“We refer to a way of life in an integrated domain where hunches, cut-and-try, intangibles, and the human ‘feel for a situation’ usefully coexist with powerful concepts, streamlined technology and notation, sophisticated methods, and high-powered electronic aids.” – Douglas Engelbart, 1962
In the Digital Age learning should drive tools, not the other way around. And yet we continue to struggle with tools that don’t really fit what’s going on in a modern classroom. This is a central conundrum that has always frustrated me as both a technologist and educator. There are three critical issues that drive this gap.
First, as educators we have been trained to live with the shortcomings of the tools given to us because in many cases they were products of a general purpose approach to outfitting classrooms and creating pedagogical support materials. This has persisted into the age of customization that digital technology offers us.
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Second, the toolmakers often have a poor understanding of how effective pedagogy works. Therefore, they frequently design around stereotypical or archaic versions of how a classroom works. At worst, they pay scant attention it and use corporate models for designing products for learning because the educational market represents such a small percentage of their business.
Finally, and perhaps most fundamentally, we rarely look critically at the educational tasks that we do. This in part because of a learned helplessness from the second factor has led most educators to accept substandard or ill-fitting tools as a matter of course. It is high time we reevaluate how to approach our digital tools.
The Digital Age has lowered the barriers to entry to a host of accessible and adaptable tools. What this has done has been to give teachers a much more nuanced and targeted toolbox. This paradigmatic technological shift has not been accompanied by a parallel one in pedagogical approaches, however. Industrial Age thinking has led to increasingly specialized content being taught in our classrooms. Despite this, there is relatively little pedagogical diversity as the primary tools available to both students and teachers continue to be notetaking, problem-solving (often with predetermined formulas), papers, and tests.
Biologists would call this a non-diversified ecosystem and leaves many of its inhabitants, who failed to master these tools or to connect them to the increasingly complex subject matter they were supposed to convey, by the roadside. Changing how we teach is not just a matter of “keeping up with latest and greatest.” It is also a duty we have to those students who could thrive in a different learning paradigm.
Many of our tools, however, mirror the affordances of their non-digital predecessors. There are direct analogs between the content section of most online courses and what the teacher might have otherwise written on the board. Assessments resemble in form the familiar paper test. The tools available tend to drive instruction in certain ways because toolmakers have found it much easier to sell analogies to “traditional” classrooms. Teachers, in turn, fall back on the familiar pedagogical implements of the Industrial Age.
I have tried to create a diverse technological and pedagogical ecosystem in my classes. In every instance I have selected tools that have a direct pedagogical purpose, carefully thought out, and rejected ones that don’t augment what my students are trying to do. Through an ongoing design process I found tools that meet the specific needs of my political science classes. Currently I am using a combination of WordPress for collaborative writing and Draw.io for collaborative concept mapping to help them relate big, abstract concepts like Factions, Separation of Power, and Federalism to tangible things in their lives, such as paying for college, healthcare, or climate change.
My approach makes sense to my pedagogical model and parts of it may apply cross-discipline. However, different disciplines teach at very different conceptual levels. Frequently, multiple levels are mixed within a single lesson. Teaching is hard and pedagogy needs to be responsive to changing needs. Our tools also need to be able to be accessible and flex with pedagogical needs on the fly.
There are still limits to how customizable our tools can be, but they are often human ones, not technical ones. For instance, one tool that has always intrigued me is Hypothes.is, a tool for annotation and close reading. During a recent session with Bryan Alexander’s Future Trends in Technology and Education Forum. I asked their team if they had ever considered adding more visual elements to their platform including a way of linking diverse ideas in a nonlinear fashion. I would love to use Hypothes.is to connect close reading to the larger conceptual maps that I am prioritizing in my pedagogy.
We are moving away from digital tools that automated a few tasks but purported to meet all of our teaching needs to the potential for highly customizable tools designed to assist with one aspect of pedagogy. Our challenge here is simplicity; the one thing the chalkboard has going for it. In this context I have to balance out adding Hypothes.is to my arsenal against my students’ limited capacity for absorbing new tools.
The next generation Learning Management System (LMS) is a possible solution for balancing a pedagogically-responsive toolset with interoperability. One proposed approach is EDUCAUSE’s proposed Next Generation Digital Learning System (NGDLS). It suggests that instead of creating one-size-fits-all solutions for professors the learning management system could focus on creating linkages. The NGDLS concept could be extended to create possibilities to link in highly-customizable pedagogical tools.
I would love to see Hypothes.is, Draw.io, and WordPress functionality wrapped into an LMS with a unified account and classroom management solution (as well as other kinds of human interaction solutions such as Zoom-like videoconferencing). In this vision our LMSes could become more focused on linking easily-customizable, student-centric tools. Empowered learning could then become the driving task for our tools and our technical constraints would no longer bind our pedagogical options. Our tools could then truly augment our tasks.
Tom Haymes is a technologist, photographer, teacher, social scientist, project manager, and educational technology leader. He was design lead for Houston Community College’s West Houston Institute and is author of the forthcoming book Discovering Digital Humanity (ATBOSH Media). His website is ideaspaces.net and he tweets at @ideaspacesnet.
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