Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities

I have to agree that I have a much harder time annotating digital texts than interacting on the margins of a physical copy.

Ana, when you write “reject a negative identity,” do you mean negative self-view or view of themselves? It might be useful to clarify this as some identity scholars argue that we don’t have multiple identities, but rather multiple layers and aspects of our identities.

One further artifact that might fit the bill nicely with what you have provided below, even though it has been around for a decade or more, is the use of Second Life for language learning purposes, as this short piece in Omniglot attests: http://www.omniglot.com/language/articles/secondlife.php

Ana, you certainly make a clear connection between communicative competence and the availability of digital tools for language learning in paragraph 6. But I am wondering if it might be useful to redefine communicative competence here adding multiliteracies component (the ability to critically interpret and convey multimodal messages). There seems to be a bit of a disconnect here right now between the definition of communicative competence that language learning relies on and further discussion of resourcefulness and usefulness of digital tools. I think it would strengthen the argument.

While I agree on the whole with the move beyond linguistic elements given the awesome technology available (great artifacts provided in this piece!), I do find problematic the notion that language-learning is not about grammar. While true for L1, I don’t see why you’d avoid explaining past tenses in L2 without referring to how it’s done in L1. Why not use that resource? Yes, the goal is communication, but grammar provides the shorthand whereby you can more readily communicate the desired meaning.

Hi Julia,

Thank you for including us as an example. Beyond that, I appreciate the variety of examples offered here, since they offer an idea of the range of possibilities with regard to disciplines and tools that might be used in curation assignments. I also appreciate the range of educational levels covered in the examples.

I could see this being taught alongside Melville’s “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” or Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale in a course devoted to the history of unseen women’s labor.

perhaps better than “pure linguistic” would be “simply morphological”. since there is no aspect of language not included in “linguistic.”

This might also be paired with a visit from a Copyright Librarian or other staff member with special expertise in current copyright law, author’s rights, publisher agreements, etc., to allow students to put these discussions into a contemporary setting that might be relevant to those who wish to author or publish their own works.

I’d be curious to hear more about how this complicating and questioning of the notion of “authorship” also impacts the notion of “authority.”  This is the only paragraph that overtly mentions them together, but in moving away from the notion of the individual genius composing in isolation towards (or back to) more collective, collaborative, and even unintentional or multi-intentional forms of authorship, what are the implications for literary or interpretive authority?