You’re tuned to HybridPod: a podcast exploring conversations of Critical Digital Pedagogy, listening for ways to empower students and champion learning. It’s the aural side of Hybrid Pedagogy: a digital journal of learning, teaching, and technology. I’m Chris Friend, from Saint Leo University.
In the previous episode, Digital Pedagogy, Part 1, I tried to define what “digital pedagogy” was, or whether it was actually a thing. You don’t need to have heard it before listening to this one, but that episode does provide some context for the conversation here. It also helps introduce the voices you’ll be hearing from today. So it’s best to listen to that episode before this one, not after, but it’s not essential.
Shortly before I assembled this episode, Hybrid Pedagogy hosted a one-hour Twitter chat about technology policies in course syllabi. Many teachers prohibit the use of technology in their classes, occasionally forbidding laptops and frequently forbidding cell phones. These bans are generally called “technology policies”, but that name ignores the fact that the ballpoint pens and bleached-white papers our students otherwise use, as well as the chairs in which they sit and the windows out of which they stare are each another form of technology, created by humans as a tool to help make life simpler and more productive. Why are they not banned in “technology policies”, too?
I wonder whether it’s time or design that determines whether we think of something as a technology. I mean, I know that something doesn’t stop being technology when it’s old, but how long does something need to be with us before it’s no longer considered tech? A book of matches required design of the paper, plus the chemicals used to safely initiate combustion. I doubt many people look at a matchbook and think of it as a technology, though it was only developed in the middle of the 1800s. How often, when we flip a light switch or turn on a faucet, do we think of the technology involved in providing electricity or running water? How many teachers say they don’t like the distractions of technology, when they mean they don’t like the technologies that they didn’t have when they were students?
These questions may seem like red herrings, but I think it’s important to point out how much novelty plays into our current perceptions of technology. The same holds true with educational technology, with the siren song of “new! improved! faster! lighter! thinner! more features!” constantly vying for our attention…and our money. It’s too easy for us to focus on the novelty and not on the implications. We can too easily lose our critical perspective by thinking about what we can do versus what we should do.
I spoke with Estee Beck…
[Beck intro]
…about the essence of novelty in technology and the tension it creates with familiarity versus change.
Chris, to Estee: I think what you’re talking about is an appeal to nostalgia. And I think that it might be used to counteract the novelty of tech. Because the marketing of technology almost much always emphasizes the new, and what you can do now that you couldn’t do before. And so it really rests its reputation on change, and change is not necessarily the easiest thing to sell to people. And so I think if you balance that change with nostalgia and say, this is something that’s familiar to you. This is something that you already know how to do. You already work this way. And we’re just going to make it easier or faster or better or simpler or something like that. It allows that sense of comfort in light of the novelty and makes it more approachable.
Estee: Yes. And extending this a little bit further, the idea of marketing a new technology. There’s a lot of hype surrounded around this new way of communicating and interacting. And I think this goes back to concerns about surveillance, privacy, representation, or really just writing infrastructures in general. And I think there are so many benefits to using tools — digital tools, we’ll just go ahead and say that — you know, like, different forms of applications and software programs, but the message to get people on board plays at people’s sense of, you know, connection, or their vanity, or their ego or desires. And in ways that perhaps don’t emphasize real concerns over what information is disseminated in those spaces, whether it is leakage of information through data breaches, whether it is companies intentionally tracking information and holding on to that data for a long period of time, or perhaps even the more visible forms of just being, you know, appropriate in ways on social media spaces.
What “being appropriate in social media spaces” means isn’t always clear. Estee puts a lot of thought into the ways technology pushes against some of our basic expectations of modern life. Because you see, some people say that “the digital” is a reference to the way we code or process information, referring back to how digital interactions originally were with our digits, our hands, and have now become physical interactions with technology that uses ones and zeroes to manipulate, process, and store information.
Estee: And that’s a point of conversation that I find interesting to engage in within digital pedagogy within itself because it is… If we’re saying… If for me… if I’m saying that digital pedagogy relied on Angela Haas, is just, like, the way we code information, then part of the way that we code info is also reflecting upon how that info is stored, is processed, is used in ways that are visible and invisible to us and to others. And I think it is important to not only make that apparent to students but then also to prepare them for people who may go into tech-industry jobs, who are actually then starting to create the very types of programs that use, you know, tracking technologies in ways we might not be so comfortable with.”
Cori Anderson…
[Cori intro]
…is also not so comfortable with a lot of today’s technology privacy concerns. She avoids using social media and other non-university-provided systems in her classes so that she can maintain more control over the environments in which her students work.
