Article in an online journal

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.

Ever since their appearance in the early 1990s, hypertext novels were presented as the pinnacle of digital aesthetics and claimed to represent the revolutionary future of literature. However, as a literary phenomenon, hypertext novels have remained marginal. The article presents some scientifically derived explanations as to why hypertext novels do not have a mass audience and why they are likely to remain a marginal contribution in the history of literature. Three explanatory frameworks are provided: (1) how hypertext relates to our cognitive information processing in general; (2) the empirically derived psychological reasons for how we read and enjoy literature in particular; and (3) the likely evolutionary origins of such a predilection for storytelling and literature. It is shown how hypertext theory, by ignoring such knowledge, has yielded misguided statements and uncorroborated claims guided by ideology rather than by scientifically supported knowledge.

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 the second edition of their influential book New Literacies: Everyday Practices and Classroom Learning, Lankshear and Knobel argued that engagement with these practices was “largely confined to learners’ lives in spaces outside of schools.” That was nearly 10 years ago, and in some respects, very little has changed. In many classrooms, there is a lot more technology than there was back then; for instance, the provision of interactive whiteboards, desktops, laptops, and portable devices is better, and there is a greater variety of software and hardware on offer. Yet, even when equipment is available, up to date, and in good working order, problems of curricular integration still arise. Despite all the rhetoric about the importance of new or digital literacies in education, recent curricular reforms and their associated assessment regimes have tended to privilege traditional literacy skills and printed text. An expansive view of new literacies in practice seems hard to realize. Why should this be the case?

The school curriculum is not neutral knowledge. Rather, what counts as legitimate knowledge is the result of complex power relations, struggles, and compromises among identifiable class, race, gender, and religious groups. A good deal of conceptual and empirical progress has been made in the last 2 decades in answering the question of whose knowledge becomes socially legitimate in schools. Yet, little attention has actually been paid to that one arti-fact that plays such a major role in defining whose culture is taught–the textbook. In this article, I discuss ways of approaching texts as embodiments of a larger process of cultural politics. Analyses of them must focus on the complex power relationships involved in their production, contexts, use, and reading. I caution us against employing overly reductive kinds of perspectives and point to the importance of newer forms of textual analysis that stress the politics of how students actually create meanings around texts. Finally, I point to some of the implications of all this for our discussions of curriculum policy.

This paper examines the history of the learning theory "constructionism" and its most well-known implementation, Logo, to examine beliefs involving both "C's" in CSCW: computers and cooperation. Tracing the tumultuous history of one of the first examples of computer-supported cooperative learning (CSCL) allows us to question some present-day assumptions regarding the universal appeal of learning to program computers that undergirds popular CSCL initiatives today, including the Scratch programming environment and the "FabLab" makerspace movement. Furthermore, teasing out the individualistic and anti-authority threads in this project and its links to present day narratives of technology development exposes the deeply atomized and even oppositional notions of collaboration in these projects and others under the auspices of CSCW today that draw on early notions of 'hacker culture.' These notions tend to favor a limited view of work, learning, and practice-an invisible constraint that continues to inform how we build and evaluate CSCW technologies.

Phew! What a journey betwixt East and West that was, the mere description of the process of the process-poem. What [Jonathan Stalling] allows to subtly unfold in these poems are two popular visions of China dreamt up by the West (and it would hardly be controversial to say that the Westerner's dream of China has woven itself thick into the fabric of Chinese reality). The beginning of each poem - here, "Please speak a little louder. I can't hear you" - evokes the businessperson's China, the tourist's phrasebook in which language is a tool, the straightforward economy of exchange in which nothing is lost in the gulf between languages - because nothing has really been said. The end of each poem sounds like a garbled version of appropriated ancient Chinese wisdom and culture: the ending verse, which begins with "persuading guests to drink wine / one silk thread at a time" sounds, to my half-trained ears, like a parodie condensation of the great poet Li Bai mixed into the I Ching with a dash of Confucius to finish. I love that these poems receive their movement from the contingencies of language itself - passing sometimes across the smooth surfaces of sense, other times along the striated channels of sound - to get from language as utility (sensibility) to language as poetry (senselessness). Certainly these poems function as a gentle critique of Orientalism and are a testament to the infinite pliability of language. But the contingencies that are the poems' internal connective tissue produce accidental beauty along the way: the double, parallel descent of the shape of the poem, for one; and lovely lines like "rest on a mourning shrine / sins dark / veiled, narrow pass" all the more gorgeous for having travelled through the tumultuous waters of translation.

There is so much more I want to write about yet there's so little room, but shout-outs to: Laura Solórzano's post-Steinian gem of a poem (p. 189); Bela Shaycvich's hilarious drunken correspondences on the tasks of the translator (p. 56-57); Desmond Kon ZhîchengMingdé's masterly sestina (p. 193). By way of a cautious conclusion: The Animated Reader is a worthwhile thing; it serves as a whirlwind intro to some stellar and inventive writers; it's mostly a fuckin' blast to read because it hitssomanydifferentkindsofpleasurenodcs; and it reminds you how potent the poetic form is, and that poetry will not be slain by new Internet for ms, but will forge a head, procreating gloriously with them.