School of Information Studies appoints Terrance Newell
The UW-Milwaukee School of Information Studies is pleased to announce the appointment of Terrance Newell as assistant professor, starting in the Summer of 2007. Passionate about research and teaching and thoroughly integrating innovative technologies into both, he will provide additional depth and breadth to the SOIS research and teaching programs. Not counting adjunct instructors, this will bring the total SOIS faculty and teaching staff to 27.Dr. Newell comes to UW-Milwaukee from Florida State University, where he has been a faculty member in the College of Information. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, School of Library and Information Studies (with a minor in Instructional Systems Technology) and has additional degrees from the University of Southern Mississippi (M.S., Library and Information Science, and teaching certification for Social Science Education) and Mississippi Valley State University (B.S., History).
His dissertation, Rethinking Information Literacy Learning Environments: A Study to Examine the Effectiveness of Two Learning Approaches, addresses issues related to information literacy in two settings. One environment involves a project using a collaborative, constructivist approach to information literacy and the other fuses socio-cultural constructivism, semiotic domain theory, and a multimodal view of information literacy and immersive technology (virtual reality), to create environments within which students can develop information literacy through experiences and interactions.
His work is interdisciplinary and connected to cultural and media studies, visual studies, communications, linguistics, education, computer science, educational psychology, and instructional systems technology. He sees his research developing in three primary areas: 1) mediating information literacy learning using socio-cultural learning theories coupled with immersive technologies such as virtual reality, 2) laying a theoretical substratum of multimodal information literacy, and 3) interrogating the dynamic relationships among learners, information educators, teaching/learning communities and learning tools/objects that are mediated by information literacy learning approaches.
Dr. Newell is passionate about teaching. He sees his teaching role as a critical site of struggle from which we can shift the center of thought within the field, promoting a discussion of ideas and practices from the central traditional core to the margins of emerging thought. An example of an innovative course he is teaching, “Design and Production of Networked Multimedia,” provides students with an opportunity to learn the knowledge and social practices of multimodal/multimedia design, production and dissemination, with a particular focus on designing for activity systems. He incorporates 3D virtual reality to simulate various socio-cultural contexts within which students can employ theoretical lens and social practices and experience particular communities of practice. In the School of Information Studies, his teaching will span several subjects and include graduate and undergraduate courses, from core courses in the MLIS, to specialized courses, such as one for which he is currently preparing a proposal, “Information Literacy & Video/Computer Games."
Dr. Newell’s wife, Markeda Newell, has recently been appointed Assistant Professor in the UWM School of Education, effective Fall, 2007. Currently finishing her dissertation at Florida State University and completing an internship in FSU’s Multidisciplinary Evaluation and Consulting Center, she also received degrees from UW-Madison and the University of Southern Mississippi. Her research focuses on theoretical and practical understandings of racial and ethnic diversity in educational settings. Among her various approaches, one involves the creation of desktop virtual realities used to construct sophisticated 3D semi-immersion experiences in which the participants find themselves in highly interactive, multi-sensory, artificial environments that are so vivid that they appear real. The purpose of such virtual environments is to create dynamic, simulated consultation situations, which are used to analyze the activity of practitioners.
SOIS welcomes Terrance and Markeda Newell to UW-Milwaukee, looks forward to their contributions to the instructional and research missions of the University, and anticipates that future interdisciplinary collaborations will be mutually beneficial.
posted by SOIS at 11:22 AM
