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Educational Media Ecologies: Asking the Right Questions

Educational media ecology involves the spaces, environments, voices, practices, and technologies that surround, inhabit, and shape the very process of knowledge creation. These cannot be neatly divided. Educators, students, books, classrooms, curricula, institutions, languages, assessments, cultures, and now artificial intelligence influence the creation, acceptance, and dissemination of knowledge.

Lum (2000) uses the intricate connections between media, people, and social forces to explain media ecology. The media are more than just impartial information carriers. They are biased as they allow certain forms of perception, communication, and knowledge to become more visible while others are pushed into the background. Culture shapes media while quietly being shaped by media itself. We may not be aware of this happening because we already live in the environments we are trying to understand.

Strate and Lum’s (2000) discussion of Mumford expands media ecology beyond what we conventionally think of as “media.” Mumford’s “technics” include not only machines but also people, practices, skills, institutions, and forms of social organization. His “megamachine” shows what can happen when people and technologies operate together as one large system, guided by efficiency, power, authority, and control. Media ecology poses more questions than just “Does this technology work?” It inquires about the ways in which technology allows us to think and live, whose purposes it serves, and the things it subtly keeps us from seeing.

Educational buildings are not only spaces where knowledge is taught and learned. They are the very structures that help create what knowledge will look like within those foundations. In the deep crevices of a building, the voices of its inhabitants may remain long buried. Every pillar, every curve, and every crack in the ceiling has a story to tell. A story of how existing forms of knowledge came into being. A story of how knowers know what they know today. The environment and its surroundings encompass the evolution of knowledge production. These buildings guide whose knowledge will be taught and how.

De Castell, Droumeva, and Jenson (2014) describe a building as an active interface rather than merely a passive container. A building restricts some actions, relationships, and forms of learning while allowing others. But what happens when we inhabit the same environments for so long that we forget to notice these surroundings? Their influence has not disappeared but has simply become too familiar to be noticed.

The right question to ask here is how does education take shape and form as guided by the very buildings that actually build education? How is knowledge produced not only through its transfer but also through the form it takes and how it travels? Whose knowledge is made visible, and whose voice fades? Is it possible to become epistemically aware without a gentle nudge to awaken learners who have been in slumber for too long because of being within the same environments?

AI now becomes another inhabitant of this educational ecology. Asking whether it makes learning time efficient is not enough. What happens to learners’ epistemic agency when polished answers appear swiftly? Which voices, sources, and ways of knowing appear through its responses, and which become invisible? Media ecology makes us aware of these otherwise usually invisible relationships. It allows us to ask not only whether an educational environment can be sustained, but also whether its knowledge, relationships, and ways of knowing are worthy of being sustained.

References:

de Castell, S., Droumeva, M., & Jenson, J. (2014). Building as interface: Sustainable educational ecologies. MedienPädagogik, 24, 75–93.

Lum, C. M. K. (2000). Introduction: The intellectual roots of media ecology. The New Jersey Journal of Communication, 8(1), 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1080/15456870009367375

Strate, L., & Lum, C. M. K. (2000). Lewis Mumford and the ecology of technics. The New Jersey Journal of Communication, 8(1), 56–78. https://doi.org/10.1080/15456870009367379