Skynet: The Computerized-Classroom

Student-Centered, Teacher-Centered, the Democratic Classroom. These terms can't help but be dropped to describe pedagogies of classrooms. But, as we move into the digital classroom, the binary of student and teacher dissolves, centers do not hold and everything is shifted to zeroes.

The only input is one: The Technology.

Though my first inclination is to be suspect of the techno-centered classroom; the way it plays the queens gambit, holding the center, value free; the technology is ideological neutral. Neutrality is good? Technology fills the center pushing teacher and student to inhabit the diameter. This move makes student and teacher have equal input and the division of authority is lessened. This is the ideal for the democratic classroom, where no ideology is center and students can fill this ideological void with their voices.

But sound does not resonate in a vacuum. By moving to the techno-centered class, the lack of reflective teaching and reflective learning creates a somnambulist learning environment where the tools are not wielded with intention. Both the student and teacher are blindly writing, using the technology as modes of design and control, allowing this value-neutral entity to pull the strings. Even a teacher so bent on total control is still a puppet to the technology.

The nature of software can give students and teachers a foothold in the center. Blogs, wikis, discussion boards, synchronous and asynchronous chat are ways to break the constraints of technological, environmental, and institutional designs of the digital classroom. These modes can create a new center within these environments that allows for a Democratic digital classroom.