Cori: This is a really big drum that I like to beat because I think we may be a little closed-minded, especially those of us who are heavily involved in social media. We don’t know our students’ lives. They may have a dangerous person in their life, and that’s why they’re not on Facebook. They may have other issues where they don’t want their name too publicly visible. And so, without even getting into those concerns, by keeping things within the university, we can make it a safe space for them before we even have to cross any of those bridges. Privacy I think is a major concern of the digital world, and therefore it should be a concern of digital pedagogy.
For Cori, privacy is a matter of control, a question of who is responsible for student data and who has access to student work or writing. The struggle for control, though, isn’t always between teacher and social media or big industries. It can also happen within the university and with technology that an institution implements. In these cases, the struggle is for control of the content of a class: Do we teach to the tool, or do we use a tool to get us where we’re trying to go? I chatted about this with Sean Michael Morris.
[Sean intro]
Chris, to Sean: I want to talk for a second about wagging the dog, leashing the dog, reminding the dog who’s in charge…that sort of thing. So…Whitney Kilgore said that sometimes she likes to think that pedagogy helps with tool selection, but that sometimes the tail wags the dog. You agreed and then said that “Part of digital pedagogy is to remind the dog who’s in charge.”
Sean: I think if we change “dog” for “LMS”, for example, that sometimes the LMS controls the pedagogy, right? Or we view it that way. Oh, I have this small container in which I can do my learning and teaching. And that’s the tail wagging the dog. That’s the LMS telling the teacher what to do. And that’s incorrect. The tool… You never sit there and listen to a screwdriver or a hammer, so you shouldn’t sit there and listen to the LMS either. The tool is always what you want to do with it, and the most creative tool users are the ones who take the screwdriver and figure out how to paint with it. We shouldn’t limit ourselves by what the tools are. We are the dog. And that’s our tail.
There’s this war that happens between teachers and technologists, and it’s sometimes a very cold war. They’re fighting for control of the classroom. But in truth, they could be players together. And so the idea of “leashing the LMS” to me is saying we need to have control, we need to show it what to do. Because at the other end of the LMS is a very smart designer who created that thing, and who probably put in little pockets and holes and things that we can play with that we’re not aware of. And so there needs to be a much more playful relationship to technology, and to the LMS in particular. I mean, even with, like, Twitter. People think that Twitter works a certain way. People think Facebook works in a certain way. They think Google Docs works in a certain way. But you can break all of these. They’ve all been designed with certain breakable points. Because designers are creative people. They’re smart, they’re creative, they’re interested in technology, they want to make something fun and interesting. They don’t want to be boring; they don’t want to be bored.
So if we recognize that what we’re doing when we interact with an LMS or when we interact with some other technology, so what we’re doing is we’re interacting with a technologist. We’re interacting with the creative mind behind it. Then, we start to play. So it’s this wonderful sort of relationship, a very sort of synergistic relationship between the teacher and the technologist, the teacher and the tech. Instead of it being a relationship of control, there’s no fight here. There’s no cold war here. There needs to be more communication and more playfulness.
So if we all just agree to get along, if the tech designer avoids trying to control exactly how an app, site, or service is used, and if a teacher avoids trying to control the learning environment in which students operate, the scenario becomes far more collaborative, and it more closely resembles real-world problem solving. I’ll come back to problem-solving in a few minutes, but to get there, I want to start talking about the issue of transferability. Basically, if I have my students use one specific technology in my class, how likely is it that they can use that experience or those skills elsewhere down the line?
If you’ve ever worked at an institution where it transitioned from one LMS to another, you’ve seen how painful such a transition can be: Teachers and students have to build new mental models for how the new system works and how they need to interact with it. Or think about the last time you bought a new computer or phone, or the last time you upgraded your most-used applications or even your operating system on any of those devices. The change is frequently jarring, and it takes time to re-orient yourself to what’s different. If we teach our students to use a particular application, what happens when that app gets updated? Does all our teaching amount to nothing?
I remember when I taught in a public, brick-and-mortar high school. We offered business classes that taught students how to use productivity software. Specifically, students learned Microsoft Office. I remember the reaction from the head of the business department when Microsoft announced the release of Office 2010. She said, “I need that software. We need to upgrade all our machines now.” I was taken aback by her enthusiasm, as I’d heard about some pretty striking changes to the interface in that version, and I remembered the headache of changing file formats for Word documents three years earlier. I asked what features compelled her to upgrade. Her response? “I don’t care. Our students need to be learning that version because it’s what’s going to be used everywhere by the time they graduate.”
