We must approach the Internet of Things from a place that doesn’t reduce ourselves, or reduce students, to mere algorithms. We must approach the Internet of Things as a space of learning, not as a way to monitor and regulate. Our best tools in this are ones that encourage compassion more than obedience. The Internet is made of people, not things.

The less we understand our tools, the more we are beholden to them.

So often in our discussions of online education and teaching with technology, we jump to a discussion of how or when to use technology without pausing to think about whether or why.

it would be a mistake to think that what I do is digital, because what I really do is human

If there is a better sort of mechanism that we need for the work of digital pedagogy, it is a machine, an algorithm, a platform tuned not for delivering and assessing content, but for helping all of us listen better to students.

Digital pedagogy is not equivalent to teachers using digital tools. Rather, digital pedagogy demands that we think critically about our tools, demands that we reflect actively upon our own practice.

“the ‘digital’ in ‘digital humanities’ and ‘digital pedagogy’ refers less to tech and more to the communities tech engenders and facilitates.”

Digital pedagogy is important because it is willing to improvise, to respond to a new environment, to experiment. The digital pedagogue is not the same as an online teacher. The digital pedagogue looks at the options, refuses the limitations of the LMS, invites her students to participate in — indeed, create — networked learning. Her practice is mindful of the landscape.

Some people will insist that technology is neutral — “it’s just a tool,” they’ll say. “What matters is how you use it.” But a technology always has a history, and it has a politics. A technology likely has a pedagogical bent as well — how it trains people to use it, if nothing else — and even if one tries to use a tool for a radically different task than it was built for, there are always remnants of those political and historical and pedagogical designs. Technologies are never “just tools.” They are, to borrow from the physicist Ursula Franklin, practices. Technologies are systems. Technology “entails far more than its individual material components,” Franklin wrote in The Real World of Technology. “Technology involves organizations, procedures, symbols, new words, equations, and, most of all, a mindset.”

Far too much work in educational technology starts with tools, when what we need to start with is humans. We are better users of technology when we are thinking critically about the nature and effects of that technology. What we must do is work to encourage students and ourselves to think critically about new tools (and, more importantly, the tools we already use). And when we’re looking for solutions, what we most need to change is our thinking and not our tools.