Cole Camplese is the Director of Education Technology Services, Allan Gyorke, Assistant Director of Education Technology Services, and Sam Richards, Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Crime, Law and Justice and co-director of World in Conversation join me for episode 38 of the Digital Dialogue.
These three guests are all actively involved in the innovative use of technology for teaching here at Penn State. Our wide ranging discussion focuses primarily on using technology to engage students. We speak in particular about moving from a pedagogy of engagement to one of genuine cooperation.
This podcast is also a contribution to the Hacking Pedagogy project we have initiated at Penn State. To read more about how you can participate in that project, please visit the Hacking Pedagogy blog and tweet related articles using the #psuhack hashtag.
Digital Dialogue 38: Camplese, Gyorke and Richards on Teaching with Technology
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It might be helpful to think of these matters of cooperation in terms of socialization and especially apprenticeships. If one looks at the work of folks like Donald Schon or Lucy Suchman you begin to understand how expertise/know-how is developed through working with others, in focused communities, over time. To the degree that technology allows us to be in touch with people who are not at hand this is a benefit, but to the degree that it emphasizes ease/immediacy over sustained commitments this seems to be a loss. Without going all the way with Heidegger into the question of what is "thinking" we should mind his warnings about mere/superficial gossip (social networking) as the medium of common-sense and like Dewey focus on education as working together on specific and local projects/case-studies that affect our daily lived/experienced communal life.
I really appreciate these comments and will look into the work of Schon and Suchman. What you say about Dewey and the importance of conjoint activities for education is important. I wonder how we move ourselves as teachers into a more cooperative mode of relation with our students. I am thinking about that a lot as I craft my syllabus for this semester.
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http://www.la.psu.edu/chrislong
there is a gap between the careful efforts at understanding of your guests and the
ready-to-use cut&paste certainty of the students' postings here that goes beyond experience to something akin to a difference in forms-of-life/ethos.
part of this seems to be that they only see the end results of research and not the working process itself, so how to teach them to inhabit questions, to embrace complexity?
the temptation is to correct misinterpretations, to say point out where in fact Rorty celebrates Freud as the great democratizer of poetic dwelling, but this won't teach the way in which even such a purposeful mis-reader as Rorty 1st labors to dwell upon/within the world-view of an author, hopes to be changed/corrected, see new perspectives.