Visible Evidence of Invisible Learning

Faculty and practitioners who work with digital pedagogies know, at least intuitively, that student learning is significantly transformed in new media environments. As all of higher education wades deeper into the learning paradigm, it is increasingly important to move our understanding of new media learning beyond generalizations about engagement, interaction, and collaboration. The Visible Knowledge Project was a six-year project engaging about 60 faculty from 21 institutions, in order to explore the impact of technology on learning, especially in the humanities. This presentation will give an overview of the broad findings from the project, and look specifically at one strand of that faculty-driven research: Digital stories/narrative. The scholarship of teaching and learning that was produced by the project focuses us in part on the expansion of our conceptions of “expertise” in student intellectual development, and the roles that new media pedagogies play in that expansion. An expanded conception of expertise might be critical to recognizing how digital pedagogies often produce forms and symptoms of learning that are elusive–if not invisible–in traditional assessments or frameworks for understanding student development. This presentation will open up some of the questions about what we recognize as learning, and especially the ways that new media pedagogies and literacies invite us to expand our recognition of learning.