Alex Christie is Assistant Professor in Digital Prototyping at Brock University's Centre for Digital Humanities. His research draws from modernist practice to experiment with digital knowledge production, including recovering manuscripts as game-based reading experiences and warping historical maps to express diverse representations of space. He led the Pegagogy Toolkit project with microgrant funding from the Association for Computers and the Humanities.
This is the source
Despite the perceived newness of electronic methods in physical classrooms, electricity–and the distributed labor on which it runs–has long powered the spaces of pedagogy. Routing electronic practices in undergraduate teaching through the digital infrastructures with which they operate, this writing tests circuits of power that migrate between disciplinary and physical learning systems. It does so through a discussion of Pedagogy Toolkit, an open source and community-authored teaching repository built with Jekyll and deployed via GitHub Pages. Contributing to an increase of energy for project-based interventions in digital humanities teaching, Pedagogy Toolkit circulates digitized teaching materials, guides to teaching with digital humanities tools, a curated sample of online syllabuses accompanied by a syllabus templating tool, and an accessible website templating framework. An overview of new methods for digital teaching in the undergraduate classroom leads in turn to a reflexive discussion of the design of digital platforms as pedagogical objects, activating issues of labor, diversity, and knowledge transmission along the way. Ultimately, building a toolkit for digital pedagogy constructs infrastructure as a mode of intellectual inquiry, exposing classroom power as a conduit for ethical connections between students, teachers, and digital development teams. Rerouting logics that partition teaching practice and tool development, this article situates building communities at the heart of humanities learning.
Alex Christie introduces a Digital Pedagogy toolkit and provides an analysis of teaching DH.
Attending to the communities imbricated in digital pedagogy requires accounting for power. There is a panel at the front of my classroom with two switches for the lights and two buttons to activate the projector. I engage these mechanisms and electricity flows into the classroom. My students walk into a room of desks, chairs, notebooks, chalkboards, and markers. Such tools are always waiting, ready for us to learn with, and we may additionally learn from these tools by asking who assembled them or where they came from. The classroom brings us into contact with material traces of human labor: wood, plastic, metal, halogen bulbs and the circuits of power that light them. Such power circulates through the intellectual cultures of our classrooms, as we organize chairs in a semicircle, write with students on the whiteboard, or display a PowerPoint on the projector screen. The contemporary classroom exists as an infrastructure, a blend of physical materials with values and practices through which students and teachers alike bring those materials to life.
Just as a classroom infrastructure is shaped and guided by the pedagogical
philosophy of the teacher, so too are digital pedagogical spaces structured and
designed to foster specific forms of user engagement. Taking a pedagogical
approach to tool development, digital humanities developers build intellectual
and cultural values into the digital infrastructures that constitute their tools
[C]yberinfrastructure is more than a tangible network and means of storage in digitized form, and it is not only discipline-specific software applications and project-specific data collections. It is also the more intangible layer of expertise and the best practices, standards, tools, collections and collaborative environments that can be broadlyshared across communities of inquiry
Digital pedagogy operates through an emerging nexus where the practices and protocols of multiple infrastructures permeate and interpenetrate each other. Routing and navigating the switches and junctures between such systems always requires handling power. This writing treats electric power as a metaphor for disciplinary and institutional forms of power. Specifically, I argue that such forms of cultural power enter our classrooms when one community of practice wields the product of another while overlooking that resource’s status as community-generated. Electricity, and the technological objects it powers, may be the most ubiquitous of these resources. Instrumentalizing our relationship to them risks separating our classroom communities from the working communities with which they are deeply intertwined, including facilities services, support staff, distribution networks, and development teams, among many others. Doing so narrows the contexts within which student learning takes place and the communities our teaching may benefit. In what follows, I consider how these concerns structure relationships between communities of students, teachers, and digital humanities tool developers. The interfaces of plastic, metal, and screen often suggest we are safely separated from such power, even as we control and direct its flow.
