Are we ready for some fun?

Here's my Awesome Teaching Techniques activity for tomorrow:

This session takes a closer look at the pedagogy involved in using web-based strategies to support passion-based and inquiry-driven approaches to learning. Project introduced during webinar.

There are a whole bunch of "shoot me now" aspects to this activity. First of all, nobody uses the word pedagogy to talk about actual teaching. Pedagogy is primarily used to describe the teaching process by people who don't teach. It's a perfectly valid word, just pretentious and unnecessary. I've already said my peace (or is it said my piece?) on webinar. Inquiry driven? I guess that means people ask questions, so all of my classes are inquiry based- "Can I go to the bathroom?" "Will this be on the test?" "Is there a pencil sharpener in here?" "When is this class over?" "Can you get your feet off the desk?" "Would you please stop talking and be quiet?" All of this activity is inquiry based.

So that leaves us with passion-based and web-based. I grew up pretty emotionally closed in. It took a long time and lots of work to learn to access my own emotions and my passions. The last thing I'm interested in is using web-based anything to support my passion-based approach to anything.

This is, as they say, bass-ackwards. Just because you decided in advance that you want to use the web doesn't make it any more of a strategy than does deciding in advance that you will use a fork to pick up your food. A strategy is a plan for meeting stated objectives. Anything you do to try to implement that plan is called a tactic. They are fundamentally different things. ("My objective is to be hungry no longer. My strategy is to eat something. My possible tactics for eating include, fork, hands or direct facial). Deciding in advance that web-based is the right kind of tactic to support any kind of learning is, well, how can I say this delicately? Uh, stupid. Before you pick tactics you'd better be sure what you're trying to accomplish, and if your objective is to promote independent, linear, clear, non-distracted thinking, then web-based could possibly be disastrously wrong.

I would be remiss if I did not mention again how objectionable I find the near total lack of the student perspective. Students are hardly mentioned, and when they are it's often stereotypical. "They don't read." They mutitask." They don't form personal relationships because they're on the computer al the time." Etc. Ugh.

But I'm not cranky or anything.