It is a pleasure and an honor to be back in New Hampshire. I was here quite a few times several years ago, and got to tour much of the state working at your regional support centers.
Today I am talking about pedagogy, but coming at the topic from an entirely new direction, one that might surprise some of you, but not others. Many of you have children at home, and if you’ve observed your children, in the ‘native’ (Prensky 2001) environment, then you’ve probably already come to understand that their digital, networked, and info-abundant information experiences are about pedagogy. Video games, in particular, are entirely fueled by pedagogy.
Director of Education for the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Connie Yowell in here kickoff address for Connected Educators Month, suggested that if we wanted to identify another profession, where practitioners are prepared for their jobs and continue to prepare for their jobs, in much the same way that teachers should be prepared and preparing, she said it would be game designers. (Yowell, 2013)
I want to suggest that to create learning environments that are relevant to our children’s information habits, we should look to their outside-the-classroom learning experiences for cues. There are four qualitities of that experience that I would like to talk about. As pedagogies, they are not new. But they should be newly considered, because they are, for the first time, critical parts of our children’s native culture.
The full six are:
That our children’s ‘native’ learning experiences..
- are Responsive,
- Provoke conversation,
- are Fueled by questions,
- Drive identity building,
- Inspire personal investment,
- and Guided by safely-made mistakes.
In my talk, numbers 2 & 3 and 4 & 5 are combined.
You will find ancillary resources here:
- Online Handouts - http://goo.gl/hylUkf
- Backchannel Transcript - http://goo.gl/KPHKDZ
Prensky, M. (2001). Digital natives, digital immigrants. Retrieved from http://goo.gl/iq3RF9
Yowell, C. (2013, October). In Steve Hargadon (Chair).Kickoff. Virtual presentation delivered via the Internet Connected educators month. Retrieved from http://connectededucators.org/keynote-kickoff-connie-yowell/
It is a pleasure to be back in New Hampshire. At this point, I am wishing that I had been able to drive up to Concord, so that I could take some side-trips and photograph some of the magnificent colors here. We’re not getting a lot of color yet in my part of NC.
