Nothing says “I get it” quite like a pop quiz! Something we had a lot of fun rediscovering in class on Thursday, when I opened up the lines for a 5 minute tweetup on the question:
 |
| How is blogging influencing your learning in #DigPed? |
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” (emphasis added)
– attributed to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
(I have yet to find the original text…)
Using these two sentences as my framework, I hoped to “build a ship” that would make sense in the context of our voyage of discovery into the vastness of digital pedagogy. (Teach like a Pirate comes to mind. Also Peter Pan… Jung would have a field day.)
I had some reservations about presenting the Industrial “old school” model of teaching as the polar opposite of digital pedagogies – mostly because I’m not convinced of their mutual exclusivity. (Can there truly be perfect absolutes in responsible pedagogies?) However, a free-association exercise of the deconstructed quote seemed to shed an interesting light on our studies:
“If you want to build a ship, don’t Old School
drum up the men to gather wood, Standardisation?
divide the work Artificial segmentation
and give orders. External motivation
Instead, Digital Pedagogies
teach them to yearn Internal motivation
for the vast and endless sea.” Diverse and malleable realities
I have to say that I am rather chuffed with this approach to the lecture. Still, I do wonder if the lecture makes sense to my class in terms of the rest of their work? Did something click? Were questions answered? Were answers questioned?? As teachers do, I dream about feedback from my classes with a mixture of dread and excitement… but I digress.
As a foundation for the consideration of current trends in digital pedagogy, I introduced Ruben Puentedura’s SAMR Model for Technology Integration as a potential source of the necessary tools to re-evaluate our own perceptions on the utility of technology in our classrooms. With the current emphasis on social media in education – both positive and negative – I wondered how we could analyse and evaluate trendy tech for creative application in our own teaching. Remembering my PGCE year, I suddenly understood how my own thinking was setting me up to find a very specific aid: Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. (See what happened there?)
One of my personal learning strategies involves image searches via Google. The weird and the wonderful (“safe search” switched on, please) have often helped me find novel ways of making meaning of the results. Take a look at the wealth of graphic representations of Bloom’s Taxonomy for some inspiration, if you are so inclined. A treasure trove of digital taxonomies and pedagogy wheels promised to be nifty little bridges between my subject, our focus of the week, and work that is done elsewhere in the PGCE programme.
In retrospect, I am worried about the quality of my transitions between the phases and content of my lecture. Am I depending too heavily on the reading (and blogging) that my classes need to do beforehand? Being two thirds deep in my own research, do the links I propose between the content and the learning outcomes of this module make sense to anyone besides myself? These anxieties are probably universal, but they help keep me focused on designing better teaching and learning experiences. I believe this is good for my module, although I have to admit that my own dissertation is suffering. Which I should be writing.
Better hop to it!
Leave a Reply