The simple yet far-reaching ambition of this collection is to discover how to use digital media for learning on campus and off. It offers a rich selection of methodologies, social practices, and hands-on assignments by leading educators who acknowledge the opportunities created by the confluence of mobile technologies, the World Wide Web, film, video games, TV, comics, and software while also acknowledging recurring challenges.

In their work, academics build on the research of their peers, but when it comes to pedagogy, this is not always so. This selection of essays hopes to contribute to changing that by exploring how we learn through digital media; the authors ask how both ready-at-hand proprietary platforms and open-source tools can be used to create situations in which all learners actively engage each other and the teacher to become more proficient, think in more complex ways, gain better judgment, become more principled and curious, and lead distinctive and productive lives. Today, learning is at least as much about access to other people as it is about access to information. Such participatory learning cannot be exclusively about “career readiness” or vocational training but must also assist learners to reflect on social justice, love, history and ethics.

Where, when, how, and even what we are learning is changing. Teachers need to consider how to engage learners with content by connecting to their current interests as well as their technological habits and dependencies. Learning with digital media isn’t solely about using this or that software package or cloud computing service. The altered roles of the teacher and the student substantially change teaching itself. Learning with digital media isn’t about giving our well-worn teaching practices a hip appearance; it is, more fundamentally, about exploring radically new approaches to instruction. The future of learning will not be determined by tools but by the re-organization of power relationships and institutional protocols. Digital media, however, can play a positive role in this process of transformation.

For professor Brad Mehlenbacher, digital learning undergirds constructivist visions of radical change in how teachers approach learners, challenging traditional power relationships and emphasizing student-centered learning. We can try to imagine how cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead, artist and Bauhaus professor Paul Klee, or Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin would use digital media to take their students on intellectual adventures. Today, such innovative approaches to learning also matter to game designer and educator Katie Salen who, in Re-Imagining Learning in the 21st Century, described good contemporary teachers as learning experts, mentors, motivators, technology integrators, and diagnosticians.