Ever-changing Education

This past week has been one of discovery. About myself, about the lecturers and their teaching styles and the modules and what they entail. One question stood out and it's a very important one at that - "what kind of teacher would you like to be?" Part of my answer is that I'd like to be a pedagogue.

That may sound a bit corny considering last week I was blogging about how I'd just discovered the word. But the concept of being a pedagogue is intriguing to say the least. Sean Michael Morris writes in Decoding Digital Pedagogy that pedagogy experiments relentlessly and encourages lifelong learning. As students we most times don't consider whether we've learnt anything, or whether we take something from the class that will impact us for a long time. Being a future teacher is even more nerve wrecking, as we now have to be the ones encouraging learning from in front of the class. And by future I mean tomorrow - "Glaskas" here we go!

That is only one aspect of pedagogy. Being so broadly defined, digital pedagogy is all about change. It's about not falling into habits and pushing the boundaries of education. It's about innovation and interaction and a word I quite liked from the article - Community. Community from my perspective implies learning both ways (between teacher and student and vise versa), an interaction beyond just names and student numbers and a relationship built on the foundation of learning.

Community also spans beyond just the traditional classroom. In order for us to be effective pedagogues online, we need to develop online communities which promote learning through interaction and discussion. This is why some online courses come under bad light for the lack of lifelong learning they cultivate.

While innovation and change can be wonderful, the teaching and learning interaction is still the most important. I spoke a lot about teachers using their tools effectively in my previous blog (so I wont get into that now) except to comment on the following quote by Jesse Stommel: "None of these tools have what we value most about education coded into them in advance. The best digital tools inspire us, often to use them in ways the designer couldn’t anticipate'." After reading it, I found myself excited to take the challenge of being an innovative teacher. One who is not afraid of trying new things for the benefit of learning.