Pedagogy Like a Baby

"The best digital tools inspire us, often to use them in ways the designer couldn’t anticipate. The worst digital tools attempt to dictate our pedagogies, determining what we can do with them and for whom. The digital pedagogue teaches her tools, doesn’t let them teach her." - Jesse Stommel.

 

 

The most important fact that stood out to me while reading these two articles,

Decoding Digital Pedagogy, pt. 2: (Un)Mapping the Terrain and Decoding Digital Pedagogy, pt. 1: Beyond the LMS, were the fact that digital pedagogy is a lot like a young child growing up.

 

Let me explain.

Children are confusing things. They are not orderly or in any way neat and organized at all. That is how their brain works. It is all-over-the-place and the best thing about this is they, all of us, were born this way. We learned how to speak by blabbing different sounds and we learned how to walk by crawling and falling all over first. The schooling system wants us to become organized, stand in straight lines and sit in neat little rows exactly like the person in front of you and worst of all, to me, it wants you to write in a straight line (I could never understand why). This is scary because it stops the flow of creativity.

Here is a story first.

When I was in grade six or seven it was time to start learning different facts. I tried to learn them the way I was taught at school (writing them down in an orderly fashion) but that did not work. Then one day my mother gave me a little book about mind mapping (luckily my mom understand the important things in life) and in this book it explained to me that our brains work best if they are “deurmekaar” (for the lack of a better English word) so I started mind mapping the work I had to learn and – boom – all of a sudden I got A’s here and A’s there.

What I’m saying is that what I read from these articles made me excited to become a pedagogue, because it unlocks mystery, creativity and curiosity in learners and that to me is THE best way of learning and when a teacher gets that, he or she will be successful.

 

Like Jesse Stommel said: "It looks like failure. And wonder."