The Digital Socrate

1. The Socratic method uses questions to examine the values, principles, and beliefs of students.
2. The Socratic method focuses on moral education, on how one ought to live.
3. The Socratic method demands a classroom environment characterized by “productive discomfort.”
4. The Socratic method is better used to demonstrate complexity, difficulty, and uncertainty than at eliciting facts about the world.

I saw these in an email this morning and it got me thinking that between elements of Social Networking, authentic assessment and hard fun, the ideas that many of us have been tossing around for the last little while are (as it always seems) not really new, they have been thought of before. Individually, some of these ideas are hard to justify, but if you couch it inside the classic theory of the Socratic method, it might be much easier to get traction for using social networks, games, simulations and discussions.