I remember when I first heard about Gregory Ulmer coming up with his own terminology to reflect the evolution from literacy to a new symbolic, visual practice needed to thrive in digital environments, Electracy. Reading about digital pedagogy lately, it no longer seems radical to invent one's own term. It seems a new term crosses my Twitter feed on a weekly basis -- participant pedagogy, peeragogy, hybrid pedagogy, connectivism -- each indicating some new practice or means of interaction in a networked, online environment. Perhaps, I should be looking to coin my own term in my dissertation instead of trying to connect a very non-technical practice that is most often linked to Brazilian peasants to new media ecologies.
Today though (and this could be may lack of sleep and excess of coffee talking) an interesting distinction emerged that could connect to the differences between critical pedagogy forefathers, John Dewey and Paulo Freire. In one vein, you have connectivism, which discusses knowledge building as an associative activity, tied to experiential and active learning. In the other vein, you have the emerging peer-based learning, tied to participant driven MOOCs. One is a radical new framework for education and the other is a more pragmatic approach to using the online environment to enhance learning and increase student engagement. One can more clearly be related to the work of Freire and the other to the work of Dewey. I'm not sure what I'll do with this discovery....
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