Pedagogy Summary

There are two main topics in the area of pedagogy. First, how do sustainable digital resources assist and change teaching and learning? Lynch (2008) argues that there is tremendous potential in digital resources, but they are primarily of benefit to students who can learn without being taught. In addition, with the rise of social media, the internet can now help support students who do best in peer learning environments. However, for the larger majority, we have yet to find ways of appropriately tailoring online education for individual students. Lynch concludes: "...we must be able to articulate clearly the differences between access to information resources and access to education." (p. 117). On a similar note, the exhaustive 326-page report by Hartley et al. (2006) of faculty members in California emphasized the importance of disaggregation in user studies of online digital materials for education. They point out that their study participants created and used a wide range of online materials: “almost every conceivable type of resource” (p. 180), but that there are real issues around communications between resource developers. Other researchers have suggested that radical changes to the university may be necessary, including changes to the structure of universities, the role of interdisciplinarity, the nature of evaluation and assessment, and the need for improved equity in access (e.g. http://www.ichass.illinois.edu/hastac2010/HASTAC_2010/Presentations/Entries/2010/4/15_The_Future_of_Thinking__Learning_Institutions_in_a_Digital_Age.html).

For unaccredited learning, there are initiatives like the social media site The School of Everything (http://schoolofeverything.com/) where students and teachers can get together on emergent courses, W3Schools (http://www.w3schools.com/), where students can pick up web skills by doing interactive tutorials, or the Khan Academy (http://www.khanacademy.org/) where over 1800 free videos are available on a range of topics in math and science. There are also many excellent tools for creating and sharing bibliographies, including Zotero and CiteULike, and also some authoritative sources such as the Oxford Bibliographies Online. For even more radical changes brought by the new affordances of the digital, there are advocates of teaching using computer games and virtual worlds, and also courses that teach computer game design and development (e.g. http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2010/09/09/f-videogames-education-learning.html).

The second issue is how best to provide appropriate teaching and learning for students in the humanities to use digital resources, to critique existing resources, and to create new and better resources in the future. The digital humanities has a tradition of offering short workshops, including those held at Princeton and Duke in the 1980s and 90s and the ones currently offered each summer in Victoria and Dublin. More recently, we’ve seen the widespread interest in THATCamps, where people gather for a few days on an emergent agenda.

More formally, there are a few MA programs, including an MA in Humanities Computing at the University of Alberta, the genesis of which is discussed in Sinclair and Gouglas (2002), and a PhD in Humanities Computing at King’s College London. Hockey (1999) writes eloquently on the need for such programs, and Unsworth (2002) provides a discussion of what should be included, which revolves around a recognition that humanities computing is the practice of modeling humanities information to support both computation and human communication: “We should not refuse to engage in representation simply because we feel no representation can do justice to all that we know or feel about our territory. That's too fastidious.”

References
Hockey, Susan. (1999). “Is There a Computer in this Class?”
http://www.iath.virginia.edu/hcs/hockey.html

Lynch, Clifford. (2008). "Digital Libraries, Learning Communities, and Open Education." Ch 7. In Opening Up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge. Toru Iiyoshi and M. S. Vijay Kumar, Eds. Mass: MIT Press.

Sinclair, Stéfan and Sean Gouglas. (2002). “Theory into Practice: A case study of the Humanities Computing Master of Arts at the University of Alberta.” Arts & Humanities in Higher Education. London: Sage. 1(2).

Unsworth, John. “What is Humanities Computing and What is Not?” (2002).
http://computerphilologie.uni-muenchen.de/jg02/unsworth.html