Digital Pedagogy, Critical Pedagogy, Hybrid Pedagogy, #digped

by Sean Michael Morris

"I believe that community colleges are situated best among all institutions of higher education to open education to the lifelong, autonomous learner. Four-year institutions are limited by their own biologies, and the ossification of values of expertise, specialization, exclusivity, reputation, and relevance. But the anatomy of the community college gives it much greater flexibility, and therefore greater resiliency in the face of the challenges of new learning. The community college is based on far more humanistic, and more open source, values: personal achievement, complementarity between learning and life skills, diversity, citizenship, and autonomy. There are no “research one” community colleges; every one of these two-year institutions is founded on teaching, and on leading students into a greater understanding of their own intellectual potential."

There are better forums for discussion than online discussion forums. The discussion forum is a ubiquitous component of every learning management system and online learning platform from Blackboard to Moodle to Coursera. Forums have become, in many ways, synonymous with discussion in the online class, as though one relatively standardized interface can stand in for the many and varied modes of interaction we might have in a physical classroom.

As teachers, we sometimes get tired of hearing our own voices. That’s why we show movies, bring in guest speakers, and encourage discussion. Plus, we want to bring in other views in order to provide alternative perspectives. Otherwise, we’re just recreating ourselves in our students. Worse than that, a lack of diverse voices in the classroom can lead to boredom and indifference―so let’s have some fun, and maybe even some inspiration.

In A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown write, “Embracing Change means looking forward to what will come next. It means viewing the future as a set of new possibilities, rather than something that forces us to adjust. It means making the most of living in a world of motion” (43). The changing landscape of education in the digital age asks us to reconsider what, how, and where we learn. On May 3, Hybrid Pedagogy will host a #digped discussion about peer-to-peer learning and how we can shift from thinking about educational institutions toward thinking about learning collectives. The following is drawn from Chapter 4 of Thomas and Brown’s book. While our Twitter discussion will center around this section, we also encourage you to read the first three chapters in PDF format, buy the entire book, and explore other resources the authors have made available online.

by Sean Michael Morris and Jesse Stommel

The failure of online education programs is not logistical, nor political, nor economic: it’s cultural, rooted in our perspectives and biases about how learning happens and how the internet works (these things too often seen in opposition). For learning to change drastically -- a trajectory suggested but not yet realized by the rise of MOOCs -- teaching must change drastically. And in order for that to happen, we must conceive of the activity of teaching, as an occupation and preoccupation, in entirely new and unexpected ways. We must unseat ourselves, unnerve ourselves. Online learning is uncomfortable, and so educators must become uncomfortable in their positions as teachers and pedagogues. And the administration of online programs must follow suit.

by Pete Rorabaugh and Jesse Stommel

Intended to serve as a stop-motion camera for the torrent of information we get from social media, Storify allows the user to arrange pieces of conversations to construct a narrative. When we first began teaching with Twitter, we wanted to contain conversations that would eventually evaporate. Twitter allows us to go back through someone’s stream to see everything, but the simple organization that a hashtag brings to an organic conversation has about a two-week window. If we start a back-channel conversation in a lecture one day, Twitter requires that we look at it, learn from it, and let it go soon after. Storify emerged on the scene last year to cull these kinds of social media contributions (not just on Twitter) and freeze them.

Higher education needs more bravery. Digital pedagogy, or any experimental critical pedagogy, is necessarily dangerous, often with real risks for both instructors and students, much of which can be valuable for learning. But when we experiment with our pedagogies, we confront an establishment that can be hostile to anything new -- an establishment that often punishes rather than rewards innovation -- that increasingly enforces the standardization of curriculums and classroom practice. With approximately three-quarters of all classes being taught by contingent faculty, any deviation can trigger a non-renewal, leaving the critical pedagogue on the outside looking in.

by Sean Michael Morris

We are not ready to teach online. In a recent conversation with a friend, I found myself puzzled, and a bit troubled, when he expressed confusion about digital pedagogy. He said something to the extent of, "What's the difference between digital pedagogy and teaching online? Aren't all online teachers digital pedagogues?" Being a contemplative guy, I didn't just tip over his drink and walk away. Instead, I pondered the source of his question. Digital pedagogy is largely misunderstood in higher education. The advent of online learning and instructional design brought the classroom onto the web, and with it all manner of teaching: good and bad, coherent and incoherent, networked and disconnected. Whatever pedagogy any given teacher employed in his classroom became digitized. If I teach history by reading from my twenty-year-old notes, or if I lead workshops in creative writing, or if I teach literature through movies, I bring that online and -- boom! -- I'm a digital pedagogue. Right?

The Challenge: Incorporate an open source community service project into every class. What happens to a student paper or project after the individual turns it in or presents it in class? Where does it go? What, ultimately, is at stake for the student when s/he sits down to apply his or her thoughts to paper? What mediums do these thoughts and ideas travel through and whom they reach? What impact does their effort make beyond the classroom?

by Bonnie Stewart

Here’s a little secret: when I started teaching people how to teach online, I had no clue what I was doing.

by Audrey Watters

“It’s early days for online education,” declared a recent article in the technology blog  Techcrunch, with its typical giddiness about the changes that technology is poised to bring to schooling. But the narrative that education and technology have only recently intersected ignores decades of products and practices. It ignores decades of experiences and expertise. And while some things ed-tech might seem quite shiny, it’s worth asking -- with a nod to the past and a good deal of skepticism about the promises for the future -- “what’s new?”

The idea of teaching a subject as highly individualized as composition strikes many dedicated instructors as problematic at least. While technologists support the idea of "robo-grading", most writing instructors understand intuitively how technology will always fail to mimic the nuance present in human reading and evaluation. Our conversation developed primarily around three important matters: the role of students in their own assessment (peer-review), the role of the instructor in collective learning environments, and the matter of how we go forward as pedagogues upon whose innovation and knowledge the effectiveness of massive learning will depend.

Play is making a comeback. There have been TED Talks, peer-reviewed articles inpediatrics journals, pieces in The Atlantic, and an entire industry now devoted to the “right” kind of play for our kids’ development. So why devote another 2000+ words to play and pedagogy, especially because it has already been done well by the creators of this very site?

by Pete Rorabaugh

On Friday, March 8, I interviewed Anya Kamenetz, author of DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Change in Higher Education(2010). Kamenetz's writing investigates systemic problems associated with funding, institutional inflexibility, and explores homegrown alternatives. DIY U was one of the first books published in the U.S. to discuss the incipient cMOOC community and also touches on the work of Jim Groom at the University of Mary Washington. In the wake of a year's worth of media-MOOC-craziness, I asked about Kamenetz's reflections since the publication of DIY U, specifically related to innovations within and alternatives to the structure of higher education. 

by Jesse Stommel

Digital pedagogy is not a dancing monkey. It won’t do tricks on command. It won’t come obediently when called. Nobody can show us how to do it or make it happen like magic on our computer screens. There isn’t a 90-minute how-to webinar, and we can’t outsource it.