DPC 2015 - Digital Pedagogies Conference

“Digital pedagogy is often presumed to be just something that uses electronic tools or computers. This is unsatisfying as it often limits the teaching to the extent of its tools. Two familiar problems arise. First, if the tool you have is a hammer, it is tempting to treat problems as nails. The second problem is treating technology as merely a tool: something that accomplishes a task you were already doing, but with (electro-) mechanical advantage. For the pedagogy, not much has changed”.
[Paul Fyfe]
Famously ? for the philosopher Heidegger ? when the hammer is broken, its function recedes the background and we look at it anew, ‘seeing’ it in ways that never occurred to us when all we wanted to do was bang in some nails. The aim of this conference is to look in a similar way at the on-going transformation of the learning environment by digital technologies ? moving beyond the functional implementation of these tools in order to view them from a critical perspective and consider whether we require a concomitant re-evaluation of pedagogical models and philosophies.
Understanding how the digital is changing the ways in which information is understood, interpreted and viewed is not constrained by discipline specificity, and is challenging academics and allied professions such as information scientists and librarians. This one day conference hopes to bring together these areas with practitioners from a wide variety of educational settings with the intention of connecting emergent ideas and models with the scholarship of teaching and learning. We welcome presentations from researchers and educators working in both FE and HE sectors.