Learning To Teach Creative Technologies Remotely: A Virtual UnSymposium on 22-23 Jan 2021 was spearheaded by De Angela with a few of her Integrated Digital Media (IDM) colleagues, Tega Brain, Luke DuBois, Reginé Gilbert, and Kathleen McDermott, as well as IDM friend Ashley Jane Lewis, and hosted by IDM at NYU Tandon School of Engineering. This 2-day event was an opportunity to participate in conversations on how to foster creativity and experimentation within this new teaching and learning landscape. On Airmeet, we got together and shared what worked and didn’t work in our remote and hybrid classrooms this past year, as well as workshopped opportunities and challenges for our pedagogy in the coming semester.
Session topics included:
- Creative Coding
- Physical Computing / IoT / Computational Fabrication
- Beyond Zoom: Getting weird with teaching online. What has worked? What has not?
- Virtual Events (i.e. End of semester virtual showcases, exhibitions, and performances)
- Fostering student and/or colleague engagement and community building
- K-12 Virtual Engagement
- Undergraduate and graduate student panels
Our hashtag was #LTT2021 for Learning To Teach 2021.
The event consisted of 10-minute talks about remote or hybrid teaching and learning from 40+ educators across international universities, colleges, and cultural institutions such as CMU, CUNY’s New York City College of Technology, Eyebeam, Facebook, INDIGital, NYU, School for Poetic Computation (SFPC), Spelman College, The Basel School of Design HGK FHNW, The New School, OCAD, Pioneer Works Tech Lab, RISD, RMIT University (Melbourne), Royal Ontario Museum, School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), Tech Kids Unlimited, Technologiestiftung Berlin, York University Glendon College, UCLA, University of Technology Sydney, Technological University Dublin, VCU, and others. We also had two panels, undergraduate and graduate, with students from NYU, Ryerson University, and OCAD, moderated and curated by Ashley Jane Lewis.
We had over 400 attendees from all over the world including Argentina, Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Columbia, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Kenya, Korea, Lithuania, Mexico, Netherlands, Nigeria, Peru, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and the USA.
A massive thanks to all of our speakers and attendees for an incredible way to begin the spring 2021 semester in community!
To learn more about the conversations and resources that were shared, feel free to visit the event’s discord. A custom zine to commemorate the event is forthcoming.
Learning to Teach Conference Series
Learning to Teach is a conference series for educators teaching in creative fields like computational art and design, creative technology, emerging media, and digital humanities. This year and last we found ourselves in a paradigm shift within teaching and learning as classes continue to be held remotely or in hybrid formats due to COVID-19.
The Learning to Teach conference series (2016-present) was founded at the School for Poetic Computation in partnership with the Processing Foundation.
Documentation of previous Learning to Teach events can be found on the Processing Foundation site.
The 2021 Learning to Teach planning committee consists of: