As more students bring powerful pocket-sized computers to class in the form of their smartphones and tablets, faculty need to take advantage by devising curriculum that incorporates mobile video production as a means of contributing to the discourse of the university and the world at large. Projects where students use mobile devices to make videos create active learning environments where they are more likely to build and connect their classroom learning with what they already know. These types of projects also develop student digital composing skills while navigating several issues pertinent to a 21st century participatory culture. These assignments engage students with themes and issues that not only promote success in higher education but throughout their careers.
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With increasing calls for accountability, many faculty in higher education are paying more attention to which teaching strategies better promote student learning – with most realizing that they are uninterested in students simply echoing facts as evidence of knowledge retention. Instead, instructors want their classes to demonstrate the complex levels of learning that usually rank higher on Bloom’s Taxonomy of the Cognitive Learning Domain (Bloom, Engelhart, Furst, Hill, & Krathwohl, 1956); faculty are explicitly interested in learning that demonstrates analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.
More recent scholarship about teaching and learning has expanded both concepts of knowing and learning. Kalantzis and Cope (2008) outline a shift in “ways of knowing” from confidence in concrete truths based upon a single way of creating knowledge to an epistemological relativism and a more skeptical approach to both the process and product of knowing, (p. 189). The authors then outline “knowledge repertoires,” a more contemporary and diverse understanding of knowledge that accounts for legitimized methods of knowing with respect for difference (p. 189). There has also been an explosion of scholarship that discusses the neurological aspects of knowing and learning. Zull (2002) reminds us that learning must occur within specific sections of the brain and knowing physically changes the brain.
The more contemporary neurological research on learning has reminded many faculty that Bloom’s Taxonomy did not only include the cognitive domain. The affective domain (Krathwohl, Bloom, & Masia, 1964) and the psychomotor domain (Simpson, 1972) greatly impact student learning. Since Sutton-Smith’s landmark articulation of the relationship between play and learning in The Ambiguity of Play (1997), many in higher education have sought a curriculum that unites these once conceptually polarized concepts. Lack of stress (Medina, 2008), coupled with positive, even fun (Zull, 2002), learning activities that engage all of the senses (Medina, 2008; & Zull, 2002) are more likely to facilitate learning.