Episode 116: Learning, powered by Social Annotations with Dr. Justin Hodgson, Co-Director of IU Digital Gardener Initiative
Dr. Hodgson is an award-winning educator and digital transformation leader at Indiana University, where he Co-Directs the system-wide Digital Gardener Initiative, a series of programs focused on faculty development and student success designed to integrate digital literacy, digital creativity, and digital learning into the classroom. He is also an Associate Professor in the Dept. of English at IU Bloomington, where he Directs the Online First-Year Composition program.
How to use Tools like Generative AI and Where do the Learning and Growing Literacy Programs lie on the Spectrum?
The use of something like a generative AI programs makes it easy to do things but the hard part is understanding how to make it do things well or how to recognize when something is done at a level or an expectation that fits within an industry, a discipline, or practice. One of the biggest gaps that we have is not how we help students learn how to use the tool to write better but more importantly, how we help them understand the rhetorical strategies by which a paper becomes an effective element in their communication strategy. Even though this does take a step back to the early 40s to 50s, this sort of approach to thinking more strategically about the impact of communication, the recognize recognition of a genre, how to ask the right kinds of questions, how to generate outputs that meet audience expectations and then how to navigate with that. As a teacher, one of the things they do is not try and hide ChatGPT but how do we design things in the classroom that helps students develop the skills they need that are in complement to ChatGPT, not to replace it but to really develop those kinds of critical depth of skills like analysis, reading, and understanding the text and communication strategies across different modalities. It is not about what a tool can do but how can the student be prepared to be successful as intellectual, thoughtful, and ethically responsible individuals.
What are the Digital Gardener Program and Hypothesis?
The Digital Gardner Program borrows its name from the IUPY campus now known as Indiana University at Indianapolis from their ideal garden. It is the next-generation teaching-learning space that was created by Julie Johnson and so Dr. Hodgson has leveraged the tool and term digital gardener because he wants to focus on cultivating digital ways of knowing, doing, and making across disciplines and not really get bogged down in the problem of trying to define what is digital literacy because the term literacy itself carries a lot of baggage. They try to address things like integrating these kinds of digital tools to help offset the digital divide. With technology like Hypothesis, which brings annotation into the social atmosphere and only makes learning visible in a kind of interesting way but also, anchors your comments into the text it serves as a bit of a reaction or recovery of some of that gets lost when you go from a print book to a digital book. When the integration of Hypothesis with the faculty into the program, they highlight how it works to improve student engagement in online learning or just in the digital space in general. It allows students to have conversations around ideas. It anchors a discussion board inside of a text. This is another approach to learning, to engagement that enhances students’ digital engagement, but it does it in a low lift, easy access platform that lives inside of their system as they already designed.
What Drives Dr. Justin Hodgson?
It all started as a premise for Dr. Hodgson and what classes he enjoyed as a student. He was fortunate to meet some instructors who invested in him and thought about him as a person in a way that disciplined him in the field. That opened up opportunities and help him see himself in empowered ways. As he moved out of grad school and into the field, he started to think about how to build a better learning experience. Early in his career, he started to think about how to bring more gaming principles and practices into the classroom and this led to a bigger conversation about what does it mean to build a better learning experience and how to facilitate that. In today’s day and age, some of the really exciting things that happened are opportunities to come through next-generation technologies. and cause people to rethink. The learning space is not just a desk in a room but a space for us to engage to actively talk about ideas and solve problems. He asked this one question to his fellow faculty members “When is the last time you had fun in the classroom?” He tried to make the class fun and meaningful to the students so they can be successful. With the growing technology, it brings in more opportunities than just the regular lecture-style classroom. If a student leaves the class and does not talk about the grade then he knows that he has done his job.
Contact Dr. Justin Hodgson
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/justinhodgson/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/postdigitalJH
Learn more about the IU Digital Gardener Initiative
Website: https://uits.iu.edu/initiatives/teaching-and-learning/digital-gardener-initiative
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