The above claims are far from new, but instead contribute to a cultural critique
of teaching technologies pioneered through scholars such as Cynthia Selfe and
Cathy Camper
We manage to have the best of both worlds–we have computers available to use for our own studies, in support of our classes and our profession–but we have also relegated these technologies into the background of our professional lives. As a result, computers are rapidly becoming invisible, which is how we like our technology to be. When we don’t have to pay attention to machines, we remain free to focus on the theory and practice of language, the stuff of real intellectual and social concern.
Arguments such as Selfe’s are of renewed relevance in a moment where humanists
themselves have turned to the work of building technologies.For the humanities, the digital humanities exceed
(though they include) the functional role of instrument or service,
the pioneer role of innovator, the ensemble role of an "additional
field," and even such faux-political roles assigned to new fields as
challenger, reformer, and (less positively) fifth column. This is
because the digital humanities also have a symbolic role. In both
their promise and their threat, the digital humanities serve as a
shadow play for a future form of the humanities that wishes to
include what contemporary society values about the digital without
losing its soul to other domains of knowledge work that have gone
digital to stake their claim to that society. Or, precisely because
the digital humanities are both functional and symbolic, a better
metaphor would be something like the register in a computer's
central processor unit, where values stored in memory are loaded for
rapid shuffling, manipulation, and testing-in this case, to try out
new humanistic disciplinary identities evolved for today's broader
contention of knowledges and knowledge workers.
In both their promise and their threat, the digital
humanities serve as a shadow play for a future form of the humanities
that wishes to include what contemporary society values about the
digital without losing its soul to other domains of knowledge work that
have gone digital to stake their claim to that society.
Contributing to what might be called the digital humanities research and development
informed by, and able to influence, the way scholarship, teaching,
administration, support services, labor practices, and even
development and investment strategies in higher education intersect
with society, where a significant channel of the intersection
between the academy and other social sectors, at once symbolic and
instrumental, consists in shared but contested
information–technology infrastructures.
Like a course syllabus, the Toolkit project is designed for scaffolded engagement. First, users will encounter resources for deploying digital humanities tools in their physical classrooms. As they dig deeper into the project’s documentation and website templating frameworks, users are introduced to the code and infrastructure through which those materials are shaped and are invited to reuse the open source code to author their own digital teaching platforms using the Pedagogy Toolkit framework. The project includes a
As an open source repository, Pedagogy Toolkit’s engagement with the
preservation and dissemination of humanities documents is also an engagement
with the complex work of an archive. The role of digital archives in
reconstructing past histories, as well as in illuminating the ethics of
contemporary attempts to recover such histories, is deeply complex. As Lauren F.
Klein writes: among the greatest contributions of the digital
humanities is its ability to illuminate the position of the critic with
respect to his or her archive of study, and to call attention to the
ethical and affective as well as epistemological implications of his or
her methodological choices.
Pedagogy Toolkit’s teaching resources demonstrate the importance of intellectual
exploration in a student-directed space. Teachers construct their documents as
actionable objects that invite a variety of student problem-solving strategies,
rather than lists of information or steps to repeat. Documents are referenced as
Pedagogy Toolkit is not alone in extending pedagogies of collaborative knowledge production and disciplinary border-crossing to digital platform development and dissemination. This interdisciplinary field of work was pioneered by
[taking] advantage of the affordance of the digital form to allow readers to respond to, rearrange, regroup, and remix sample projects along a range of axes
Similarly, HASTAC’s Pedagogy Project shares an open repository of teaching
assignments and experiments, which is openly accessible for community comments,
updates, and additions. The scope of the Pedagogy Project is vast, including
creative and multimedia projects, collaborative digital projects, and examples
of social media and public scholarship. Crucially, the project encourages
teachers to comment on its resources, offering feedback on how the exercise went
in their classroom as well as suggestions for future improvement. Through the
open access and commenting features of the HASTAC platform, this project invites
teaching communities to collectively share and reflect upon their teaching
practices online. Echoing Lisa Spiro’s reminder that sharing energizes and shapes a community,
The aims and aspirations of this project emerge from a specific institutional
context. It began under a Learning and Teaching Development Grant from the
University of Victoria Learning and Teaching Centre, headed by Misao Dean and
Lisa Chalykoff.
