Photo by artist Nick Morrison on Unsplash
I was in that generation of teachers long ago (when I only had my M.A. and was adjuncting) who tested the old Deadalus system as a method to encourage digital conversation among students in a face-2-face class. I don’t remember it being highly successful, but it was an interesting experience. Of course, now that idea has grown into all sorts of digital affordances for learning and writing–affordances which teachers use all the time, such as PowerPoint, email, video and audio tools, web tools, and streaming, among many, many others.
In the years between that first encounter and now, I have incorporated and experimented with all sorts of digital teaching and learning tools including using digital electronic learning management system (Canvas, Blackboard, and Moodle), building a class website in which students’ websites were hosted or linked, and adding hybrid and purely asynchronous teaching styles into my experiences.
Nothing for me really replaces face-2-face teaching in a small classroom, but I cannot imagine today how I taught effectively without digital tools and platforms in my past years as a teacher. These tools are now just a part of the teacher I have come to be. In this section of my website you’ll find evidence of work I have done in becoming a certified online pedagogue, as well as some thinking, research, and things learned along the way.
I like to think that the innovative Sophists who taught rhetoric in the ancient world would have been excited about the technology we have today and the enhanced possibilities to communicate and persuade! Certainly, they, themselves, would have been using it and training their students in how to make such technology work elegantly and culturally (and I hope, ethically).
