HybridPod 005 — Digital Pedagogy
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.
Advances in digital technology have become commonplace to the point of being routine. We regularly hear of new developments in hardware, software, or system designs that influence how things get done in modern life. More significantly, though it sometimes seems no less frequently, we hear about major changes in entire industries brought about by the influence of digital technology. For instance, according to Tom Goodwin, senior vice president of strategy and innovation at Havas Media: Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. (You may have read those comments as they initially circulated on Facebook.) Encyclopedia Britannica, long seen as the standard source for general-knowledge reference material, published its last print edition in 2012, but its content has been available online since 1994. Print-based phonebooks are still produced in many places…but when’s the last time you used one? For that matter, you probably know a few people who no longer have a landline phone (I’m one of those people). In each of these cases, the shape and nature of an industry has been redefined because digital technologies rendered the old way of doing things obsolete.
When something “goes digital”, the way we work with that thing fundamentally shifts. With analogue photograph, an image was recorded on film, and the results couldn’t be seen until that film was developed. One-hour photo processing was a big deal. But with digital photography, an image is captured by computer circuitry, converted to zeroes and ones, and saved to a file. Film developing is mostly a historical relic. With analogue writing, text was recorded on paper, with ink or graphite bonding to the surface. The writing was done by hand or by typewriter, and once something was written, it had to be physically manipulated — think white-out, scissors, or erasers — to be changed. But with digital writing, text is captured by computer keys (or speech recognition), converted to zeroes and ones, and saved to a file. Correction tape and carbon paper are mostly historical relics, to say nothing of scribes. With analogue teaching, classes were… classes were… Hey, wait a second. Have we moved from analog to digital teaching?
So there’s the question to launch us into today’s episode. We’re going to talk about moving education into today’s technological era — today, we’re talking about digital pedagogy. It’s actually the continuation of a conversation started back in April 2015 at GradUcon, a student services event for graduate students at the University of Chicago. One panel at this conference-style gathering, organized by Kristy Rawson (whom we’ll hear more from in a little bit), was titled Digital Pedagogies. The panel had broad goals, designed “to share information around a range of digitally enhanced pedagogical practices.” I was one of the panelists, and in this episode of HybridPod, we’ll be hearing from everyone else on that panel as we try and get to the heart of what digital pedagogy actually is, what sets it apart from regular pedagogy, and how digital pedagogy works it today’s educational environments.
That’s not going to be as simple as it initially sounds. Defining “digital pedagogy” presumes that “digital pedagogy” exists — a claim that creates more contention than you might expect. Our Digital Pedagogies panel started with the first panelist saying:
Cecilia Lo: “There’s no such thing as digital pedagogy.”
The rest of the panelists quickly agreed.
Molly Hatcher: “There’s no such thing as digital pedagogy.”
Cori Anderson: “There’s no such thing as digital pedagogy.”
Sean Michael Morris: “Actually, there is.”
That last voice belongs to Sean Michael Morris.
[Sean Intro]
Sean wasn’t at the panel, but he was one of the first people I talked to about it afterward. I shared with him how amused and excited I was when the panel started out with a claim that the thing we had supposedly gathered to talk about wasn’t actually a thing at all. His immediate reaction, objecting to the panelists’ unified stance, caught me off-guard and made me look for some way to resolve the tension. To understand how these two different views can co-exist, I need to unpack them a bit. Let me start with Cecilia Lo, who started the panel off and made that initial claim.
[Cecilia Intro]
Cecilia: “The reason I opened with the line that there is no such thing as Digital Pedagogy is because I think of digital tools — the things that we call digital, they are tools — and the pedagogy part — how do you help students learn — they’re really overarching principles that work with both digital tools or low-tech tools.”
In other words, according to Cecilia, pedagogy applies regardless of the tools we’re working with. The digital forms a layer on top of our pedagogy. Next up was Cori Anderson.
[Cori Intro]
Cori agrees with Cecilia’s take, saying that our pedagogy should be at the heart of what we do. Digital tools give us new ways of expressing or demonstrating our pedagogy, but our intentions can be consistent.
Cori: “So on the one hand, I completely agree that all pedagogy is pedagogy. And so i’ve really been thinking, assuming there is such a thing as digital pedagogy, how is it different from the rest of what we do? And I guess I sort of come down on, well, I guess the only difference is that it involves things that are digital. So are the principles different? No, not necessarily. I think the end goals — what we want our students to leave the class with, what skills we want to give them in general — should be the same. The only difference is the platform.”