As I developed the project, the work of curating pedagogical content became the
work of curating community, access, and exchange. Such an approach echoes
Bethany Nowviskie’s call for We should put as much energy into connecting and
building up people–into developing supporting, motivated, skilled,
diverse, and intersecting communities of expert practitioners–as we do
into connecting the services, systems, and corpora that are the other
pillars of a national digital platform.
With funding from the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH), I
worked to build pedagogy into the project materials so the local forms of
knowledge exchange taking place at my home institution could be re-situated as
distributed, global, and asynchronous. The project thus transitioned from a
local institutional memory base to a global and open repository designed to
share the work of many diverse digital practitioners. Scaling up the toolkit
project was not primarily concerned with bandwidth, server space, or computing
power. Instead, scale became about people and communities of practice, a
function of building diverse sets of perspectives and benefits into tools,
expanding them as a function of community need and uptake.
The Toolkit project is powered by code and GitHub servers as it is equally
powered by the intellectual contributions of a diverse online community. Rather
than channeling resources from one community to another, such power is
reflective of the vitality of interrelated sets of practitioners. All content on
the site is authored through collaborative input from teachers of composition,
rhetoric, literature, and digital humanities, as well as developers and expert
users of digital humanities tools. From this perspective, the Toolkit project not only seeks to build communities
in and around digital pedagogy, but also demonstrate[s] how and where
those communities contribute raw material for building the project out
in new directions
With this intellectual cross-pollination and cross-fertilization in mind, the Toolkit guides offer an introduction to the tool, followed by teaching applications shared by contributors. In many instances, the introduction includes an interactive tutorial authored within the tool environment itself (produced by a developer or expert user). While the guides offer a space for experienced users to share their digital activities, they also offer an accessible venue for those new to digital pedagogy to access those activities and include them in their own classes. Designed to share and unite the interests of multiple communities of practice in and around digital pedagogy, the guides reflect the input, interest, and meaningful contributions of a range of diverse digital practitioners. Beyond offering exercises in souping up a classroom with tech, the tools section is developed as a collaborative zone where users can reframe their digital work in the contexts of various other communities engaging in tangential and continuous lines of inquiry. Doing so, in turn, reframes contingent classroom labor as an essential node in digital humanities networks, growing such networks by empowering students to build knowledge of and on digital platforms. In this way, established hierarchies and dynamics within the field are contingent upon the teaching work of adjuncts, sessionals, and teaching assistants, who actively conduct knowledge of such disciplinary formations to students.
The teaching shared by the project comprises nearly one hundred hosted documents and over forty contributors. Many offer strategies for teaching and authoring digital project-based scholarship. Alicia Peaker shares strategies for creating non-linear arguments using Neatline and Omeka. Peaker’s work invites students to conduct research from a shared repository of sources, which they then curate and visualize on a map using Neatline. Arguing from these shared materials, each student generates his own means of synthesizing and displaying the sources to build a web-based geospatial argument. Also working with Neatline, Areti Sakellaris shares her project that maps correspondence from the Library of Congress’s Woody Guthrie Manuscript Collection. Sakelarris’s project is designed to be reproduced in the classroom, offering materials for student curatorial work and web-based arguments. Others invite students to reflect upon their composition and revision practices using online tools. For instance, Jeffery Boruszak asks students to generate text analysis visualizations of their primary and secondary research sources in Voyant Tools. This enables students to visually explore trends in their research as they work to shape a research topic and thesis. Students may then use the trends they identify as new search terms to expand their collection of research sources.
