digital pedagogy

In New York City in 2009, a new kind of public school opened its doors to its inaugural class of middle schoolers. Conceived by a team of game designers and progressive educational reformers and backed by prominent philanthropic foundations, it promised to reinvent the classroom for the digital age. Ethnographer Christo Sims documented the life of the school from its planning stages to the graduation of its first eighth-grade class. Disruptive Fixation is his account of how this “school for digital kids,” heralded as a model of tech-driven educational reform, reverted to a more conventional type of schooling with rote learning, an emphasis on discipline, and traditional hierarchies of authority. Troubling gender and racialized class divisions also emerged.Sims shows how the philanthropic possibilities of new media technologies are repeatedly idealized even though actual interventions routinely fall short of the desired outcomes—often dramatically so. He traces the complex processes by which idealistic tech-reform perennially takes root, unsettles the worlds into which it intervenes, and eventually stabilizes in ways that remake and extend many of the social predicaments reformers hope to fix. Sims offers a nuanced look at the roles that powerful elites, experts, the media, and the intended beneficiaries of reform—in this case, the students and their parents—play in perpetuating the cycle.Disruptive Fixation offers a timely examination of techno-philanthropism and the yearnings and dilemmas it seeks to address, revealing what failed interventions do manage to accomplish—and for whom.

As an adjunct instructor during the pandemic, I am in a rather unique position to speak to the use of the Learning Management System (LMS) as a pedagogical platform (I currently teach at three different post-secondary institutions and use three different LMSs). This pandemic has clearly laid bare several of the difficulties of precarious labour in the academy, and the need to fluently navigate several disparate platforms is just one. But, I would like to use this unique position to begin to speak to the role of pedagogies of digital literature to help students develop critical digital literacies, and how the proprietary LMS might influence or impede that process.This paper’s primary focus is a scholarly analysis and critique of the use of the LMS Blackboard for course delivery of ENGL4309 Digital Adventures in English, a fourth-year seminar that is marketed primarily as a course in DH tools for the study of literature and the digital literary. One of those DH tools I am using in a module on digital literatures is Nick Montfort’s “Taroko Gorge” and the many remixes thereof. By situating the e-lit classic in this way, my goal is to treat the code and the popularity of its remixes as a DH tool, and to thus follow in the excellent arguments made throughout 2020 about electronic literature as digital poetics (see, of course Dene Grigar and James O’Sullivan’s Electronic Literature as Digital Poetics, or Alex Saum-Pascal and Scott Rettberg’s “Electronic Literature [Frame]works for the Creative Digital Humanities” for the Electronic Book Review).

As a part of this module, I ask my students to remix “Taroko Gorge,” as we did when I first encountered the work through the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) several years before. However, extending that same project to upper-year students who were, until that point unfamiliar with the field, and most of whom had never interacted with code before at all, proved to be difficult. And one of the difficulties of this assignment, indicating barriers to access for student and instructor alike, was attempting this project using the proprietary software of the LMS.

Of course, one of the assignment’s learning objectives is building the critical digital literacy of recognizing that all digital texts are two texts: a code, and its reconstitution. Following Serge Bouchardon’s arguments in his “Mind the Gap! 10 Gaps for Digital Literature,” this assignment is designed to at least in part reveal the basic mechanisms of how code shapes the digital text to readers who do not know how to program (like me!), and to thus begin to close “the gap separating us from digital literacy” that Bouchardon observes. But, the incongruity of the LMS and the remixing project reveal a potential limitation that we need to be cognizant of as instructors of the digital literary and beyond.

In this contribution to her co-edited collection, [Frame]works, Saum brings to the digital humanities both makers and theoreticians, gnosis as well as poiesis, school teachers as well as research professors.

“Electronic Literature [Frame]works for the Creative Digital Humanities,” edited by Scott Rettberg and Alex Saum-Pascual, gathers a selection of articles exploring the evolving relationship between electronic literature and the digital humanities in Europe, North and South America. Looking at the combination of practices and methodologies that come about through e-lit’s production, study, and dissemination, these articles explore the disruptive potential of electronic literature to decenter and complement the DH field. Creativity is central and found at all levels and spheres of e-lit, but as the articles in this gathering show, there is a need to redeploy creative practice critically to address the increasing instrumentalization of the digital humanities and to turn the digital humanities towards the digital cultures of the present.

Conceived as an ongoing conversation, rolling out 2-3 articles each month until the end of the year, all contributions are tackling at least one of the four following areas: Building Research Infrastructures and Environments, Exploring Creative Research Practice, Proposing Critical Reading Methodologies, and Applying Digital Pedagogy.

(Source: editors)