Digital pedagogy redux
Monica Chin's new article in The Verge is getting a lot of buzz for highlighting something that many college faculty will doubtless have noticed: Gen Z students don't really think in terms of files and folders. Faculty from a range of institutions, public and private, two-year and R1, report having difficulty explaining to students how to locate files by following directory pathways. If a file doesn't turn up in global search, it may as well not exist. The story presents this in terms of a generation gap, with much of the disconnect explained by the ubiquity of search engines and students' greater familiarity with mobile over desktop computing, while faculty generally have the opposite. But there's displaced emphasis on the former over the latter, which I think is one of the deeper problems.
Have you reimagined your digital pedagogy today?
The academy has responded to the pandemic poorly, responding to declining enrollments and budget shortfalls by increasing class sizes, cutting entire programs, and laying off contingent employees en masse. In the midst of all this, those of us lucky enough to keep our jobs are enjoined to "reimagine digital pedagogy" so as to somehow replicate the experience of face-to-face teaching in a remote setting. This is impossible, and I'd bet its impossibility is behind much self-reported "burnout."
tags: godge