Elsewhere, Brandon Walsh and Amy Robison share digital activities that use digital environments to teach literary and theoretical concepts. In
How do the tool and our framing of it affect how we read the text?
I started by asking them to show using the nodes…not what the storymeans but what it does.
Other contributors teach close reading skills. Julia Bninski’s assignment collates the 1818 and 1831 editions of
Overall, teachers share experiences using digital humanities tools and methods
to teach abstract thinking through practical electronic applications. The above
and related exercises let students approach multimodal collaboration, literary
theory, and close reading through the systematic and step-by-step procedures of
a given digital tool. Doing so lets students craft concrete and systematic
strategies for critical thinking with a given tool and environment. Furthermore,
teaching critical thinking skills through digital tools often carries the added
benefit of revealing and reworking classroom cultures. As many contributors
confirm, exposure to digital tools lets students better grasp the class’s
collective relationship to course material, as they note shared sources of
confusion with certain aspects of a tool, a text, or both. Chuck Rybak’s
students share relief upon realizing that they all become stuck at similar
places in the course material, allowing them to move forward with a newfound
sense of confidence and team-based learning (a dynamic I have also observed in
my own classrooms). While such approaches prove largely effective, they further
expose a key zone of intellectual concern where teaching and the digital
humanities meet at the experience of student learning. Developing abstract
thought in programmed environments risks reproducing the ideological
architecture of digital humanities interfaces in students’ own learning
strategies. As Amy Robinson explains: Students without a critical education in digital
technology risk being programmed by their programs, trained like
computers to follow the same intellectual pathways over and over
again
In addition to sharing classroom activities for teaching with digital tools, the
project also includes a syllabus templating tool that allows instructors to
remix and repurpose elements of digital syllabuses to create a downloadable
template course syllabus. The tool is automatically populated with CC BY-SA
content from syllabus information in the Pedagogy Toolkit repository. Syllabus
components are stored in the project repository in JSON format, which enables
new syllabuses to be added to the templating tool by sharing syllabus
information as a JSON file. The templating tool currently includes syllabus
contributions from Constance Crompton, Lisa Gitelman, Steve Jones, Amanda
Licastro, Eric Rettberg, Janine Utell, and Jacqueline Wernimont. Energized by
contributors from a range of academic positions and levels, the tool empowers
teachers to rapidly prototype digital pedagogical materials from a breadth of
colleague contributions. In so doing, it strives to avoid drawing power from
consolidations of disciplinary and canonical influence (and thereby conducting
such establishments of power, in turn, to the teacher engaged with the tool).
The templating process is divided into three stages: prepare, remix, and revise.
In the preparation stage, users enter basic information for their course. The
remix stage allows users to weave elements of existing syllabus data into their
working syllabus.
The production and design of the templating tool works through the constraints of both code and culture. Rather than being purely an exercise in building a tool under the constraints of Jekyll and Javascript, the development process of the templating tool was also an exercise in working to understand and reshape the cultural constraints of digital humanities syllabuses. This approach is deeply inspired by a conversation I had on Twitter with Jacqueline Wernimont, Daniel Powell, and Whitney Trettien. We discussed Wernimont’s
the inexcusable absence of women’s work from DH syllabi.Inspired by this conversation, as well those that stemmed from it at the 2015 Digital Diversity conference, the templating tool interface plays out tensions between instrumental and diverse visions of syllabus composition.
