Journal article: Teaching International Relations with New Media

I’ve just published an article on teaching International Relations with new media in the German journal of IR, Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen.

The full text can be found here: ZiB 1/2014 – Teaching IR with New Media

My conclusion:

Our students will likely spend their lives increasingly reliant on the Internet, mobile computing and online social networks to navigate the complexities of their world. They will be entering a networked information economy that differs significantly from the industrial information economy that preceded it, and must develop news skills to cope with rapid increases in the volume, variety and velocity of information in society. They will be required to engage with new media spaces in order to make their voices heard in these new public forums, and a premium will be placed on their ability to meaningfully discover, make critical sense of, and contribute to knowledge flows.

As the complexity and speed of global communications continues to increase, digital information literacy will become a more challenging and more important skill set to acquire. Bridging their firsthand experience with the Internet, social networks and mobile devices with rigorous analysis of the social and political impacts of those forces is an exciting opportunity in International Relations teaching. Building this into the design of our classes creates the opportunity for learning and reflection by both teachers and students on many complex, important themes of the digital age.

It is important to help break down the traditional isolation of the university classroom by connecting students more deeply to ongoing academic debates, to their classmates and teachers through collaboration, and to the wider world outside the classroom through these new public spaces. Technology can facilitate the goal of university courses to step beyond their traditional role as centers of expert knowledge transfer, into more dynamic venues for the analysis, critique and collaborative creation of knowledge by students themselves. By taking this step we are more likely to see our students think rather than just learn, and we in turn are more likely to learn from them. In an era of accelerating technological disruption in every area of public life, we all have much to learn.