Lightening Talk
Daniel Chamberlain
Director
Center for Digital Learning +Research
Occidental College
Biography
As the Director of the Center for Digital Learning + Research at Occidental College, Daniel Chamberlain teaches courses on urbanism and emergent media, and leads efforts to advance digital scholarship across disciplines at the College. Daniel also works with faculty to explore new ways of teaching with media technologies in and out of the classroom, to consider how their research and publication strategies might benefit from networked collaboration and open access platforms, and to partner with colleagues and projects at other institutions. Daniel’s research on emergent media technologies and new urban spaces explores the correspondences between these phenomena at the level of their cultural and economic emphases on personalization, mobility, and interactivity.
Abstract
How might computational thinking be made a core aspect of a liberal education? For the past few years I have directed the Center for Digital Learning + Research at Occidental College, and we have gradually made a transition from investigating and supporting nascent digital scholarship efforts towards experimenting with new techno-pedagogies and stimulating computational thinking across the curriculum. Building on ideas such as Douglas Rushkoff’s “Program or be Programmed” and Cathy Davidson’s “4Rs,” and taking advantage of a curricular gap in the Computer Science curriculum at Occidental, we have been experimenting with a number of approaches to integrate computational thinking, including integrating basic multimodal assignments across the curriculum, design project-base webmaking courses, launching lab-components to existing humanities and social science courses, and integrating a critical making and physical computing component into the College’s regular support for multimedia project work. We will be experimenting in the coming year with a pervasive game designed (in part) to enhance students’ digital fluencies and with the design of an integrated media wall and system intended to support the development of critical visual fluencies. Taken together, we are embarking on an effort to get students working thoughtfully with digital media in a way that encourages them to become active producers and designers of the digitally mediated world in which they live.