Digital reflections on learning : a monograph by students of Digital Pedagogies, Semester 2, 2011

Learning a digital tool is often a hidden process. We tend to learn new tools in a bewildering range of ways. Formal, informal, structured, random, conscious, unconscious, individual, group strategies, may all play a part, but are often lost to us in the complex and demanding processes of learning. But when we reflect carefully on the experience, some patterns and surprising techniques emerge. This monograph presents the thinking of four students in MDN642, Digital Pedagogies, where they have deliberately reflected on the mental processes at work as they learnt a digital technology of their choice.

Learning Strategies for Digital Tools

Learning a digital tool is often a hidden process. We tend to learn new tools in a bewildering range of ways. Formal, informal, structured, random, conscious, unconscious, individual, group strategies, may all play a part, but are often lost to us in the complex and demanding processes of learning. But when we reflect carefully on the experience, some patterns and surprising techniques emerge. This monograph presents the thinking of seven students in MDN642, Digital Pedagogies, where they have deliberately reflected on the mental processes at work as they learnt a digital technology of their choice.

Tell me what you see : Pre-service teachers' recognition of exemplary digital pedagogy

How do you identify "good" teaching practice in the complexity of a real classroom? How do you know that beginning teachers can recognise effective digital pedagogy when they see it? How can teacher educators see through their students’ eyes? The study in this paper has arisen from our interest in what pre-service teachers “see” when observing effective classroom practice and how this might reveal their own technological, pedagogical and content knowledge. We asked 104 pre-service teachers from Early Years, Primary and Secondary cohorts to watch and comment upon selected exemplary videos of teachers using ICT (information and communication technologies) in Science. The pre-service teachers recorded their observations using a simple PMI (plus, minus, interesting) matrix which were then coded using the SOLO Taxonomy to look for evidence of their familiarity with and judgements of digital pedagogies. From this, we determined that the majority of preservice teachers we surveyed were using a descriptive rather than a reflective strategy, that is, not extending beyond what was demonstrated in the teaching exemplar or differentiating between action and purpose. We also determined that this method warrants wider trialling as a means of evaluating students’ understandings of the complexity of the digital classroom.

Tell me what you see : pre-service teachers' recognition of exemplary digital pedagogy

How do you identify "good" teaching practice in the complexity of a real classroom? How do you know that beginning teachers can recognise effective digital pedagogy when they see it? How can teacher educators see through their students’ eyes? The study in this paper has arisen from our interest in what pre-service teachers “see” when observing effective classroom practice and how this might reveal their own technological, pedagogical and content knowledge. We asked 104 pre-service teachers from Early Years, Primary and Secondary cohorts to watch and comment upon selected exemplary videos of teachers using ICT (information and communication technologies) in Science. The pre-service teachers recorded their observations using a simple PMI (plus, minus, interesting) matrix which were then coded using the SOLO Taxonomy to look for evidence of their familiarity with and judgements of digital pedagogies. From this, we determined that the majority of preservice teachers we surveyed were using a descriptive rather than a reflective strategy, that is, not extending beyond what was demonstrated in the teaching exemplar or differentiating between action and purpose. We also determined that this method warrants wider trialling as a means of evaluating students’ understandings of the complexity of the digital classroom.

Digital storytelling, podcasts, blogs and vlogs : exploring a range of new media texts and forms in English

Curriculum initiatives in Australia emphasise the use of technologies and new media in classrooms. Some English teachers might fear this deployment of technologies because we are not all ‘digital natives’ like our students. If we embrace new media forms such as podcasts, blogs, vodcasts, and digital stories, a whole new world of possibilities open up for literary response and recreative texts, with new audiences and publication spaces. This article encourages English teachers to embrace these new digital forms and how shows we can go about it.

Copyright, digital media literacies and preservice teacher education

This article considers copyright knowledge and skills as a new literacy that can be developed through the application of digital media literacy pedagogies. Digital media literacy is emerging from more established forms of media literacy that have existed in schools for several decades and have continued to change as the social and cultural practices around media technologies have changed. Changing requirements of copyright law present specific new challenges for media literacy education because the digitisation of media materials provides individuals with opportunities to appropriate and circulate culture in ways that were previously impossible. This article discusses a project in which a group of preservice media literacy educators were introduced to knowledge and skills required for the productive and informed use of different copyrights frameworks. The students’ written reflections and video production responses to a series of workshops about copyright are discussed, as are the opportunities and challenges provided by copyright education in preservice teacher education.

iPed : pedagogy for digital text production

Reading and writing are being transformed by global changes in communication practices using new media technologies. This paper introduces iPed, a research-based pedagogy that enables teachers to navigate innovative digital text production in the literacy classroom. The pedagogy was generated in the context of a longitudinal digital literacy intervention in a school that services low-socioeconomic and ethnically diverse students. iPed synthesizes four key pedagogies that were salient in the analysis of over 180 hours of lesson observations – Link, Challenge, Co-Create, and Share. The strengths of the pedagogy include connecting to students’ home cultures, critical media literacy, collaborative and creative digital text production, and gaining cosmopolitan recognition within global communities.

