Hacking Pedagogy

Below is the process we will follow for peer review in this class. This post will take you through the following steps: 1.) Emailing your draft to your peer reviewer 2.) Opening your peer's draft in iAnnotate and adding your comments 3.) Emailing your comments to your peer, and 4.) Turning in your commented draft.

The Hacking Pedagogy project aims at undermining those existing pedagogical practices rooted in a logic of domination and control in which faculty authority suppresses student creativity. 

The model is based on two insights:Learning is social and so it is most effectively pursued in communities of education in which teachers and students are actively engaged together.Social media technologies are transforming education because they are able to open dynamic communities of learning between teachers and students.The power of new social media technologies for education lies not in the information they deliver, but the communities they can create.

In the context of ethics education, this presentation seeks to articulate how blogging allows faculty not merely to deliver content to students about ethical theory and practice, but also to perform the virtues of inter-human ethical interaction with students in light of the theories and practices under consideration. Blogging thus allows us to perform the ethics we teach.

I embed here the video Teaching and Learning with Technology produced to highlight how I use blogs in my Philosophy classroom

Before you knew it, I was addicted to the blog, checking it multiple times a day and posting more and more, either with comments or my own posts. This blogging element works: it turned a cynic like me into a true believer, and I even started to enjoy reading platonic texts. And the reason for this road to Damascus conversion was that the blog is a 21st century equivalent of what Socrates was doing over two thousand years ago: organic dialectic. The very nature of the course encourages this online, expanding the class outside of the one hour and fifteen minutes classes twice a week. It's impossible to have this sort of conversation without the blog.

This format can be quite disconcerting for students at first - in fact it probably alienated a minority of the class - but the overwhelming majority of students found it engaging, and those intimidated at first eventually came to embrace it. It takes students out of their comfort zone, a necessity to truly participate in the dialectic. My own views were challenged and I even changed my mind, most notably my dislike for philosophy classes. And this was achieved through a blogging cooperative community, one that went beyond online and into real life.

We are also continuously trying to figure out how get our readers/followers/fans to actively participate in our initiative. We are, of course, always hoping that our audience finds a blog post interesting and decides to post a comment. Simply asking questions and inviting the reader to participate within a blog post has helped to generate some feedback. We have also found that blog posts focusing on "hot topics" or more widespread themes, like State Patty's Day, have created some of the more animated discussions. Posts written by students also have consistently been been successful on our blog. Indeed, capturing this student voice will no doubt continue be an important part of all of our social media. Encouraging students to take part in what we are doing has repeatedly shown our office that in order to create the community that we envision, we have to relinquish some control of the message.

He never presented himself as a guy who has all the answers (though I suspect he has a better grasp on them than we do). Instead, he encouraged us to work TOGETHER -- teacher and student -- to discover the truth. In fact, he took it a step further and actually let us AUTHOR our own textbook -- that is, he trusted us enough to let us control the blog. As a student, this sort of trust motivates you to live up to expectations. It's actually a lot of pressure ("he expects us to partially direct the class ourselves? Well jeez we better make this interesting...")

One faculty member learned more about her students' thinking and learning through online discussion forums, and stopped pre-planning for every minute of classtime - giving more control to her students. Another faculty member used to think that students had to be in class to learn, but learned that they were able to learn just as well online. Another walked away from the PPT slides and used more student participation.

At first, she requires constant contact, holding my hand and reaching for me as the waves approach. Slowly, but more quickly than I anticipate, she ventures further away. She grows in confidence, yet remains always within reach. I learn my job: to be present to her, to the oncoming waves, and to the moment; to lend a little courage, to praise a wave well ridden, to hold and lift when necessary.