Page 129 - Teaching Innovation for the 21st Century

To overcome the somewhat cold, detached and impersonal environment associated with online teaching, I enact a cyborg role with a social presence (Sung & Mayer 2012), making students feel personally connected to their peers and me. I do this by encouraging social sharing and a sense of intimacy. For example, during my flipped, virtual Master’s class, students prepared presentations and shared their challenges and tips while completing their studies. My pedagogy of care is evident as I reach out to the students’ worries and create a safe space for sharing personal stories. Using humour and playfulness for comic relief, I start my virtual classes by displaying memes depicting a range of funny facial expressions. Participants discuss the meme that they felt most accurately represented their state of mind. This method gave us a safe space to share a few laughs
and exchange our stories of coping with a work-life-study balance, especially during a pandemic.
Another way of establishing a social presence, or ‘humanising education through technology’ (Greyling & Wentzel 2008) for the 4IR cyborg teacher is by installing a ‘real’ or authentic version of myself as I would physically
do in class. I do this by ensuring that I greet and welcome everyone (Aragon 2003), ensure that I don’t sound like
a robot reading monotonously from the slides. I often playfully interject my personality quirks and anecdotes, as illustrated in the pre-recorded lecturers. Moreover, a social presence is established by requesting students to upload blogs on Blackboard and comment (Queiros & De Villiers 2016) on one another’s’ blogs, which helps establish a virtual sense of belonging and community.
Finally, the roles that have just been discussed enable me to integrate my four constructivist pedagogies as summarised in the next section.
Considering the convergence of man
and machine in 4IR super-highway (Xing & Marwala 2017), my role
as a 4IR cyborg teacher
is to maintain a social presence (Whittle et al. 2020) by establishing an atmosphere of care, trust and creativity needed for our reciprocal relationship to be effective.
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