While I laud her intentions to familiarize her students with what would be standard in the business world by the time they went into the job market, the uncritical move to upgrade a lab full of computers (and, of course, to purchase new textbooks for those new programs) still makes me cringe. She operated on the premise that she was teaching a specific application, instead of a transferrable skill set. Couldn’t she save time, trouble, and money by teaching students things that applied in various situations, not just in one version of one program? At the Digital Pedagogies panel in April 2015, we discussed Wordpress as a specific tool that is often taught in today’s undergraduate courses that involve digital writing. Many of us argued that Wordpress, as a specific app, shouldn’t be taught. Here’s Cori again.
Cori: I think I agree with you that Wordpress as a thing isn’t as important as the skill of blogging. Which is kind of strange because I feel like putting Microsoft Office on a resume is important, and that is something that’s often listed as a prerequisite for getting a job, is “highly proficient in Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel,” for instance. I think that PowerPoint deserves a lot of the criticism it gets. Microsoft Word, you really can’t get away from that. Microsoft Word is like using a can opener and then calling yourself a chef.
So when it comes to technology, do universal features or transferable skills even exist? Some say they might, but we need to work to highlight them, letting students know that a tool is a means to an end, rather than the point of a class. Here’s Cecilia Lo…
[Cecilia intro]
…and her thoughts on transfer in digital spaces.
Cecilia, 18:43: The transferrable skill is using digital tools. A lot of these tools have similar concepts, like, in term of construction. For example, you see a lot of apps. If you see a plus sign, that means create a new document. Once you know one tool works like this, if you see another tool that has similar layout, similar sort of visual language, you learn this visual language, and if you’re administering that say, blog or whatever tool, you get to know what kind of options you have. And if you use a new tool, you have that background, and it’s much faster to pick up. So that’s the transferability.
Kristy Rawson…
[Kristy Intro]
…uses tools as a way to start a conversation about broader issues that affect the way we use those tools.
Kristy: When you start bringing other tools into the classroom, you start having conversations about audience. When you start to have your students write online instead of for each other, instead of just the singular audience of one—the instructor—they’re going to write differently, they’re going to think about their topic differently, and they’re going to start conceptualizing audience, which I think is always valuable in any context.
Estee, whom you’ve already heard from, goes a bit further with that idea, recognizing the opportunity to specifically work with students to identify how they adapt to new systems and new contexts.
Estee: I think even with any type of pedagogical philosophy, whether it’s critical pedagogy, feminist pedagogy, collaborative pedagogy, there is an element of transfer. And I think what really connects the pedagogies all together is that it’s just a frame or an orientation for exploring and navigating the world around, under a particular type of investigation or orientation or method. And with digital, for instance, I think because there are so many ways to communicate using so many different types of systems of communication that learning some basics on how a platform or a software program or an application or whatever operates, having a literacy for how systems function helps navigate or feel more comfortable orientation when a person enters a system with new rules, with new codes, with new processes. So I think that for me it’s residing at the layer of just, we order…people order the world around them through systems, through laws, through codes, and having an ability to be aware of, to critically reflect upon the rules, the processes, the procedures of systems helps people in general to navigate in a more fluid or dynamic way. Or perhaps in a more easy way.
And Cecilia talked about an “easy way” to learn to navigate the environment of digital tools. To her, the desire to try and navigate a new technological system can itself be a transferrable skill:
Cecilia: The other transferability is a sense of adventure. A willingness to experiment. A lot of these tools, you just click around. Once you get used to the idea, with a lot of these tools, oh, I can just click around! I don’t need to worry about breaking things. That gives you a sense of adventure, a sense of experimentation. That is what I find is most valuable in terms of transferable skills.
Let’s expand this a bit further. Molly Hatcher…
[Molly intro]
…works with graduate students, introducing them to tools they can use in their classes with students. Even though she’s working specifically with people who work in the classroom, she still keeps transferability in mind.
Molly: We’re teaching pedagogy to graduate students, but we know that they are all going towards a faculty career, especially now, given the academic job market. So we want to be sure that what we’re giving them is a range of soft skills that they can transfer to multiple contexts. So we think a lot about that, and not just giving them those tools but making them understand that they have those tools so they can market themselves in really productive ways. So that can be anything from teaching them Wordpress or you know, teaching them to use a learning management system to design a module, but it’s also about the broader picture of what their careers are going to look like.
So I think of things like the digital, that participatory, sharing, collaborative way that I’m thinking about digital — in the same way that I’m thinking about inclusivity and teaching — is that we want to create good citizens who know how to communicate with each other and who know how to leverage each others’ skillsets and backgrounds and interests and know how to engage in a way that’s generative and exciting. And I think that if you give them opportunities to do that in the classroom, whether it’s with a specific tool or whether it’s just getting them to collaborate on knowledge together and not have this proprietary feeling about knowledge or this kind of private, monopolizing feeling about their ideas, that they’re gonna have… They’re gonna carry those into lifelong learning situations.