Media play : new (and old) pedagogies with young children

Modern technologies mean that the principles of quality arts education are the same (as they ever were) and different. Discussion in this paper is based on a small research project that used art as pedagogy, art as research method and, for the young children participants, celebrated art for art's sake. The project was designed with two aims. Firstly, the authors were interested in how young children engage with media as a strand of the arts. This also informed some of their thinking around the debates over Information and Communication Technology (ICT) as a process for the production of a media text. Secondly, they were interested in the extent to which digital media could enable young children to make their learning visible.

Re-engaging marginalized youth through digital music production: performance, audience and evaluation

This paper presents two case studies of marginalised youth experimenting with digital music production in flexible education settings. The cases were drawn from a three-year study of alternative assessment in flexible learning centres that enrol 650+ students who have left formal schooling in Queensland, Australia. The cases are framed in reference to the literature on cultural studies approaches to education and the digital arts. Each case describes the student’s histories, cultural background and experiences, music productions, evidence of learning and re-engagement with education. Findings document how digital music production can re-engage and extend participation among students who have left formal education. They do so by theorising the online judgements and blog comments about the digital music production as a social field of exchange. It also raises critical questions about the adequacy of current approaches to evaluating and accounting for the learning and development of such youth, especially where this has occurred through creative arts and digital production.

The challenges of preparing pre-service teachers to embrace a digital pedagogy

The need for pre-service teachers to be proficient in the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in the classroom once they graduate is essential, though this process is not a straightforward process (Zhang, 2008) and needs to go beyond pre-service teachers just being able to use ICT. Research suggests that for teachers to successfully use ICT in their classrooms they need to be specifically trained to do so (Markauskaite, 2007; Batane, 2004; Jacobsen, Clifford & Friesen, 2002). Pre-service teachers must also be able to embrace and use new and emerging ICT’s, often referred to as digital technologies, within their pedagogical approaches to teaching and learning. According to UNESCO, these “new technologies require new teacher roles, new pedagogies, and new approaches to teacher training” (2008, p.9). However, new approaches to teacher training have moved very slowly in many areas and preparing pre-service teachers to develop proficiency in embracing a digital pedagogy within their own classrooms can be a challenge for teacher training institutes. This paper reports on a case study of first year education students (N=667) and their experiences during their first semester of pre-service teacher education in a core ICT unit. It will report on the background ICT knowledge and skills that these students bring to the course as well as their expectations of the unit and ICT in their future teaching. The paper will then draw on the research results to identify challenges facing teacher training of pre-service teachers in using digital technologies in their future classrooms.

Literacy, place-based pedagogies and social justice

Our long-term program of research has considered the relationships between teachers’ work and identities, literacy pedagogies and schooling, particularly in high-poverty communities. Over the past decade, we have worked with teachers to consciously explore with them the possible productive synergies between critical literacy and place-based pedagogies, and the affordances of multimodal and digital literacies for students’ engagement with the places where they live and learn. These studies have been undertaken with teachers working and living in various locales—from the urban fringe to inner suburban areas undergoing urban renewal, to rural and regional communities where poverty and the politics of place bring certain distinctive opportunities and constraints to bear on pedagogy for social justice. There is now wider recognition that “social justice” may need rethinking to foreground the nonhuman world and the relation between people and politics of places, people, and environments in terms of “eco-social justice” (Green 2010; Gruenewald 2003b) or spatial justice (Soja 2011). In this chapter, we explore place as a site of knowing and as an object of study as developed through the Special Forever project by teachers in schools located in the Murray-Darling Basin bioregion. Putting the environment at the center of the literacy curriculum inevitably draws teachers into the politics of place and raises questions concerning what is worth preserving and what should be transformed. We consider how the politics of place both constrains and opens up possibilities for pedagogy for eco-social justice and review the pedagogical work that one teacher, Hannah, undertook with her upper primary class.

Decolonizing digital heritage practices for Indigenous literacy: A multimodal analysis of iPad Tellagami videos

Purpose Drawing on multimodal texts produced by an Indigenous school community in Australia, we apply critical race theory and multimodal analysis to decolonize digital heritage practices for Indigenous students. This study focuses on the particular ways in which students’ counter-­‐narratives about race were embedded in multimodal and digital design in the development of a digital cultural heritage (Giaccardi, 2012). Pedagogies that explore counter-­‐narratives of cultural heritage in the official curriculum can encourage students to reframe their own racial identity, while challenging dominant white, historical narratives of colonial conquest, race, and power (Gutierrez, 2008). The children’s digital “Gami” videos, created with the iPad application, Tellagami, enabled the students to imagine hybrid, digital social identities and perspectives of Australian history that were tied to their Indigenous cultural heritage (Kamberelis, 2001).