Teaching Technology in the Outdoors... and on the Road

Description

This session will discuss experimentation in teaching style, namely involving my Mobile Storytelling in the Park class. In this course, I teach them how to effective use technology for storytelling means in a place we don't normally associate with technology - the great outdoors. My course was featured in a previous DEL conference (2016), but it has since expanded from state parks around our university to taking students on the road to different national parks around the country. This expansion of the course has offered even more opportunities for experimentation with student learning.

Takeaway

This session will offer guidance on pushing comfort zones when it comes to student learning - both from a student and professor perspective. It offers a variety of contradictions - technology in the outdoors and students learning in a classroom hundreds of miles from the brick and mortar structure.

Abstract

The Mobile Storytelling in the Park course started, itself, as an experiment. Would students be interested in learning about technology in an outdoor setting - possibly far from a cell signal or WIFI access. Would mobile technology be sufficient to produce the types of stories expected of a course like this? Would students react positively to the pressure of their work being shared with hundreds of thousands of people via different agency social media platforms?

As I've learned over the past few years of this course, the answers are yes, yes and yes.

But the experimentation continues. After being featured as a session at the 2016 Digitally Engaged Learning conference in New York City, much has changed with this course. Having grown from state parks in the local vicinity of our university, the course is now part of Study in America - which is much like Study Abroad, except programs stay in the United States. It now forces students to experiment even further with their learning habits and work flows as they study, learn and produce content at national parks several hundred miles away from campus.

This session will focus on how this course helps students become agile learners, how they adapt to a learning environment far from home, and how they adjust to setting after setting during several days on the road.