In other words, according to Cori, digital pedagogy is normal pedagogy happening in a different space. She’s holding on to a conversation that we could be having without the digital, but that the digital makes necessary. Here’s Kristy Rawson, who organized the panel.
[Kristy intro]
Kristy: “I think Cecilia’s concern, and why it was good that she brought it to our attention right at the beginning is that we didn’t want to be talking about something that was distinct from good pedagogy, and I think that was the use value of it. We’re still talking about teaching. We’re still talking about student learning. This isn’t about technology. And I think that was really productive, and yet as you recall there was someone in the audience going, “What is…? Wait a second, why am I sitting here then? And that also led to a pretty rich sort of counter-argument.”
Chris: “Absolutely, yeah. And led to a lot of discussion of, “Well you’re absolutely right, things do change when we bring technology into this, and the digital does make a difference. And so again, we talked more, and I think we found more common ground as we went.”
Kristy: “Yeah, definitely.”
Chris: “Because, you know, he was able to make a really good point that if we ignore the technological, we will make ourselves obsolete, or we will miss opportunities to work with students in ways that they would find more familiar or are even more relevant.”
Kristy: “Right.”
Chris: “And then we’re all saying that if we ignore the pedagogical side, then we’ll be just as lost because we’re not going to be paying attention to what our students need to help improve their thinking.”
Kristy: “Right.”
That attention to student thinking, rather than to the content or to the tool, is crucial to a balanced view of digital pedagogy. The emphasis of our efforts — in planning, as we teach, even when we assess students — has to be on the way our students think about their work, whatever that may be. And thinking, as we all know, is notoriously, frustratingly, wonderfully unpredictable.
Sean: “I think that what digital pedagogy, when it reminds us to look at our pedagogy, it’s reminding us that learning is always a fluid landscape. It’s always changing. I mean, in the moment. It’s never reliable. It’s never something that we are fully in control of. And so we need to not try to be.
So much of what’s happened with online learning over the last ten years has been about control. More and more and more about control. Even the design of an LMS is really about controlling the experience of learning, and it’s not just like having four walls of a classroom. It’s like having four walls of a classroom and then lines of desks, and then students strapped into those desks, with their eyes propped open to watch the thing that’s happening in the front of the classroom.”
Me: “Yep. It’s Clockwork Orange education.”
Sean: “It really is, and there’s so much control. And it’s in complete denial of what actually happens in learning, that learning is this crazy, weird, dynamic thing that happens that we can’t fully understand, no matter how much we try to. So the teacher is someone who is a master of chaos. They aren’t a master of control. They aren’t a master of order. They’re a master of chaos. They’re able to sort out the sea of things that are going on. They’re able to interpret in the moment. They’re able to move quickly and think on their feet. That’s what we do. That’s what teachers do.”
Working with — and responding to — student thinking is really what makes teaching invigorating, worthwhile, and rewarding, right? Like Sean said, it’s what we do. I mean, I don’t know about you, but I sure as hell didn’t sign up for this gig because I love to grade essays. No…just no.
Working with student thinking is at the heart of good pedagogy. But when we throw the word digital in front of pedagogy, it sounds like things should change, like it’s something different than the pedagogy we’ve spent our time building and refining. When Cecilia opened by saying that “there’s no such thing as digital pedagogy,” she made a claim that things aren’t as different than we might initially think. To look more into this claim, I spoke with Molly Hatcher.
[Molly intro]
Molly says that our panel’s position on the terminology comes from our reactions to what we see going on in conversations about educational technology.
Molly: “We almost felt proud of going into that panel conversation by making that claim, and I think a lot of that has to do with our cynicism towards that term and buzzwords that have generated around educational technology. I think a lot of that has been summed up very nicely by Audrey Watters. She’s articulated this concern about the political and business side of edtech and how that generates these buzzwords and questions about who stands to gain from digital pedagogy and from these educational technology innovations. And I think we are all so interested in making sure that students are the ones who gain and not some big business or developers or someone who’s outside of understanding the best interests of students that we feel like we dig our heels in a little bit when we hear these kinds of things pop up. So I kept thinking about something she said in like the review for last year, which was if you throw the word “digital” in front of anything educational, it seems to give you this purchase on something transformative or something new. And I think that that panel, we all resisted that because we want to start with good pedagogy first that may have these modifiers or different avenues or methods, but that it really, pedagogy is first and foremost to all of us.”
