" ... if you're using the same pedagogy with a stick and sand as you are using with a high-speed computer network, you really don't understand teaching and learning" (Downes, 2011)

Many teachers use digital technologies simply to enhance or to shore up pedagogies that are no different from the pedagogies they have deployed at other times and in more traditional settings, and perhaps throughout their teaching careers. There may well be a degree of technology panic, with the focus being on the technology rather than the pedagogy and the way students want to learn. The use of standard institution-wide classroom technologies, in my experience, has been one of 'tethering' to the front of the classroom rather than liberation.

I have helped colleagues whose sessions, punctuated by technology failures, become catastrophic because there is not the underpinning pedagogy which would rapidly offer alternatives to deliver what was required in another way - paralysis by technology rather than liberation. Teachers also face a student population who are potentially more comfortable with, and have exceptions of, a more digital learning and teaching experience.

“Today’s students have not changed incrementally from those of the past. A really big discontinuity has taken place. One might even call it a singularity – an event which changes things so fundamentally that there is no going back. This singularity is the arrival and rapid dissemination of digital technology in the last decades of the 20th century” (Prensky, 2001). I think there is a need to look at the digital immigrants/ digital natives debate in more depth to see where the changes in expectations, skills and learning styles (in both staff and students) are taking us.

If we recognise the changing nature of what it means to be educated in the 21st century, then we have to be willing to think about pedagogy in the context of digital and networking technologies. New ‘Digital Pedagogies’ have emerged which have shifted the focus of teaching away from face-to-face physical (analogue) interaction, and towards an online, interactive, constructionist pedagogy, which can be led by the student, as much as the teacher. An example of this is the ‘Massive Online Open Course’ or MOOC, which you are participating in.. Courses designed on a MOOC model allow for students to access the course when and where they wish, study at their own pace, and are (generally) free of charge. With the rise of the use of digital pedagogies alongside the pedagogies of traditional curricula, there is a mixed educational milieu, and a mixed learning and teaching experience for students.

Digital pedagogy It is not about the technology, although clearly digital delivery requires technology, it is about the way we want to teach, and the way students want to learn, being facilitated by technology. The technology should not be the master, but rather the slave. Likewise the drive for a digital pedagogy cannot reside with an institution’s Information Technology department because that leads to the inertia and paralysis of technology fear, the ICT department should provide the technology service that supports an agreed digital pedagogy. This relationship needs to be more collegiate than in most instances just now.

There are lots of ideas and debates going on around defining a digital pedagogy, but no concrete answers yet. Journals like Hybrid Pedagogy and Interactive Technology and Pedagogy provide platforms for these debates and are worth a visit to take part in the discussions.

So a good working definition for us might be "digital pedagogy is the use of digital elements to enhance or to change the experience of education". For the first task in the course I would like your views on this definition.

References

Downes, S. (2011) Why isn’t it about the pedagogy? [WWW] http://www.downes.ca/post/54552 accessed May 2016

Prensky, M. (2001) Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. On the Horizon, Vol. 9 No. 5, October 2001