Digital Delights

"WHAT TRIGGERS THIS NEW PEDAGOGY?

Changes in society, student expectations, and technology are motivating university and college faculty and instructors to rethink pedagogy and teaching methods.

New Demands of a Knowledge-Based Society

There are three separate factors at work in the knowledge-based society. The first is the continuing development of new knowledge, making it difficult to compress all students need to know within the limited time span of a post-secondary program or course. This means helping students to manage knowledge - how to find, analyze, evaluate, and apply knowledge as it constantly shifts and grows.

The second factor is the increased emphasis on applying knowledge to meet the demands of 21st century society, using skills such as critical thinking, independent learning, the use of relevant information technology, software, and data within a discipline, and entrepreneurialism. The development of such skills requires active learning in rich and complex environments, with plenty of opportunities to develop, apply, assess and practice such skills.

Thirdly, it means educating students with the skills to manage their own learning throughout life, so they can continue to learn after graduation.

New Student Expectations

Even the most idealistic students expect to find good jobs after several years of study, jobs where they can apply their learning and earn a reasonable income. This is especially true as tuition and other educational costs increase. Students expect to be actively engaged in and see the relevance of their learning to the real world.

Today's students grew up in a world where technology is a natural part of their environment. Their expectation is that technology is used whenever appropriate to help them learn, develop essential informational and technological literacy skills, and master the fluency necessary in their specific subject domain.

New Technologies

Continuing advances in digital technologies, social media, and mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, give the end user, the student, much more control over access to and the creation and sharing of knowledge. This empowers students, and faculty and instructors are finding ways to leverage this enhanced student control to increase their motivation and content relevance."

"Digital redlining is the modern equivalent of this historical form of societal division; it is the creation and maintenance of technological policies, practices, pedagogy, and investment decisions that enforce class boundaries and discriminate against specific groups. The digital divide is a noun; it is the consequence of many forces. In contrast, digital redlining is a verb, the "doing" of difference, a "doing" whose consequences reinforce existing class structures. In one era, redlining created differences in physical access to schools, libraries, and home ownership.

(...)

We might think about digital redlining as the process by which different schools get differential journal access. If one of the problems of the web as we know it now is access to quality information, digital redlining is the process by which so much of that quality information is locked by paywalls that prevent students (and learners of all kinds) from accessing that information. We might think about digital redlining as the level of surveillance (in the form of analytics that predict grades or programs that suggest majors to students). We also might think about digital redlining to the degree that students who perform Google searches get certain information based on the type of machine they are using or get served ads for high-interest loans based on their digital profile (a practice Google now bans). It's essential to note that the personalized nature of the web often dictates what kind of information students get both inside and outside the classroom."