That resistance is important, and I think Molly is exactly right. By saying “there’s no such thing as digital pedagogy,” none of us meant that the digital doesn’t influence what we do. On the contrary — we wanted to show that the digital very much influences what we do, but not that the digital is what we do. We are pedagogues who operate in digital spaces, and we work to help students learn, not to implement new tools.
Now let’s go back to Sean. You remember, he’s the one who dissented with the panel and says there really is such a thing as digital pedagogy. I’ll hand over the mic for a bit here, because he has a really interesting way of presenting his approach. He starts off a bit confrontational, but once he starts talking about the “pedagogical current” underneath the digital tools, you’ll hear that his thinking aligns pretty well with the other voices you’ve heard so far.
Sean: “For me, saying that there is no digital pedagogy is pretty naive. It’s a claim that there’s no difference between a chalkboard and an iPad or, even more germane, no difference between a book and an iPad. There’s probably plenty of cognitive research that’s been done on the differences between turning the pages of a book and turning the pages on a Kindle, but there’s also just a qualitative difference when you’re engaging something that’s digital versus when you’re engaging something that’s — for lack of a better word — analogue. And when we can see that, when we recognize that there’s a qualitative difference in the way that we engage the digital vs the analogue, we can’t deny that that has an effect on the pedagogy when we bring those things into the classroom. It’s actually destructive to say that there’s no difference.
Because if you bring an iPad into the classroom, even if you bring a SmartBoard into the classroom, hell the change of technology from a chalkboard to a whiteboard. These things change the classroom, they change therefore the learning experience, they change what we do in the classroom. That doesn’t mean that pedagogy isn’t foundational, that good pedagogy isn’t a current that flows under everything, right? Good pedagogy, no matter what the tools in the classroom are, no matter what the classroom looks like, no matter what the interface for the learning is, good pedagogy will always remain, to a certain level, consistent. That’s why we can have such a thing that we call “critical digital pedagogy.” It’s essentially critical pedagogy, but it is engaging with digital learning environments.
So that current remains the same. That’s probably what the panelists were talking about, is saying, well, pedagogy is pedagogy is pedagogy. And to a certain extent that’s true, but pedagogy can’t be blind to a change in the environment, a change in the tools, a change in the way we interact with the resources for learning. So I think that to say that there’s no digital pedagogy, it feels like a denial to me. That basically, “you know what, I can stand in front of the class and teach the same way that I’ve always taught even though there are iPads instead of books,” that’s incorrect. You can’t. Because guess what, that iPad also links to the Internet. Your book doesn’t connect to the internet. That iPad also links to the other iPads around it, and books don’t do that. So conversations now can take place in our books that couldn’t take place before. So you have to compensate for that. Your pedagogy has to basically expand to compensate for different ways of interacting, for different ways of connecting, and different ways that the classroom now becomes more permeable.”
We’ll talk more about that permeability later. For now, I’ll say that the biggest thing I gathered from these views is that when we say “digital pedagogy”, we make it sound like we’re talking about something that’s uniform and distinct from analogue pedagogy. Instead, it’s far more accurate and appropriate to discuss “good pedagogy used with digital tools.” Pedagogy itself hasn’t become digital, but it has had to respond to modern life, which has, somewhat, become digital. As Kristy puts it, “Student learning is going to be digital whether it happens in the classroom or not.”
While the commercial emphasis is on novelty and features, teachers need to worry about application. After all, we’ve been saying that understanding and improving student thinking is at the heart of our work. Digital pedagogy needs to help us do that.
Cecilia: “I’m not opposed to use “digital pedagogy” as a term to help raise awareness and to help guide people, to help people think about pedagogy. In higher ed, a lot of people — before the digital tools become popular, a hot topic — people are used to doing what they have been doing. The faculty lecture, and then students take notes, and that’s that. And students take a quiz, and you take a final exam, and maybe you write a paper. There are many other ways of learning to help them grapple with ideas, to help them develop critical thinking skills, and having these dig tools, I find that it helps grab faculty’s attention. They say, “Oh, hey, that’s the new thing!” But it’s not… in reality, it’s not really new, but it helps them think, oh, that’s this tool. It focuses their attention. “How do I use this well?” Then you can sort of get them started thinking about pedagogy.”
