Plenary with Sean Michael Morris: Teaching through the Screen and the Necessity of Imagination Literacy
Date Thursday, Dec 3 Time –
If one thing has become clear since the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic it is that in the most dire situations, our imagination, our creativity, underpins our perseverance. Faculty, administrators, learning designers, students who have responded to this crisis with "what if?" instead of "what now?" have found innovative ways to deliver instruction, form community across distance, teach and learn and sustain education through the screen. The imagination is a critical literacy as much as it is an active agent in our answer to turning points and challenging situations. In this talk, Sean will explore how a pedagogy of imagination has supported, and can continue to sustain, the work of education during this crucial time.
Chairperson

Ilona Buchem
Beuth Hochschule für Technik Berlin, Germany
Ilona Buchem (PhD) is Professor for Media and Communication at Beuth University of Applied Sciences in Berlin. She graduated with a Master’s degree in Applied Linguistics at the University of Warsaw (Poland), Concordia University (WI, USA) and University Duisburg-Essen (Germany).
She studied Educational Sciences at Humboldt University in Berlin and obtained her PhD degree in Business Education in 2009. Her research and teaching focus on the intersections of digital media and society, with special focus on emerging technologies such as social, mobile, wearable and smart technologies. Her research interests include Digital Collaboration, Digital Diversity, Digital Learning and Digital Leadership.
Ilona Buchem has led a number of R&D projects dedicated to emerging digital media for learning and digital strategies in organisations. She is the Chair of the Special Interest Group on Wearable Technology Enhanced Learning at the European Association of Technology Enhanced Learning (EATEL), the founder of the Europortfolio German Chapter and a member of several organisations related to distance education and technology-enhanced learning, including the Association of Media in Science (GMW) and the European Distance Education Network (EDEN).
She has initiated and has been actively involved in a number of national and international projects both as a project coordinator and a researcher, including Open Virtial Mobility (Erasmus+), Open Badge Network (Erasmus+), BewARe (BMBF), Digital Future (Stifterverband), fMOOC (BMBF), BeuthBonus (BMBF, BMAS, BA, ESF), Credit Points (BMBF, BMAS, BA), Wikipedia Diversity (Wikimedia), Mediencommunity 2.0, iCollaborate and Future Social Learning Networks (FSLN).
Links
http://www.beuth-hochschule.de/
Speaker

Sean Michael Morris
Director of Digital Pedagogy Lab, University of Colorado Denver, USA
I am a digital teacher and pedagogue, with experience especially in instructional design, networked learning, digital composition and publishing, collaboration, and editing. I've been working in digital teaching and learning for 16 years. My work in the field of Critical Digital Pedagogy and Critical Instructional Design is founded in the philosophy of Paulo Freire, and finds contemporary analogues in the work of Howard Rheingold, Audrey Watters, Henry Giroux, bell hooks, and Jesse Stommel. I am committed to engaging audiences in critical inspection of digital technologies, and to turning a social justice lens upon education.
I am currently Senior Instructor of Learning, Design, and Technology in the School of Education and Human Development at the University of Colorado at Denver. I am also the Director of Digital Pedagogy Lab, an experiential, exploratory professional development gathering for a global digital pedagogy community; and I am the former director and managing editor for Hybrid Pedagogy, a digital journal of learning, teaching, and technology. I am the co-author of An Urgency of Teachers: the Work of Critical Digital Pedagogy, and a contributor to Disrupting Digital Humanities, Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities, MOOCs and their Afterlives: Experiments in Scale and Access in Higher Education, Applied Pedagogies: Strategies for Online Writing Instruction, and Critical Examinations of Distance Education Transformation Across Disciplines.
I have been working in digital learning environments since 1999, first as an instructional designer, and later as an adjunct instructor and English program chair. I've consulted with institutions and corporations including the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Marylhurst University, the Community College of Denver, Udacity, Instructure, the City University of New York, HASTAC, the University of Delaware, the University of Dayton, the American University in Cairo, Iliff School of Theology, Warwick University, Open University, and the University of Mary Washington, among others. I received my M.A. in English from the University of Colorado at Boulder.