You are at once trying to leverage the closeness and innate understanding you have of the media, due to the close relationship you have with it, all whilst attempting to create distance so that you can look at it for what it is.
This past week I have been teaching social media. Sometimes it happens that some, or all your classes intersect with what the topic is. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, your subject intersects with something happening in another class. This creates a lovely point of reference for the students. Along with some satisfaction that your subject does in fact have relevance. Or at least in the context of their school life, and sometimes, that’s enough.
In one class I am teaching social media in the context of Media and Change. We are exploring the evolution of media and the role new technologies have in changing old ones, adapting to our habits, and adapting our habits to fit to them. In another class we are considering social media in the context of personal branding. This is positioned in a way which sees these platforms as a tool to be a creator, either for yourself or a brand. We examine how each of the social medias speak to one another and the role they may have in future careers.
It's two sides of the same coin. It’s like analysing media and making media. You must understand films well in order to do both, and appreciating one helps you apply the other.
Standing in front of a group of young people who have a better applied knowledge of what you are teaching is interesting. This is not to say that someone being young automatically means they have a better understanding of technology, this is not true. The assumption of the skills of a ‘digital native’* is probably one of the greatest confusions. Especially when we look at the use of technology in education (and especially during the pandemic). Young people may know how to use some devices more than others, but whether they know how to use that device to its full capacity is something else.
Having said that, I often spend more time on the theory than the practical in my classroom. Largely because the assessment is often theoretical, and as a result more of the outcomes are. The other element to this is that spending time with the technology will often mean students pick up how to use it, and from this use comes an understanding and knowledge of the technology which will allow you to use it in a way that you see fit. The theoretical understanding is one which we must coax because it is less intuitive and often, we are helping students learn another language (that of media) which then must be applied. The expectation may be that they use a camera to film, not that they have then teach others how to use it. The principles are the same, even as the technology evolves. So, we don’t spend so much time on it.
Studying media constantly means learning new things about the world around you and teaching it can feel like you’re constantly out of touch with what’s happening.
I don’t feel old but the minute I go to talk about memes as a form of participatory culture I am reminded of how archaic I can sound. The other day I explained to my class that growing up I couldn’t use the phone and the internet at the same time and one student was like ‘back in my day’. And everyone laughed. Clearly, I missed the mark on how to connect with them about how media has evolved. And perhaps the fact that we all shared one phone and that you couldn’t use the internet at the same time is irrelevant. I guess it’s like when people tell you that potato cakes used to be 5 cents. Not much that we can with that information now.
*A digital native is anyone born during or after the digital age. They can be seen to be multimedia oriented and ‘always on’ i.e., attached to a device. A digital immigrant on the other hand is someone who has adopted these technologies.