Firstly, Socratic dialogue is a purposeful conversation consisting of “asking essential questions and testing tentative answers against reason and fact in a continual and virtuous circle of honest debate” (Cookson, 2009, p. 8). As recently discussed by Cope (2019) Socratic dialogue has long been embedded in traditional higher education. Indeed, the famous ‘Harvard Case Method’ in which Harvard Business School professors engage with their MBA students utilises a form of Socrative dialogue, although in a structured formulaic way. In the MBA case class, the professor poses a series of broad questions to the class about a problem or issue faced by a business, and various class member respond and build on each other’s thoughts and ideas in a typical 90-minute session. Harvard Case Method facilitators also must undergo extensive training to become proficient in this method.

Cope (2019) contends that the new digital media provides the architecture for building rich dialogue in pedagogy. However, todays millennials have been ‘trained’ by exposure to the general digital media platforms, that are very far from the dialogic that Socrates would recognised as being congruent with his method. The general standard of discourse on Twitter for example generally consists of opinion and counter opinion. It is going to take considerable effort on the part of educators to be trained and able to build rich purposeful conversations in a digital media space for our 21st century students. Aiding students to build the critical thinking skillsets and discipline required for meaningful dialogue and problem solving, underlines the importance of today’s educators needing to keep up with both old and new pedagogical ideas and methods. A good example is the current Coursera course I am undertaking - enabling educators to initiate and facilitate the meaningful rich conversations that Socrates would have recognised; albeit in the new digital learning sphere!

Cookson, P. W., Jr. (2009). What Would Socrates say? Educational Leadership 67, 8–14.

Cope, B. (2019) Recursive Feedback Part 4D Socrative dialogue finds a home in the 21st century, Retrieved from https://www.coursera.org/learn/elearning/lecture/NpBkq/recursive-feedback-part-4d-socratic-dialogue-finds-a-home-in-the-21st-century