Network Pedagogy

I would say that traditional pedagogy is individual, but impersonal, and private, but mass-experienced. That is, though students learn mostly on their own, their learning experiences are not personalized to them. Thus they privately experience the lecture given to a hundred students. Conversely, a networked pedagogy would by personalized, but social, and public, but customized. That is, new technologies can give students a greater deal of flexbility in how they approach the material and that approach is now shared with other students. Thus their learning experiences are public (to varying degrees but at least beyond themselves as individuals) but can now be shaped at the user level.

Maybe the appeal of the CMS is its sterility. In fact, there's probably little doubt about it. That's what appeals to faculty and universities about Blackbored: the sterility of the CMS means little can happen.

The real concern though is the deeper pedagogical problem this reveals. Clearly the traditional lecture classroom operates on a pre-industrial, medieval model where the best way to get information is to listen to the expert tell you. All of our school behaviors condition us to accept this state of affairs as natural. In the digital world, where we have an overload of information, the problem is restricting the flow of information, identifying what is the best media. However, that doesn't mean that we need a lecture; it means we need a guide. The classroom with its no-laptop policy and Blackbored are designed to create artificial conditions of information scarcity where the performance of the medieval lecture can be re-enacted.

Of course, once we record the lecture, we don't need it performed again. In fact, why don't we hire Morgan Freeman or some other actor-sage and create documentaries like those on Discovery or the HIstory Channel? Why not have big budget videos with historical reenactments and special effects of black holes or atoms or dinosaurs or whatever? Why not have that instead of lectures? If the classroom is all about delivering information and then testing people to see if they received the information, then we really don't need professors. We need videos, some texts, a testing center, and maybe customer support/tutors. For some perverse reason, this seems to be the future that faculty wish to pursue (except somehow they fantasize they get to keep their jobs, maybe through union protectionist clauses). The perverse reason is that they would rather go under with the lecture hall than risk entering a non-sterile online space.