Month: April 2008

Pedagogy before technology

how (not) to sketch a graphSomewhat of a mantra for the learning technologist but is it true? And what does it mean? In practice, do learning technologists always put pedagogy first? At the risk of sounding lousy at my job, hand on heart, I have to say that pedagogy doesn’t always lead the way in my work. Not because I don’t think it should but just on a practical day-to-day basis my work is more technology-focused than pedagogically-focused.

If I’m in a conversation with a teacher about how to implement a particular teaching activity then sure, I will always try to get them to think about the activity and its purpose first.

However, in the everyday work of this learning technologist those conversations are fairly limited (and restricted to a handful of enthusiasts I work with regularly). Most learning technology users (primarily VLE users) are off the radar just getting on with it. And for those i do work with, I spend much more time helping with technical how-tos. Equally in my researchy exploratory work I tend to focus on getting to grips with new technologies rather than pedagogy. But perhaps I’m being unfair, the p-word is always there at the back of my mind.

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/leonardlow/1667114083/

Time to twitter?

Now this is me being a reluctant technologist, which generally i’m not, but twitter, I’ll take some convincing.

my twitteringsSeeing that even downing street now twitters there can’t much life left in it but I thought that I should at least try it, after months of resisting… what’s the point etc. I’m still not sure, but we’ll see. You should be able to see a twitter feed of some sort on the right, if I can’t fix it you can see my twitters on twitter.com

The Missing Net Generation

Cups of TeaA year or so ago a member of the ‘Net Generation’ told me they knew nothing about blogging. No big deal, this Interweb stuff isn’t everybody’s cup-of-tea. I read a lot about the Net Generation but I also come across a lot of numbers like the ones from previous posts which I’ll repeat here to save you the hassle:

  • 49% UK 8-17 year-olds have a social networking profile (Ofcom, 2008 )
  • 55% of all online US 12-17 year-olds use online social networking sites (Pew Internet, 2007)

What’s interesting to me is the 51% and the 45% who don’t! (Plus note that the US figure is based on “online” teenagers). Do these percentages challenge all the hype about everyone born since 1981 living in MySpace & Bebo? While there’s certainly a whole lot to think about in teaching the net generation, perhaps we should also remember that not everyone is signed up yet!

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/olivierclaurent/474306315/

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