Blended Media: Student-Generated Mash-ups to Promote Engagement with Science Content

Introduction

The tsunami of technological advances, especially in mobile devices, is enabling students in schools and universities to create a variety of innovative digital media to share with others. It is therefore not surprising that of the six key trends predicted for the next five years in the 2014 Horizon Report for higher education (Johnson, Adams Becker, Estrada, & Freeman, 2014), the two most prominent are students as content creators and students’ use of social media for learning. The Horizon Report predicts that there will be a pervasive “shift from students as consumers to students as creators” (p. 14) that will drive change in higher education within 3–5 years. Whilst we agree with the prediction, we disagree with the timing—it is happening now. Examples can be found around the world as evidenced in a recent edited book that includes chapters detailing ways that tertiary instructors have their students create a digital media product as an assignment (Hoban, Nielsen, & Shepherd, 2016). Further, these examples cross a range of science subjects, for example, biochemistry (Vanderlelie, 2016); engineering (Belski & Belski, 2016); technology (Jablonski, 2016); pre-service science teacher education (Amos & Campbell, 2016; Keast & Cooper, 2016; Kidman, 2016); environmental biology (Rayner, 2016) and pharmacology (Pearce, 2016).

This shifting of responsibility from content consumers to content creators is being fuelled by the accessibility of mobile technologies that include various affordances for representing content. In particular, access to personal technologies such as smart phones and tablets serve to increase students’ capacity and mobility to create media anywhere and anytime (Cochrane, 2011; Jones & Issroff, 2007). According to Traxler (2010), mobile technologies provide users with more ownership of knowledge and responsibility for learning since “mobile devices demolish the need to tie particular activities to particular places or particular times…mobile technologies have converged with the wider user-generated movement associated with Web 2.0 rhetoric and technologies” (p. 151-155). Whilst students are increasingly creating digital media, it is mainly for the purpose of uploading to social media sites such as Facebook, YouTube and Instagram. However, there are several important reasons why students in schools and universities should be encouraged to create digital media for educational purposes.

First, creating digital media is a way to engage students with content. Blumenfeld, Kempler and Krajcik (2006) define engagement as “students’ willingness to invest and exert effort in learning …the use of strategies can be superficial or deep ….deep level engagement involves the use of elaboration and organizational strategies as students try to connect new ideas to old” (p. 475). In designing and creating a digital product to represent content, students first need to understand the content and then make decisions about how to synthesise and represent the information into a coherent media product. This process requires organization and decision-making skills consistent with Blumenfeld et al.’s definition of engagement. Students are also usually willing to invest their own time in using personal technology such as smart phones and computers. All such devices have access to free media- making software, which, further, gives students a sense of ownership and authority in representing content.