Every day I read the tweets of fellow educators it’s clear that the battle for technology adoption is still going strong. It’s also clear that endless panics – moral and otherwise – are a part of the problem. Just today, wired educator and author Will Richardson described the challenge of teaching critical (technological) literacies without access to the tools and services our students actually use:
I’m with Will 100% and feel this literacy extends to video games and virtual worlds as well. For example, as a media teacher, it’s difficult to address questions of representation and racism in Grand Theft Auto or the violence of first person shooters without the actual texts. Because Facebook, World of Warcraft and Xbox are all, quite properly, primary media texts rich with opportunities for inquiry-based learning. They are also corporate spaces and products with enormous ideological, social and cultural consequences, which leads me to the question of HOW we’re teaching with technology – not just the what or why (which we’ve all more than spoken to).
Advocacy or promotion?
The good news is, there’s no shortage of open pedagogy circulating throughout the web. The bad news is there is still a profound absence of critical inquiry, equity, diversity or inclusion in the form of a digital critical pedagogy. Sign in to Twitter and you’ll read far more chatter about the latest apps than discussions of the more grounded challenges for today’s learners.
For some time now I’ve been arguing that genuinely “emergent” pedagogy has little if anything to do with technology. That the vital priorities for digital education concern largely social, cognitive and civic engagement – not the absence or presence of a particular device in your classroom. This informs how I use technology in my own classroom and my desire for a more expanded notion of what we call “classroom2.0” beyond products and panics.
POST CONTINUATION BELOW