Hi Mark,

Unfortunately, I do not think that the "sage on the stage" and "guide on the side" are myths. Teacher training courses still refer to the former as "pedagogy" and the latter as "andragogy."

I think reference to "digital native" is helpful if it is not used to suggest that all young learners are digital natives. I was a digital native as a child, because I had microcomputers and access to the Internet, making me a digital teen. Most people from my generation weren't, so are thus digital immigrants. Not every young person today is a digital native and thus not a digital teen. If all they have access to is broadcast technology like TV, and not information on demand, like the Internet, then they are simply analogue natives and analogue teens.

When I was one of the few digital teens from my generation - which include owning technology that could capture the text from teletext pages - I had the values of an independent learner so got labelled "SEN" and then went to a specialist school based on the "guide on the side" model.

Most teenagers today have the values I had, demanding the "guide on the side" of andragogy and rejecting the "sage on the stage" of pedagogy. Today I wouldn't have SENs, simply ENs, because most young learners want the education I had as a result of the pioneering Education Act 1981.

Adults from my generation who have now given up their technophobia and become digital immigrants are starting to develop the same values as digital natives and thus have become "Digital Adults." So in the same way as when someone comes to live in the UK they are an immigrant, they and their family will eventually become settled that no one could know they were not natives. Do we need a term like "digital settlers" to refer to all people with digital fluency, whether native or immigrant?

I am now developing my research outputs more around "guided inquiry." In such a setting, as you seem to advocate, the andragogy and pedagogy get blurred. The teacher can be more powerful than the computers I previously developed. They are constantly reacting to the situation, where their students could be reading through books, accessing YouTube/Wikipedia, asking the teacher or their peers questions, using their own device or one provided by the institution. In such an environment the need for the terms "digital native" and "digital immigrant" are redundant because technologies, whether digital or analogue, are just there.

In such a classroom, the "session plan" cannot be organised in terms of timings as in "sage on the stage" or in terms with exercises in "guide on the side", but it is the role of the teacher to ensure that during what might seem like chaos, the learning objectives are achieved.

I am currently doing a series of studies to test out this approach, and it might be that one day the expressions of "guide on the side" and "sage on the stage" and indeed "digital native" and "digital immigrant" will indeed be myths.

Best Wishes,

Jonathan

Jonathan Bishop
Mixter, Freeman, Councillor
BSc(Hons), MSc, MScEcon, LLM,
FRSS, FRAI, FRSA, FIAnstM, FCLIP, FBCS,
MIMarEST, MIEEE, MACM, MIET, MCIJ,
CITP, ICTTech
AACS

Author of over 75 research publications.
Editor of: Examining the Concepts, Issues and Implications of Internet Trolling; Transforming Politics and Policy in the Digital Age; Gamification for Human Factors Integration: Social, Educational and Psychological Issues; Psychological and Social Implications Surrounding Internet and Gaming Addiction; and Didactic Strategies and Technologies for Education: Incorporating Advancements.

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On 5 January 2016 at 01:03, Mark Stevenson <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Hi Jonathan,

1) At first glance I can see the value of investigating ways technology might aid in overcoming the "thinning spread" problem introduced by the challenge of individualising learning style tasks.

2) At second glance, I begin to wonder if technologies come with stylistic features that can be just as alienating as the "sage on the stage".

3) And then I begin to see that for many the proposition "through technology" might be experienced as something surprisingly impenetrable, an experience I hope is given as much critical attention as "the classroom" as matters proceed. Robert Pfaller's (and Zizek's) concept of interpassivity (1998!) and technology's role in it would be a good place to get started.

Perhaps it is time to ditch the sage on the stage myth, along with the digital native, and other simplistic asides/broadsides (and guides), along with juicy rhymes...? (jokes "allow the old play with words and thoughts [of childhood] to withstand the scrutiny of criticism"; ref. Freud, 'The Mechanism of Pleasure and the Psychogenesis of Jokes.')

Best wishes,

Mark