Like the switchboard at the front of my physical classroom, the switches and boxes that populate the digital interface restrict the flow of information through the binary logic of the toggle button. Interfaces equally shape the user’s experience of the tool, from text boxes to the disclaimer “all fields optional” that accompanies them. While the tool interface encourages users to remix and interweave elements of other syllabuses, such weaving is ultimately reduced to acts of activating, deactivating, deleting, and rewriting. The tool therefore presents engagements with online syllabuses as simultaneously an intellectual venture in incorporating diverse pedagogical choices and values into one’s teaching and also a bureaucratic venture in toggling flows of text to produce syllabuses on the fly. Rather than eliding or resolving such tensions, the templating tool inhabits and dwells in them. Combined with the critical readings highlighted at the end of the templating process, the tool’s design and user experience prompts teachers drafting a syllabus to wrestle and tangle with the mechanisms of digital teaching in their full messiness, failing to neatly resolve disjunctures between structures of knowledge and interface. This failure lays bare the everyday tensions between the challenge of course content and the immediate access to that content afforded by teaching tools including textbooks, worksheets, and screens, not to mention structures of contingent labor in the academy.
The syllabus templating tool responds, in part, to a twofold technical and
cultural pressure exerted upon contingent faculty. While part-time instructors
are often required to rapidly produce and vet teaching materials, the
availability of canonical sources used to inspire and produce those materials
(as Wernimont and others note) often corresponds to entrenched hierarchies of
gender, class, and sexuality. The templating tool responds to these pressures as
an initial resource to facilitate productive action within a stratified labor
system that does not succeed by reproducing corollary cultural stratifications.
Such complex tensions between diversity and instrumentalism play out through the
powered interfaces of classroom and computer alike, with the templating tool
(whose switches and boxes downsample diverse content through the binary logic of
selection) as no exception. The templating tool embodies the messy and uneasy
tensions between efficiency and accountability that shape tool-based learning in
digital environments. In this way, it embraces John Unsworth’s claim that
failure is an act of discovery, revealing limits to current theories and methods
that a field may yet expand upon and explore.if
we really want to get our money's worth, we should make sure that we
don't fund
Unsworth continues: I think, a very compact, elegant, and persuasive
criterion for deciding whether a real problem has been addressed,
and solved — namely, the test of whether the solution of that
problem has raised new problems
Structural interventions in technology and teaching are not problems with easy
solutions because teaching is always an unfinished act, an ongoing negotiation
of self and other. Cross-pollinating the values, choices, and assumptions that
figure into the structures of classroom and technology requires a constant
re-evaluation and how, where, and why they intersect. Just as electric power
circulates through teaching environments, so too may forms of cultural and
disciplinary power propagate through the digital tools and platforms such
electricity drives. Through deliberate, pedagogical entanglements of circuits of
communication, community, and cultural critique, students may come to better
understand how such power shapes their learning, finding themselves empowered to
re-situate coursework in relation to the various communities of practice it
relies on and supports. This tangle of symbolic, disciplinary, and literal,
electric power expresses what Elizabeth Ellsworth calls the wicked problem of
pedagogy: Wicked problems are problems that can’t or haven’t been
fully defined. Questions about them can always be asked and
reformulated. There is no explicit end to a wicked problem because
solutions can always be developed further
Rather than a singular or universal solution to the wicked problem of pedagogy then, Pedagogy Toolkit serves to energize the complex terrain on which every teacher, developer, and digital project freshly faces such problems through their practice. This terrain is shaped by the interlocking practices of communities both inside and beyond the classroom.
The community of the physical classroom always stands connected to the building
communities that shape and design its teaching infrastructures. Digital pedagogy
carries the promise of rendering visible and legible the often silenced, labor,
assumptions, and values of such communities. This work not only reveals future
engagements between the cultures and classroom and coder, but also existing
entanglements of physical and digital infrastructure that often go unaddressed.
As Valerie Robins explains: The technologies we work with every day–even programs we
take for granted like MSWord–take the intellectual capital of an entire
community of people in order to build and maintain: inventory,
designers, builders, mangers, and even testers working together in a
variety of ways. Like a telephone wire up the side of a mountain,
programs like Word must be assembled and maintained by a team of workers
who we don’t see, and almost never think about, until there’s an
issue.