Kristy Rawson also works with graduate students, but her goal is to train them for their careers, which for her students tend not to be in the classroom. So her view of transferability is quite different from Molly’s, and she asks a different kind of question.
Kristy: What can graduate student teachers take from their teaching experience or use from their teaching experience (when they use these tools) that are going to be more transferable should they be looking for other kinds of work than classroom teaching? And part of the reason that I think about that and that I encourage graduate students to use these kinds of tools in the classroom, is because if you need to get through graduate school with more transferrable skills than one traditionally gets through graduate school with, it’s gonna be time consuming. You’re gonna spend time besides the traditional routes through which you rack up your credentials in research, teaching, and service.
So if you want to start a blog that positions you sort of in a certain sort of public intellectual light, and you need to use Wordpress and get better at it and understand the dynamics of it, and think about what kind of comments you’re going to enable and why, then one really great way to do that in a really sort of time-efficient manner, is to teach it in the classroom and to learn along with your students about writing for a different audience, who that audience is, how that audience might respond, what that means to maybe have them on your blog or not, and all of those things. So then you’ve got more than only your experience running your blog, you’ve got the information that you’ve gleaned from your students, and you just become smarter faster.
All good, right?
Chris: Aaand that’s the goal.
If getting smarter faster really is the goal of education, we might benefit from watching how children learn things when they aren’t in school. After all, think of all the things we learn while we’re at recess. Here’s Sean again to explain.
Sean: It really is very much like kids on a playground. One kid has learned how to play hopscotch. Does that make that kid an expert in hopscotch? Did they get their PhD in hopscotch? And did they do research to find that out? No, they played. And then they learned it. And then they teach someone else to play it. And then you know what? As soon as that person knows how to play hopscotch, they’re on an equal level. And they may quickly master hopscotch. And then all of a sudden they become the teacher for their teacher, and our system doesn’t allow for that — doesn’t compensate for that.
And I think the thing that the whole idea of the digital points out is the whole idea of distributed expertise, in a way we’ve never acknowledged before. We certainly have seen it before, but we’ve never acknowledged it before because our institutions were too valuable to us. When we talk about digital pedagogy, what we’re talking about is a conversation. We’re not even talking about the use of technology. We’re not talking about adoption or networks or…we’re not talking about any of that. What we’re talking about is a conversation about what our lives look like now that they’re digital.
So digital pedagogy — however we define it — and digital technology — however we define that — both work to change our perspectives. They change how students see information, how we see our students, how academics see our own disciplines, and most importantly, how we and our students see ourselves positioned within the world around us. That change in perspective relates to the one comment I got from all the folks we’ve heard from: Digital technologies, unlike anything else, help with collaboration over geographic distances, bringing the far corners of our world a bit more within reach. We hear a lot about this when talking about digital tools because it’s something that we simply cannot do unless we use a digital tool to help us. Communication over the global distances we now take for granted requires electronic technologies, rather than, say, writing or spoken language, which, while they are technologies developed by humans, don’t require anything electronic and have been a part of our society for so long that we have mostly stopped considering them technology altogether.
Newer technologies, though perhaps less culturally familiar, are nonetheless prevalent and beneficial…as long as we stop and think what we should do with them, rather than merely thinking of what we can do. However, what we cannot do is ignore or prohibit them. Those “technology policies” need to go away.
You've been tuned to HybridPod, a production of Hybrid Pedagogy, Inc.
Just because the show is over doesn't mean the conversation ends. Nearly everyone who contributed to this episode is accessible through Twitter, and so is the show itself. Along those lines, @HybridPod and @chris_friend would like to thank Cori Anderson (who inexplicably doesn’t use Twitter…how is that possible?), Estee Beck (who is @estee_beck), Molly Hatcher (who has quite possibly the best Twitter handle ever. She’s @AdmiralMollsey), Cecilia Lo (who is @HigherEdMuse), Sean Michael Morris (who is @slamteacher), and finally Kristy Rawson (who is @EstherRawson) for adding each of their voices to today's show.
I have good news on the accessibility front: Both of the Digital Pedagogy episodes have complete transcripts available from the Hybrid Pedagogy website! Now you can read along with everyone, search through the text of what we said, or take in the podcast without ever using your ears.
As a bit of a heads-up to those ears (Can I do that? Does the metaphor work that way?), I want to let you know that the next episode of HybridPod will start with new theme music. I figured it was time to lighten up a bit, so I’ll be dropping the dark and brooding tones of the current theme and going with something a bit more energetic. I hope you like it. To be sure you’re among the first to hear the new sounds, go subscribe to the show so you can get each new episode delivered directly to your devices. You can subscribe to HybridPod in iTunes, Stitcher, or Player.fm.
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Thanks for listening!