pedagogy

Digital platforms have become central to interaction and participation in contemporary societies. New forms of ‘platformized education’ are rapidly proliferating across education systems, bringing logics of datafication, automation, surveillance, and interoperability into digitally mediated pedagogies. This article presents a conceptual framework and an original analysis of Google Classroom as an infrastructure for pedagogy. Its aim is to establish how Google configures new forms of pedagogic participation according to platform logics, concentrating on the cross-platform interoperability made possible by application programming interfaces (APIs). The analysis focuses on three components of the Google Classroom infrastructure and its configuration of pedagogic dynamics: Google as platform proprietor, setting the ‘rules’ of participation; the API which permits third-party integrations and data interoperability, thereby introducing automation and surveillance into pedagogic practices; and the emergence of new ‘divisions of labour’, as the working practices of school system administrators, teachers and guardians are shaped by the integrated infrastructure, while automated AI processes undertake the ‘reverse pedagogy’ of learning insights from the extraction of digital data. The article concludes with critical legal and practical ramifications of platform operators such as Google participating in education.

This paper examines the changing landscape of literacy teaching and learning, revisiting the case for a “pedagogy of multiliteracies” first put by the New London Group in 1996. It describes the dramatically changing social and technological contexts of communication and learning, develops a language with which to talk about representation and communication in educational contexts, and addresses the question of what constitutes appropriate literacy pedagogy for our times.

In this panel moderated by Lai-Tze Fan, we examine Twine at ten, exploring the ongoing influence of this hypertext platform on pedagogy, play, and literature: 

What We Talk About When We Talk About Twine (Moulthrop) - Creating digital stories and games involves many cultural registers. Just as important is the unmapped, semi-formal culture that underlies communal, open-source software. In the case of Twine, this can involve distinctions among versions of the core software, associated scripting languages, and "story formats." Learning this buried lore can reveal a technologized "artworld," in Howard Becker's term, and raises questions of hierarchy, value, and the nature of creative work in what is essentially a gift economy – questions that may ultimately apply to any form of art. 

Twine at 10: Reflections on Pandemic Storytelling (Salter) - Hypertext and games platform Twine recently marked its ten year anniversary, complete with a celebratory game jam. Twine’s affordances as a web-driven, open source tool drive its renewed significance as a platform for rapid response storytelling, enabling users to build playful, poignant responses to the many challenges of 2020 as exemplified by Mark Sample’s 10 Lost Boys; Cait Kirby’s September 7, 2020; and Adi Robbertson’s You Have to Ban the President. 

Twine, The EpistoLab (Laiola) - A frustrating element of teaching with Twine is the platform’s limitations with real-time collaboration across devices. Before COVID, when the classroom could operate as a lab, this limitation could be solved by students gathering around a single machine. But when shared machinery and gathering becomes impossible, Twine offers another model--“the epistolab.” The epistolab follows an epistolary model of collaborative work, dispersing colLABoration across times and spaces, and prompting a reevaluation of the roles that simultaneity and liveness play in collaboratory, pedagogical work. 

Twine as Literature, Not Literacy, in the Program(ming) Era (Milligan) - In the 21st century digital humanities, “digital literacy” has seemingly become the humanistic endgame for how we conceptualize, rationalize, and advertise the skillsets we impart; In e-lit, Twine as well is often presented to students in these terms. As the potential shortcomings of literacy as sole pedagogical outcome, however, become increasingly clearer (for instance -- as we reckon with its limitations to prevent insurgency-through-misinformation in the US), I propose another way to teach Twine and its promise of digital storytelling differently: through a model, based on the creative writing workshop, that highlights the literature and literary possibilities of Twine. 

The panel will conclude with an open discussion of Twine’s future as a platform

In this paper, I share my experiences and some strategies developed while teaching my first E-lit course at a small urban liberal arts college. Mills College at that moment, had no campus digital curricular resource center for faculty or students and the English department’s approaches to digital humanities were, by necessity, hyper local and “small batch.” As the first E-lit course offered at Mills it was designed to be both an introduction to E-literature and criticism, and to literary critical practices and it was also to have a creative component that allowed students to develop their own born-digital projects. The course drew students from literature and creative writing majors and non literature majors and enrolled both graduates and undergraduates. It was an exuberant group who brought a tremendous range of skills to the table. Figuring out how to teach this cohort and this material was a creative-critical challenge of its own. E-lit as topic and medium invited me to think in new ways about my pedagogy. I had taught creative writing workshops (in poetry) and had some experience of the workshop model found in MFA programs -- though I felt it wasn’t a model that worked well. I had experience teaching literature and theory at both an advanced and beginning level and had found that often the best way to teach someone to write about literature was to have them try to write it first. For this course, I needed to come up with assignments and structures that helped students to develop as both literary critics and as creators of E-lit. Some of my students had deep technical backgrounds and skills; they could code and were familiar and comfortable with the technologies they might use to create E-lit projects. Others had almost no computer experience outside of facebook and email -- which meant that they needed help identifying technologies that they might use to build E-lit which they could learn to use within a short matter of time. Some of the students were fairly adept at academic writing/reading conventions or interpretive strategies, but most were not. Also, I was teaching in an institution that required a final “grade” and in a department that had specific learning goals in close-reading and thesis driven argument, and so I faced challenges regarding assessment. This presentation is designed to be helpful both to those who are thinking about how to design assignments in classes when teaching E-lit in spaces without structured institutional support and to teachers who want to think about pedagogical tools for E-lit, who might want to use or amend a couple of the assignments which I hope may be useful to others. I will share examples of student work for both of these assignments, and share what worked particularly well, and where I encountered challenges. I will end by asking a couple of questions about E-lit and pedagogy. I hope this presentation leads to a larger conversation about teaching practices for E-lit.

(Source: Author's Abstract)

We describe six common misconceptions about platform studies, a family of approaches to digital media focused on the underlying computer systems that support creative work. We respond to these and clarify the platform studies concept.

(Source: Authors' abstract)

Alex Saum-Pascual presents and contextualizes contemporary Spanish-language electronic literature and reads from her digital poetry.

Paul Collins on collegiate content: syllabus, discussions, lectures, and all.

(Source: EBR)