There is no doubt that the introduction of digital technologies into education, has ruffled more than a few feathers. It’s not surprising really, there was education ticking over as usual, the same old relations of power in place, teachers ‘delivering’ nuggets of knowledge to ‘consumer’ students, distributed through the paper-based materials owned by the mighty publishing houses. At the same time all this kept in check by political targets of students ‘success’ maintained by highly reductive modes of assessment, stringent copyright protection of published materials, the commodification of education as a whole and in the end the total de-professionalisation of the teaching profession where teachers have become mere agents in the processes of ‘learning’….ah that feels better now.
AND then the INTERNET came along….oh what joy
Of course there have been plenty of efforts by educational institutions and interested parties to fight off the threat, and we see it all the time in the anti-technology discourses, of ‘the Internet is evil and is bad for your children’ – yeh right, I remember when people used to get square eyes from watching too much telly. Of course there are security and privacy issues, and I have no intention of devaluing those concerns, but they are not valid excuses to deny the right of people young or old to new opportunities in learning.
As Graham Stanley points out in an article this year on his blog – “Looking back on 2011…Dogme ELT & Interactive Whiteboards”
I for one have had enough of the 2 warring camps and the ‘Tech vs Anti-tech’ argument – I think we really have moved on. It’s no longer a question of whether language teachers should use technology, but that teachers should use it judiciously and only when it advances the language learning in the classroom. There have been a number of posts (by myself, Nicky Hockly here and here, Sue Lyon-Jones) on this.
With the introduction of the Internet and it’s associated media and technologies into education, we’ve seen a ‘tension’ between an ethos of control, hierarchy, competition and commodification, i.e. education, while in stark contrast a web 2.0 ethos of sharing, collaboration and community. In the end an almighty head-on collision.
The argument I’m building is leading to a defence of Dogme in ELT, not an attack. To my mind, and to many others I think, the Dogme approach is not at odds with the new technologies. Indeed Dogme addresses the concerns of control and prescription through the over-use and reliance on paper-based materials in ELT. Dogme seeks to draw on the real resources of the classroom i.e. the learners and teachers and their lives. As I understand it, Dogme has never pretended or intended to be a ‘methodology’, and certainly never one that fits all.
Through this discussion I would like to build a bridge between the tech vs anti-tech camps in relation to Dogme. As Luke Meddings points out in a recent seminar ’20 steps to Unplugged Teaching’, Dogme or Unplugged teaching can be based around a three-point framework, being;
conversation driven, materials light, and focussed on the emergent language
It’s the ‘materials light’ aspect that seems to be the sticking point in aligning Dogme and technology.
Perhaps a different perspective is required here in understanding ‘materials’ and their use. My suggestion is that rather than materials light it might be better to think about materials as being ‘learner-generated‘ . From this viewpoint we can see the valid use of technologies such as blogs, wikis, digital photography as a means of connecting to the lives of the learners (and teachers) and generating learners’ texts through talk, images, videos and so on.
I’m going to be blogging a few digital dogme lesson ideas starting with; ‘learners images’ – so watch this space 
By Richard Gresswell from ELTbites
