I might not have made it clear enough in my post, but I’m not endorsing the conception of disciplinary instruction that I spell out here. Instead, I’ve tried to clarify a certain kind of logic that might (and, I think, does) lead a certain kind of instructor to be skeptical about assignments involving new media. My thoughts arose out of a discussion of the job of an ed tech program, so I was concerned about how to address the potential/actual concerns of faculty.

Another way of framing the picture of undergraduate instruction that you sketch in your comment – a way that I almost spelled out in the post itself, but one that I wanted to mull over some more first – is that the strict “discipline”-focused teacher might be shown the value of new media assignments by a careful evaluation of the goals of the course and of the discipline in general. When you answer the question “what’s the purpose of an intro to philosophy course” with “to give students an introduction to philosophical methods and topics”, you’re not really digging as deep as you should be. The question is why those methods and topics are valuable to think about in the first place, and why those reasons are valuable, and so on, until you can get to some relatively irreducible goals for the course. If educational technologists make this discussion a starting point for their discussions about implementing tech into a syllabus, it might help show how disciplinary instruction is actually not at odds with assignments using new media in a native way.

Faculty members who teach only to reproduce themselves should teach only grad students. Those who teach undergraduates *should* be cognizant of the gen ed curriculum of their schools and how their discipline fits into that program and interacts with the other disciplines to which their students are exposed. When teaching upper-level students, they should expect a certain amount of facility with the tools of the field and even some sophistication, but what is the argument for expecting professional-level scholarly work?

If one works within the learning goals framework I’ve laid out above, it’s easy to see how a faculty member might mix a variety of assignments into its attainment. Certainly assignments can be designed that meet both the requirements of work in the discipline while also qualifying as native use, pro media literacy types of work. A class that builds a site about a neighborhood requires both research and struggling with the implications of presenting material online, and with the proper guidance and tools could balance those pursuits quite nicely.