Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

I recently read Cathy Davidson’s “Let’s Talk about MOOC (online) Education–And Also About Massively Outdated Traditional Education (MOTEs)” on the HASTAC [the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory] blog.  I agree with her argument that talking heads do not a MOOC make (nor do they help digital pedagogy in general). I particularly like her use of the verb “squander”: using talking heads (a form of MOTEs) is “squandering a technology, not taking advantage of its particular affordances that cannot be duplicated elsewhere in the analog, pre-digital world.”

Democratic pedagogy begins with the idea that teachers do not pour knowledge into students. It holds, to use   Freire’s famous metaphor, that students are not banks into which teachers deposit knowledge. He called this practice the banking method of education because it presumed that all of the power of knowledge was in the teacher’s / owner’s hands and that their job was to deposit that knowledge into the piggy-blank slots in the top of their students’ heads. But this method, Freire argued, does little to develop learners’ agency and democratic participation (you know, the reasons why we teach).  Instead, he suggested, teachers should find ways to facilitate sharing and building knowledge between students.