So tools can be useful in education, motivating us to re-evaluate how we teach or giving learners the ability to do new things. Or digital tools can be a distraction, emphasizing the features of a system or a device over the learner’s ability to think in new ways. The trouble is, it’s far easier to get excited by novelty, media, and hype instead of responding intentionally and critically to the changing shape and scale of today’s classrooms.
Me: “When I go and I look online at what other people are talking about regarding digital pedagogy, the educational technology conversations, for instance, are almost invariably about the tools. They’re about what does the tool let us do? What new features are in this tool that aren’t in this other tool that we were talking about last week? And I’m wondering if you have any ideas about why that is. Why is there this difference in our perspective of “it’s the skill that’s important” and the general popular conversation that’s all about the tools and the feature sets.”
Cori: “Because when everything looks like a hammer, you want the fanciest hammer on the block, so that you can nail those nails even better. It’s beyond me. I don’t share that approach at all. I think first about the purpose, and I think second about how to actually accomplish it.
Here’s how Cecilia puts it.
Cecilia: “Why is there a difference? I think it’s a shiny thing. Tools are shiny, and that’s what grabs people’s attention. In fact, we do that at the University of Chicago, we use that to grab people’s attention, but when we start a conversation, we always start with, ‘what is it that you’re trying to do? What is it, that you are trying to have your students accomplish?’ That really, in my opinion, should be how you start a conversation about teaching and learning.”
So what are we trying to have our students accomplish? What is the goal of our teaching, and does it change when we work in digital environments? Cori explained her views on the difference between digital and traditional pedagogical goals this way.
Cori: “It’s sort of like, is playing cards online — digitally — different than playing cards? Well, yeah, you don’t actually have to have a deck of cards, you might have to have an Internet connection, you might have to have some basic skills of how to use a computer. You’re going to be playing against people you’ve never met in real life. But the rules of the game are still the same, and the way to win is still the same. So the answer is yes and no, and those are the same.”
Me: “Interesting. I like the card-playing metaphor because one of my favorite things when I was first introduced to Hearts and Solitaire on Windows many, many years ago was that I didn’t have to shuffle. Because I have poor dexterity, and shuffling has never been my thing, and so I was like, ‘Oh, great! Cards I can play, and I don’t have to worry about shuffling! This is fantastic!”
Cori: “And you’ll never lose one, you know, you’ll won’t get that crinkled Jack of Spades that lets you cheat a little bit (which could be good or bad).”
Me: “And I love how you pointed out that you play with people you’ve never met before. Because you’re right, that is one of the best parts of card-playing. It’s the social interaction there. I would argue that that could be brought directly into pedagogy, where the best parts of our classrooms are the interactions we have with one another. And the tools, the materiality of the cards aren’t as important as the interactions with the other people. We don’t play cards because we like the cards; we play cards because we like the people, and I kind of wonder how all that translates over into the digital spaces.”
Let’s talk about that for a minute. I want to try straining this metaphor. If we play cards for the social interactions, the game itself is merely an entertaining distraction, yet the game is ostensibly the reason for gathering — kind of like our curriculum, right? The content we’re supposed to teach is ostensibly why we’re all in the same room together. But maybe it’s not as important as we usually think. And I just said “in the same room”, but that doesn’t apply when students can access course materials from anywhere, or when a course meets online. And we’ve heard from a number of people who say that technology isn’t the important point behind digital pedagogy, that it’s a distraction from our emphasis on good teaching. So what’s left? What is good teaching, or digital pedagogy, if the content, the classroom, and the technology are all off the table? Here’s Sean again.
Sean: “What’s left is what’s always been there and what teaching or learning always has been, and that’s dialogue with each other. So in the case of a situation where you have a teacher and student — so we can use those terms, “teacher” and “student” —
Me: “Don’t tell me I’m going to have to rephrase the question and say that there is no such thing as a teacher and there’s no such thing as students.”
Sean: “There isn’t. But… I mean, when you boil this all down, what you have is a relationship that ultimately is not unlike kids in a preschool playground learning and teaching each other. The whole idea of elevating someone to the level of teacher — that, oh, hey, you’re an expert now and you get to teach other people — is false and is based on an education system which is based on economies which are based on prestige and blah blah blah, and like all kinds of weird hierarchical stuff, none of which is actually accurate to what happens when real learning occurs.
