Brian Croxall defines digital pedagogy simply as “the use of electronic elements to enhance or to change the experience of education.” Many scholars of digital pedagogy focus on similar ideals of change and experience, circling around keywords such as “discovery,” “process,” and “agency.” Indeed, digital pedagogy is not the unreflective use of computers in the classroom, but the use of digital tools and methods to empower students to explore, discover, hit dead ends, and rethink ideas. Unfamiliar tools and methods have the power to inspire students and instructors to approach problems in creative ways, to break out of tired assumptions about reading and research, to see texts freshly. Moreover, digital pedagogy fosters not only independent exploration but also community and collaboration. Shared research repositories, discussion boards, and the necessity to organize multi-part digital projects leads students into scholarly conversation with each other—conversations that will hopefully make learning more participatory and more meaningful. Jesse Strommel writes that “far too much work in educational technology starts with tools, when what we need to start with is humans.” As digital pedagogues, we hope to think collaboratively, first, about our students’ needs, and, second, about how digital tools can help us approach those needs in creative, conversation-provoking, and student-centered ways.
Recommended Reading:
- “Digital Pedagogy?” by Brian Croxall
- “Digital Pedagogy Unplugged” by Paul Fyfe
- “Critical Digital Pedagogy: A Definition” by Jesse Stommel
- “Teaching in Our Right Minds: Critical Digital Pedagogy and the Response to the New” by Sean Michael Morris
- “How Not to Teach Digital Humanities” by Ryan Cordell
- “Why We Need Digital Literacies” by Cathy Davidson