Several people in the Dogme Yahoo discussion forum have attempted to give greater shape to the idea of Dogme teaching using web 2.0 technologies (“Dogme 2.0”). Graham Stanley has suggested formulating “vows” for Dogme 2.0 similar to the original Dogme model. Here are my thoughts on what some guiding principles for Dogme 2.0 could include.
Methodological Guidelines
In “Dogme: Dancing in the dark?” Scott Thornbury sets out the original guidelines (“vows”) for Dogme. The below guidelines for Dogme 2.0 draw on these Dogme principles to suggest an approach appropriate to a web 2.0 world. As such they focus on the areas where 2.0 technologies are changing our relationship to knowledge and therefore our approaches to learning.
- Enabling conversation: technology can enable dialogue, broadening the range of participants, or deepening the conversation by involving others.
- Content co-creation: materials stimulate conversation, but the content for the lesson is driven, indeed created, by the students themselves. Collaborative tools (such as wikis) can encourage students to work together to create the lesson’s content.
- Locality: mobile devices can help students relate to their current location, through photographing, filming, audio recording or writing descriptions relating to where they are. A Dogme use of mobile devices helps students to better relate to their immediate surroundings, or to places that are important to them.
- Connections: strengthening communication with others (near or far) to facilitate connectivist learning that involves not just individuals but also broader networks or communities.
- Relevance: the internet is used to ensure greater relevance of the subject matter for the learner. Students are able to find more specific information and connect with networks that are more suited to their interests.
- Voice: online publishing (be it text, audio, images or video) allows learners to be heard and included in specific and yet global discussions.
- Identity: students have space to express themselves and in so doing to focus on different aspects of their identity (perhaps in Second Life or by participating in different online networks or communities). Students develop language skills that are relevant to them as individuals, through exploring their identity and relationship with the world.
To give some background to these suggestions, I discuss below some related concepts with respect to Dogme.
Connectivist learning beyond the classroom
George Siemens points to how learning is becoming increasingly informal, experiential, and continual. This has implications for the teacher as the majority of the students’ learning will take place outside of the class and therefore beyond the immediate reach of the teacher. Dogme 2.0 recognizes that a considerable amount of a student’s learning (perhaps most) takes place outside of lesson time and therefore beyond the classroom. It addresses the question of how to enable continued conversations outside of the lesson, as it draws on technology to reconnect class members when they are physically distant from one another. As such the students’ learning stretches beyond the class’s subject matter, its student body and the experiences they share together.
Connectivist learning places great importance on networks (of colleagues, friends and others interested in a particular subject) in enabling an individual’s learning. Learners create and strengthen links between themselves and others who are also learning in the same or related fields. Not only do they make connections between sources of knowledge, but also between other ideas or concepts. Siemens sees this process as driven by the increasing need to manage changing contexts, where decisions are necessarily taken with limited knowledge. Indeed he sees the capacity to learn (in the future) as being more important that the knowledge an individual currently has. It is the capacity to make future connections that will solve future problems. Dogme’s focus on the conversation allows the learning process to also strengthen network relationships, since the themselves are based upon communication.
Location and reality
By drawing upon what is already in the classroom (in preference to bringing in external materials) Dogme implicitly places great emphasis on being present in one’s physical (rather than virtual) location. 2.0 technologies can in fact be used to focus on our relationship with the real world: with places, people and experiences. Mobile and 2.0 technologies can bridge experiences and conversations in the outside world with those within class.
- Mobile devices allow students to record their experiences between classes (as text, photos, sounds or video). Text or voice recording permit students to capture their thoughts, impressions, reactions to that experience or environment.
- Twitter likewise allows learners to share their ideas with others (perhaps via a mobile phone) according to the moment.
- Augmented Reality on mobile devices can display data according to the physical location of the handset. This information can be determined by the provider (as in web 1.0) or created by the device user (as web 2.0 applications). These 2.0 programs (such as BrightKite and Tonchidot AirTags) allow greater connection with others depending on both the student’s location and interests. Conversations can be both topic-specific and yet inclusive; they can be location-specific, yet global.
- Virtual worlds present Dogme 2.0 teachers with a greater challenge as they more obviously remove the student from their present location (and in this respect they are quite different from augmented reality). However, virtual worlds can be used to focus on the students’ location: perhaps by virtually visiting where they live or work; perhaps by inviting students to build in a 3D virtual environment as a way to relate to their real world location.
Pedagogy 2.0
In the same way that Dogme is based on pedagogically sound foundations, so too is Dogme 2.0, where the focus is on the use of technology to achieve specific pedagogical goals. However, Dogme 2.0 also recognizes that changes in technologies are leading to changing relationships to knowledge and therefore learning. Learning increasingly takes place on the group level (in addition to the individual’s level), so web 2.0 tools play an enabling role in facilitating the building and development of networks within the process of learning. Dogme has a natural role to play by focusing on conversation as the medium for both learning and developing network relationships.
Is Dogme 2.0 still Dogme?
Dogme 2.0 is very much an application of Dogme ideas to the world of web 2.0 and the above ideas are certainly in harmony with the three precepts that Meddings and Thornbury present in “Teaching Unplugged”.
- Conversation driven: dialogue is at the heart of any Dogme lesson; it also enables connectivist learning through network building and development. Dogme 2.0 allows the conversations to extend globally.
- Materials light: the lesson’s content is created by the students themselves; the wealth of materials available online, merely serve to stimulate creation of content by the students.
- Emergent language: Language emerges through the content that the students have created. Grammar and new vocabulary are uncovered through the students striving to express themselves more accurately and more completely.
Dogme and learning 2.0
Both Dogme and learning 2.0 have much to offer each other. However, it does not seem an evenly beneficial relationship. Although Dogme 2.0 brings Dogme up to date (especially in its recognition of networked learning and connectivism), it is eLearning that gains most from Dogme: Dogme offers a clear framework for working with tools that so clearly place students at the center of their learning and in control of their own relationship to knowledge.
Some related links…