So when we really get at it, our whole paradigm has to shift. And that I think it’s what’s incredibly valuable about digital pedagogy. Because it’s not just asking us to re-evaluate the way that we assess students. It’s not just asking us to re-evaluate the way that we plan lessons, or the way that we lecture, or what technology we use, to do the things we have always done. It’s actually reminding us to look and say, “What the hell is going on with learning? What’s happening here?” And I think what’s really great about digital pedagogy, and the sort of digital age, is that learners now couldn’t give a shit whether they have a teacher. They’ve got the internet. They can teach each other in communities on the Internet. They can reach out, they can do research, they can…
And a lot of teachers will be, like, “Yeah, but they don’t know how to do the right kind of research.” Well, guess what. There is no “right kind of research” because the academy is not going to be the only measure of what’s accurate or what’s…”
Me: “Verifiable and reliable?”
Sean: “…of what counts, yeah.”
So here we have a consideration of the changing nature of authority in education, the changing ways we — any teachers, learners, or organizations at any level — manage and process information.
Sean: “We live in a society where the news now, right, our trusted journalists, are getting information from HuffPost, which is essentially a group blog, right? So people are generating information. It’s no longer institutions generating information. The academy hasn’t quite figured this out yet — that they are no longer the generators of information and research, that everyone’s doing it now.
So now when students come in, they’re expected to do something they haven’t been doing, for a long time: to sit there and listen to you. And to trust that you have all the information. The truth is that they have all the information at their fingertips. What we can do as, like Howard Rheingold calls teachers “chief learners”, what we can do as people who have been down this road once before, or who have been down this road a little bit longer — we’ve been walking this path a little bit longer than some of the other learners — is we can help them understand who they are as learners, how their own mind works, how they gather and collect information, how they learn to play with the information that they get.”
Helping students understand themselves and understand how to play around with information is a tall order. But it may not be as new as we might think. The morning before our Digital Pedagogies panel convened, I did a bit of Twitter marketing to try and get people interested. I tweeted out a photo of my hand, with each of my digits clearly visible, asking what makes something count as “digital” pedagogy. It was an idea I got from Angela Haas, an author in rhetoric and composition. I’d like to bring one more voice into this conversation today. Let me introduce my friend and colleague Estee Beck.
[Intro Estee]
Estee and I have been meeting each other at conferences for years, mostly at the Conference on College Composition and Communication and at Computers and Writing. Estee’s research focuses on issues of online surveillance and privacy, so she’s deeply concerned with how students and teachers use digital tools to aid in their learning. I thought she’d add an interesting perspective to this discussion. When I asked her whether she thought digital pedagogy was a thing, she told me
Estee: “So yeah, I do think there’s such a thing as a digital pedagogy, but I want to preface that, saying there is such a thing as digital pedagogy, because I’ve seen some definitions floating around in various spaces of a “digital pedagogy” that I don’t necessarily perhaps agree with.”
So she wrote her own. (You see why I love talking with Estee?) Anyway, the approach she took to defining digital pedagogy shows her roots in composition scholarship, and it also opens up a number of complex avenues for exploration.
Estee: “In Douglas Eyman’s book Digital Rhetoric, that the University of Michigan just published in the summer of 2015, he makes mention of Angela Haas’s remarks about the term “digital,” and she in this description refers to it as our digits — our fingers — and the primary ways of making sense of the world around us. And most importantly, about the coding of information. And so for me in thinking through a definition of a “digital pedagogy”, the foundational concept, in the most broadest sense, is the coding of information.”
“So that’s my very fancy definition of a digital pedagogy. And really, to parse that out, I want a definition that is perhaps the most broadest in sense of really considering historical concepts of digital, cultural concepts of digital, the way that a group of people set about to create a product that’s used in digital spaces, how things like race, class, use, access, surveillance, privacy… how all of those things also are intentionally or unintentionally part of how that tool operates within certain systems of communication.”
Those issues, then, will form the basis for the next episode of HybridPod. We’ll talk more about Digital Pedagogy, but rather than debating whether it exists and what it is, we’ll look at the implications of good digital pedagogy in how we teach and how we structure and build our classrooms. I’ll continue my conversations with everyone you heard from in this episode, and we’ll talk about how to plan for effective digital pedagogy in our classes and how to be mindful of the complications such implementations bring to our teaching. Stay tuned.
You've been tuned to HybridPod, a production of Hybrid Pedagogy, Inc.
Just because the show is over doesn't mean the conversation ends. 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: @AdmiralMollsey), Cecilia Lo (who is @HigherEdMuse), Sean Michael Morris (who is @slamteacher), Kristy Rawson (who is @EstherRawson) for adding their voices to today's show.
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