Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Concepts, Models, and Experiments

Abstract

Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Concepts, Models, and Experiments is an open, collaborative digital humanities project focused on the intersections of digital technologies with teaching and learning. The project consists of an open-access, curated collection of downloadable, reusable, and remixable pedagogical artifacts that are categorized by keyword and annotated by their curators. Drawing on the keyword approach of Raymond Williams (Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.), this collection, taken as a whole, will document the richly-textured culture of teaching and learning that responds to new digital learning environments, research tools, and socio-cultural contexts. This presentation by one of four co-editors of the project will give an overview of the project’s conception and progress to date, especially highlighting innovations in open-editing, collaborative workflow, and insights into digital pedagogy.

Now under contract with the Modern Language Association (MLA), Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities is a book in a new form. Currently, the project is in the initial phase of production; the first six of the 50 keywords (Hybrid, Interface, Praxis, Queer, Rhetoric, and Video) have been submitted to the MLA and will be available for open peer review later this year. Each keyword will have a curator who will briefly introduce a particular term in the context of teaching and learning and then provide ten pedagogical artifacts, such as syllabi, prompts, exercises, lesson plans, and student work drawn from actual courses, classrooms, and projects across the humanities. Building on earlier digital pedagogy projects like the Zotero group for Digital Humanities syllabi (http://bit.ly/_zotero), the Digital Research Tools Wiki (http://bit.ly/_dirt ), and MERLOT (http://bit.ly/_merlot), Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities, will share the actual stuff of teaching and learning rather than reflective essays. Thus, it will complement such essay collections as Learning through Digital Media (iDC Press, 2011), Debates in the Digital Humanities (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), and Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Principles and Politics (Open Humanities Press, 2013).

The project itself models features of digital pedagogy. Consider, for example, the keyword, “Open”. Not only will the collection undergo open peer review before being released under an open access license, it is also being openly edited in a GitHub repository (https://github.com/curateteaching). By using this software versioning tool to share various states of each keyword submission, the editors are making visible the process of scholarly production and demonstrating the affordances of digital tools to reveal knowledge creation. Such open creation invites students into the scholarly process. Likewise, the act of curating pedagogical artifacts echoes the curation practiced by faculty as they create assignments and courses, drawing on resources and models in the digital learning ecosystem. The model of curators who collect pedagogical artifacts from other digital pedagogues also illustrates the connected nature of learning, as described in George Siemens’ “Connectivism: A Learning Theory for a Digital Age” (Elearnspace, December 12, 2004. http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism.htm) by linking both information and people into larger networks.