supporting questions, planning activities in the LLC that model these shifts, working with teachers that are implementing these changes, and planning activities for the students in classes where those shifts aren’t happening are my chisel at the rock of traditional classroom teaching.
Research Sources
Brailas, A. (2017). Digital storytelling in the classroom: How to tell students to tell a story. International Journal of Teaching and Case Studies, 1(1), 1. doi: 10.1504/ijtcs.2017.10003059
Nam, C. W. (2017). The effects of digital storytelling on student achievement, social presence, and attitude in online collaborative learning environments. Interactive Learning Environments, 25(3), 412–427. https://doi-org.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/10.1080/10494820.2015.1135173
Castleden, H., Daley, K., Sloan Morgan, V., & Sylvestre, P. (2013). Settlers unsettled: Using field schools and digital stories to transform geographies of ignorance about indigenous peoples in Canada. Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 37(4), 487-499. doi:10.1080/03098265.2013.796352
What are common threads of humanity, and how do we keep them in education?
Growing up in small-town Manitoba, my K-5 education was not really so far removed from what my parents received. Sure, I didn’t start my schooling in a one room schoolhouse, as my parents did, but the teacher who taught my dad Grade Three was still around to teach me Grade Three-Four-and-Five in a seven-room schoolhouse. The main differences between my schooling and that of my parents were that:
The teachers had access to a photocopier.
The school had a TV on a cart, and you knew it was going to be a good day when they rolled that beauty into your room to watch Telefrancais and that weird pineapple told us he was a pineapple.
Thanks school TV cart for these amazing memories.
There were only three grades in a classroom instead of eight.
Otherwise, most of how we were taught was pretty much the same – right down to Mrs. Johnson, the teacher. Spelling tests, World Book Encyclopedias, the rote memorization of facts, and learning that (for the most part) never left the four walls of our classroom.
The world has changed a lot since then, probably triggered by the fact that Mrs. Johnson retired.
I jest.
But more seriously, these changes are often the topics and areas that I am drawn to in terms of education. They are also topics that I imagine becoming focus points in education in the coming years. And many of them couldn’t even have been imagined 25 years ago. Some of them probably can’t even be imagined now.
My interests
Unlike the classroom of my childhood, where the computers in the school were the only computers anyone really had access to, today not everyone has the same accessto resources. I see a growing divide in classrooms between those who have access to their own top-of-the-line devices, and those who are limited to the often lagging or broken laptops and other technological tools provided by the school. Significant access issues also exist between urban, rural and northern communities – leaving 10% of Canada’s population without high speed internet access according to a 2018 Auditor General’s report.
I see educator’s struggling to bridge the divide between older curriculums and expectations that are very fact heavy and outcome-based, the need to quantify student learning with a mark, and providing students with the opportunity fordeep-learning which is so very difficult to boil down to a number. And frankly, that number or mark-based assessment ends up missing the point and not accurately representing the learning and growth made by students. When curriculums are shifting and changing with the times (like the New Grade k-8 ela curriculum in manitoba, which focuses heavily on digital literacies).
The conceptual framework of the New K-8 ELA Curriculum in Manitoba Manitoba Education. (2019, October). English Language Arts Curriculum Framework: A Living Document. Retrieved January 7, 2020, from https://www.edu.gov.mb.ca/k12/cur/ela/framework/foundations.pdf
I see teachers struggling to make the shift between teaching outcomes in isolation and a more holistic view of learning. I would argue that there is significant room for improvement in how we teach students skills and strategies to help with Cognitive load management as they juggle between countless tabs and windows while bombarded by advertisements and the pull towards other tasks that release way more dopamine into their developing brains.
I see plenty of opportunity to connect with students around the world and to provide students with an audience well beyond the snowy city of Winnipeg, and opportunities to develop cross-cultural competency. The growth and development of empathy and understanding among people of different life experiences can hopefully come from these opportunities.
I am interested in multi-modalities and the multitude of ways we now have available to teach and share concepts with teachers and students. Digital storytelling and apps are an interest that ties in with this concept. I have a pet student ‘writing’ project in the library called The Write Company, and I’m really interested in growing its audience beyond staff and parents. I’ve been using Sway in Office365 for its production but am interested in all of the different Adobe Spark products, which I have not used yet; although we have access to themthrough a division subscription. I’m interested in expanding The Write Company to include different forms of writing, like digital multimedia and student projects. Check out our first issue this school here!
Here’s a brief video I made for PD about the building of our student writing ‘magazine’. I would love to find new apps to add to my toolkit.
And although sometimes I worry that we have moved too far past the point of no return on this topic, I’m interested in open source technologies, especially ones that aren’t limited to top of the line devices that need to be replaced every three years or the operating system is no longer updated/supported. Applications or programs that run across various operating systems would also be an interest.
I’m also interested in learning about how data from schools is used by major corporations such as Google and Microsoft.
School, divisional and provincial considerations
I teach in a Middle School/Junior High setting, so my interest would mainly be skewed to that age category – although I am always interested in seeing what elementary schools are up to because then we can scaffold and build on skills and strategies.
The division I teach in has a Standards for Success in Literacy document that has been a focus for professional development over the past several years. This tied in with a trial project at the Grade Four and Seven levels that has seen small sets of Microsoft tablets put in these grade level classrooms.
The division is also currently in the process of phasing out computer labs in K-8 learning environments. Laptop carts are also being slowly removed, and each homeroom is receiving six laptops. I hope that my exploration can some way assist teachers pedagogically as they move to a more Project Based and Inquiry learning model. This also needs to be kept in mind, because I am predicting that students will rely on their own personal devices more frequently under the new model, so using apps and programs that work across various Operating Systems is important. The 5-6 classrooms also have small banks of iPads, and there is a larger set that can be booked out of the library for all classes.
I am fortunate to have a flexible schedule, which is great because the things that I explore with can be brought back into classrooms in project blocks with individual classrooms. What I choose to research should fit within this model.
Potential Topics
Ultimately, because of school and division priority, my own personal interests, and the weighing of tech accessibility in classrooms, I am leaning towards a focus on digital storytelling. This topic lends itself to collaborative group projects, as a multitude of skills are necessary to complete a final project. I think that this fits very nicely with the new ELA curriculum in Manitoba, will give me the opportunity to support teachers in using new apps and can be tied together with Project Based and Inquiry Learning, and allows for the integration of multi-modalities. Because projects are digital in nature, I would like to learn about using Twitter as a tool to connect with others. I would also like this to tie in with skills regarding cognitive-load management that I could teach to students and teachers while working on projects.
Search Terms
Benefits of digital storytelling
Multimodal digital storytelling
Empathy and storytelling
Empathy development and technology
Storytelling apps
Digital storytelling tools
Cognitive Load Management theory and skills
Open source educational software
Upon reflecting on this process, I think it is interesting that I have narrowed my focus down to some topics that are definitely very far removed from the classroom of my childhood. But yet, the common thread that holds these things together is something that has followed humanity since the beginning of language – stories. I think that finding a way to connect these new skills and technologies to something so integral and ingrained in our history is a way for us to use these technologies and skills in meaningful and important ways.