Rendering transparent the black-boxed technology that informs classroom practice is a mission directed towards the future equally as it invites us to reconsider the past. Even traditional, analog classrooms exist enmeshed with technologies such as Microsoft office, Moodle, Outlook and Mail.app, and so on. Such technologies, built as bureaucratic and information management tools, inform the assignments, lectures, and other documentary expressions of student-teacher communication most teachers author on a regular basis. While the pedagogical applications of corporate technologies do not necessarily signal the bureaucratic subversion of learning management, the role these tools play in shaping learning remains overlooked and under-theorized. Locating pedagogy as a zone that reconfigures the classroom’s connection to the diverse communities it impacts and relies upon thus invites student and teacher awareness of the corporate production teams to which their learning is silently linked. Attending to the histories of the classroom as it has been impacted by the widespread adoption of information management tools is a task that digital pedagogy might still undertake.
Pedagogy Toolkit invites teachers to supplement existing classroom technologies
with tools whose development teams and values resonate in humanist terms. The
tool guides strive to render clear the values and assumptions of a given tool
and its development team, reconfiguring the relationship between teacher and
tool developer as a two-way process marked by mutual visibility. They empower
teachers and students alike to situate their coursework within ongoing
communities and their built products outside the classroom, thereby building
community across student experience and developer environments. Designed by
digital humanities development teams, many tools included in the Toolkit offer
expanded contexts for student research, particularly as they translate learning
objectives into design goals. Consider Serendip-O-Matic, which is designed
explicitly to help scholars discover diverse research sources from unexpected
sources drawn from the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), Europeana, and
Flickr Commons. Designed in one week from the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History
and New Media, this tool conceives research not as a process of information
retrieval, but rather one of serendipitous discovery. Similarly, the interface
for New Radial facilitates the visual annotation and organization of related
resources. It allows students to import and collaboratively annotate primary and
secondary sources, using annotation as a means of constructing complex
connections that transform a collection of related sources into a connected
network of ideas. Elsewhere, Scholarslab Prism constructs online reading as an
environment for crowdsourced interpretation, allowing teachers and students to
explore shared reactions to a text through the online interface. As the project
website explains, the 2011-2012 and 2012-2013 Praxis fellows designed the tool,
first, to translate the physical exercise of marking a text into a digital
one,
and, second, to expand Prism to a format that would promote
classroom use and scholarly conversation.
Far from exercises in deploying digital tools in physical classrooms, digital
pedagogy signals the analog classroom as a community that reflexively evaluates
its own means and modes of learning in relation to the unseen communities that
shape it. Among such communities are digital humanists at a range of positions
(from research faculty and project leads to tool developers and designers).
Digital pedagogy engages the products of digital humanities communities as those
communities design technical frameworks within which digital pedagogy may
operate, forming loops and recursions between the two zones of practice. Such
loops operate through the electric interfaces of tools analog and digital alike,
as well as the disciplinary power they conduct into the hands of users. At the
same time as teachers and students channel and direct such power through the
tools they use, the design and interfaces of the environments at hand may
empower or disempower critical awareness of the tool’s role in knowledge
construction. This awareness challenges the traditional concept of
My call is to stop attempting to distinguish so
incessantly between online and on-ground learning, between the virtual
and the face-to-face, between digital pedagogy and chalkboard pedagogy.
Good pedagogy is just good pedagogy
Digital pedagogy promises connection and collaboration across contiguous communities equally as it risks entrenching the separations and partitions that divide them, segregating teaching from research, emerging from established, and faculty from information technologist. Such divisions often constitute frozen hierarchies of power and labor. They frame communities of practice in competition with each other, manufacturing discrete knowledge commodities instead of building interconnected structures for intellectual sharing and advancement. The emergence of social infrastructure in the humanities conceives pedagogy as an intersubjective act through which communities reach, share, and grow together to challenge and overturn such divisive logics and frameworks. More than a register of electrified currents in humanities teaching, digital pedagogy teaches dynamics through which humanities continue to grow.