Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

3.24.11 | Last fall’s Re: Humanities conference co-sponsored by Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges—a two-day symposium featuring presentations by undergraduate scholars interested in the effects of digital media on academia—shows that digital tools are transforming the way we teach and learn about literature, history and other subjects more closely associated with stacks of dusty tomes than social media.

And while students may be taking the lead with innovative projects and theses built entirely around websites, teachers are developing some pioneering courses. Take, for example, English professor Katherine Rowe‘s Shakespeare class, in which the students meet as avatars in a virtual Globe Theater. Patricia Cohen writes in The New York Times:

Prof. Katherine Rowe’s blue-haired avatar was flying across a grassy landscape to a virtual three-dimensional re-creation of the Globe Theater, where some students from her introductory Shakespeare class at Bryn Mawr College had already gathered online. Their assignment was to create characters on the Web site Theatron3 and use them to block scenes from the gory revenge tragedy “Titus Andronicus,” to see how setting can heighten the drama.

“I’ve done this class before in a theater and a lecture hall, but it doesn’t work as well,” Ms. Rowe said, explaining that it was difficult for students to imagine what it would be like to put on a production in the 16th-century Globe, a circular open-air theater without electric lights, microphones and a curtain.

Jennifer Cook, a senior, used her laptop to move a black-clad avatar center stage. She and the other half-dozen students agreed that in “Titus,” the rape, murders and final banquet — when the Queen unknowingly eats the remains of her two children — should all take place in the same spot.

“Every time someone is in that space,” Ms. Cook said, “the audience is going to say, ‘Uh oh, you don’t want to be there.’”

Students like Ms. Cook are among the first generation of undergraduates at dozens of colleges to take humanities courses — even Shakespeare — that are deeply influenced by a new array of powerful digital tools and vast online archives.

The Times story includes other teachers and students who are integrating technology in their day-to-day academic life. From an interactive version of Marianne Moore’s poetry to a comparative reading of different digital and non-digital versions of “Great Expectations,” students and teachers are finding new ways to enliven timeless texts. And some students are applying a sophisticated knowledge of digital media to their course work.

“Students are fluent in new media, and the faculty bring sophisticated knowledge of a subject. It’s a gap that won’t last more than a decade,” Rowe told the NYT. “In 10 years these students will be my colleagues, but now it presents unusual learning opportunities.”

It’s an engaging article, and it offers smart examples, but I wish it acknowledged that both educators and students have been using digital media to build upon texts and reimagine literature and history since, well, the inception of digital media.

While researching the works of Alexis de Tocqueville in the mid-90s, I came across a re-contextualized version of “Democracy in America,” one of several hypertext projects created by the American Studies program at the University of Virginia. Sure it looks rudimentary now, but it was an exciting start.

The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH), whose goal is to develop information technology as a tool for scholarly humanities research, was founded at UVA in 1992. Some of its earlier literature and history archives are also simple hypertexts, but they are prominent examples of the convergence of the humanities and online technology before we even had the term “digital media,” and the work continues today.

Another good example, this one from the West Coast, is Voice of the Shuttle, which started at University of California, Santa Barbara in 1994 as the “website for humanities research.” While it didn’t create original content, it quickly became the ultimate portal for online resources. 

Jumping forward almost a decade, HASTAC—the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory—was founded in 2002 by Cathy Davidson and David Theo Goldberg. Together they wrote a manifesto for the humanities, calling for humanists, artists, social scientists, natural scientists and engineers to work collaboratively on new ways of learning. The HASTAC website summarizes some of the projects by network members who have developed tools for multimedia archiving and who have created new platforms for social interaction and original gaming environments. (Anyone can join; register here.)

The Labyrinth Project, a research initiative on interactive narrative based at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, is one of the older examples. It has been in place since 1997 under the direction of cultural theorist Marsha Kinder. Newer additions include “Bound by Law?,” a comic book inspired by the collision of documentary filmmaking and intellectual property law. The book’s authors are Jennifer Jenkins, director of Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, and James Boyle, one of the founders of the Center and a Duke Law School professor. Free digital versions are available, and readers are also encouraged to remix the comic.

HASTAC also features active blogs and coverage of the annual Digital Media and Learning Competition and the projects that have emerged from it. More than anything, HASTAC shows that when it comes to digital media, the kids (and the teachers) are all right—and have been for a while.