The regular slate
of courses I teach includes several that work successfully only to the
extent that students learn to apply abstract principles and theories to
concrete communicative activities that must be simulated in the classroom,
usually through role-playing. For example, in COM 450: Organizational Communication,
readings and lectures focus on systems theory, cultural analysis, relational
or dialogic philosophy, and network theory; all are essential background
for any student who may someday require an in-depth understanding of the
literature of organizational behavior and management. Illustrations are
available, but relevant examples tend to fall outside the range of work
experience or organizational participation that many students have acquired
at this stage of their lives. My solution is to use the University of Michigan-Dearborn
as an organizational environment that the class can study together as an
arena of application for basic principles and theories; in addition, I
require students to select another organization that they can study similarly,
either through direct participation-observation or through print and on-line
resources. I address similar pedagogical challenges in COM 300: Communication
Research through the same basic approach.
During this
past semester, I have also introduced students to field work that I have
currently underway at a Detroit shelter for mentally ill, homeless men.
By offering constant updates on the progress of this organizational research,
I am able to enlist students in these classes as observing consultants
on my project. They are, accordingly, able to compare their own role-playing
research with this actual project.
The professor’s
research becomes, in effect, a medium that mediates between students’
individual learning experiences, a common research experience available
to the class through narrative descriptions, and the underlying principles
and theories introduced in the course. All class participants share the
opportunity to understand others and to make oneself understood through
the medium of research-in-progress.
Medium is used here
in the sense of “any process, technique, or technology that facilitates
… the emergence of something visible or something tangible” (Altheide,
1995, p. 59). Communication scholar David Altheide further specifies, “Media
provide the space for temporal ordering.” This foundational dimension of
all communication, that it extends meaningful phenomena across space and
preserves them through time, provides a relevant starting point for considering
what media ought to come under consideration in a program such as MITTEN.
Relating this first
conversational opening to the main topic of remediation, one can observe,
along with Bolter and Grusin, “that new media are doing exactly what their
predecessors have done: presenting themselves as refashioned and improved
versions of other media” (p. 14). The conversation about new media becomes
a conversation among media forms – old and new.
What is new about new media comes from the particular ways in which they refashion older media and the ways in which older media refashion themselves to answer the challenges of new media (p. 15).
The first word may
well be one we have heard and spoken many times before. We often find ourselves
advocating, or listening to others advocate, a revolution. But Monday moves
to Tuesday, to Wednesday … (or Tuesday to Thursday, or Monday to Wednesday
to Friday, on the University schedule) as more of an experienced continuity.
New media end up being more about remembering than they are about forgetting.