Digital Ghosts in the Modern Classroom is an article written by Ashley Hinck which tries to define critical digital pedagogy. Hinck’s objective was to represent the environment of modern day classrooms while also discussing topics like authority, roles, and agency. Students understand the fact that technology is and will be essential in both their personal and professional lives. The issue here is that these students have been taught to think that digital media is all about using a template or some sort of shortcut in order to succeed in the end. These template based platforms tend to reflect traditional school culture and banking mode of education. This makes learning very rigid which causes students to lose that sense of exploration and discovery when working with digital media. These template are what Ashley Hinck considers to be the “ghosts” that hover over the students and their learning. The goal of this article is for teachers to understand that we should be moving students from simple users of template platforms to “makers, creators, and speakers”.
Personally, I grew up only knowing and using Microsoft Office as my form of digital media and that too was all about templates and shortcuts. Just like Hinck said in the article about students being apprehensive and nervous about technology, I too feel the same way because of this. I tend to be a very creative person when it comes to visual art, but only when I have something in my hand like a pencil and paper. Alternativley, when it comes to digital media, I seem to lose all my creativity. This relates to the article in that, I too, have only used templates as platforms for digital media, it’s all I know. I tend to get anxious at the idea of having to create my own digital media product when starting from scratch. The idea of failure is also one which pushes me away from technology as I have become comfortable in doing things hands on. With this in mind, I am able to appreciate where these students are coming from and why they would be frustrated.
To represent this article using a form of digital media, I chose to create a sketchnote and present it in video form. The video aims simply guiding the audience attention at specific parts of the sketchnote at different times. On the other hand, the sketchnote itself is the main focus here. I felt it was very fitting to create this form of media as there are no shortcuts or templates to be used. As a creator, I was in charge of picking out points from the article which I found to be most important and delivering these points in a way which highlights them. Take a look at the video created here: