Digital pedagogy according to Fyfe (2011)

Digital pedagogy is the part of our future jobs that we will not be able to hide from. The children in our classes will bring it in through the door, literally in the palms of their hands, if we try to deny it.

Pedagogy is a word thrown around a lot in these past two weeks. Honestly, I'm still confused as to what it really means to me as a future teacher. What I do gather though, is that it boils down to method. To me it seems that with all that's going on around us and life moving at a million miles an hour, teachers have to fight for attention. The only way to get attention is through your method. 

In this article, Fyfe challenges the notion of what "digital" really means and how this will influence our methods. 

Constraining ourselves to the definition framed by electronics, is the problem we are facing at the moment. In many instances, I believe schools still operate on the end of the digital spectrum where an overhead projector and a wooden pointer is seen as exciting or even distracting. On the other end, many university lecturers have fallen victim to the awful idea that by having a PowerPoint presentation, that their 50 minute rant about molecular cell structure will somehow be life changing and inspiring. 

Being an educator, it is unavoidable to be a hacker. You have to manipulate an often broken system to your advantage on a daily bases - thus hacking to meet the goal of educating. You have to hack media, hack the newspaper, hack the curriculum, hack the blackboard, and most importantly, hack the children in your class.

I watched a series, Mr. Robot, this past week. The story follows the life of a hacker. He often speaks to the term of "hacking people". We need to adapt our pedagogy to hack people, to mold their minds, build their creativity and adapt their cognition. Here we need to use what is relevant and challenging. Intuitively, I may still think computers fall under challenging and pencils under relevant, but I think we need to realize that the tables have turned. Every teenager has a very relevant phone in their hands and a very challenging classroom where they should write instead of text. 

We need to be hybrid scholars. We need to mix relevance with challenge. Teachers cannot be lazy for one single day. We need to keep our eyes fixed on YouTube and PowerPoint without letting it do the teaching on our behalf. We need to add on to these relevant methods with something challenging and foreign such as a real life magazine or a difficult question. We might be surprised by the innovation sparked by something as simple as a question, especially one requiring the help of their brain and their gut and not of Google.