Pedagogy of Digital Media

Hello and welcome to my first blog post. My name is Mousho Tekeian and I study English Literature at California State University Northridge. Coming off that point, studying any subject matter in our era lends us easy access to a number of tools, tools that are now a controversial subject. 

The inherent difference in digital media to regular, physical media is the widespread access people have to it. Anybody can post information and anybody can read that information so long as they have internet access and a device. The key word used in the previous sentence is information; there are two categories to that word: correct and incorrect information. So although the benefit in digital media is the connection people can have, the dialogical process that leads to learning and understanding oftentimes can be skewed by falsehoods. But that is not to undermine the clear advancement in the classroom teachers may have with digital Media.

There no longer exists the issue of a lack of communication (in theory) between teacher and student thanks to emails and other apps. One use I see commonly in most of my classes in the humanities, are discussions with a given prompt. This method of communication where the students are required to meaningfully respond to each other on the material, does in fact produce real conversation if they are being graded on the quality of their responses. In the classroom (in my experience) most people are hesitant to speak because of whatever reason that may be, but when they are given the opportunity to research, analyze, and produce slowly their response, the outcome tends to be more fruitful. 

That is of course the case if everybody is educated to utilize these tools. Problems also occur with academic dishonesty, as students as well as teachers can regurgitate whatever source they find on the internet. It is truly a double edged sword and we must find a middle ground.