Digital Pedagogy #4 (Let the kids be in charge)

I found the video fascinating since the kids were put in charge of their own education. I was wondering if this was not promoting more independent thinking as well as work ethics. The students seemed more enthusiastic about their school subjects and one of the students exclaimed also how ambitious the tasks were that they came up with for researching, things like infinity, reading books like Stephen Hawking’s, how maths could be applied to a game of poker and doing research on global warming by inspecting nitric oxide fixation in soil. The one student exclaimed how the subject became more personal to her because of her own personal endeavours because, she wanted to know more.

All of this might be pointing towards how schools might be implementing education in the future. If this were to work it might make teachers more of a go to than an authoritarian figure. The teachers will be assisting the learners in their education by guiding them through the learning process. The learners need to be given the opportunity to think for themselves and probe their own learning. The learners will benefit more through questioning and finding things out for themselves instead of the teacher giving all the information word for word to them. Students taking charge of their own education seems like an excellent idea and might be pointing towards where the future is heading. How this will impact society as a whole we can just speculate but the Independent Project is pointing towards how this might be possible. In the article of Hamilton 2014, he points out that the teacher student relationship needs to be disrupted and sees it as an oppressive system. Where the student is seen as an empty vault where the teacher can make his deposits of knowledge but of course this is false since the student has plenty to teach and the teacher also has plenty to learn.

Lastly how can we use technology to improve learning, communication amongst students using digital technologies will go a long way to improve this. Now different terminologies are used to provide distinctions on how we can do this effectively, functional access (the ability to use), critical access (the ability to choose to use), and experiential access (the ability to use in a personal context). If all the latter abilities can be used successfully it would point towards using the digital pedagogies in a very successful manner enhancing the communication of students and consequently also their learning.