For many, imagining the possibilities of digital technologies, in classrooms and in our lives, conjures up two dystopian extremes: unregulated chaos or constant surveillance. These nightmares are animated by a fear that the digital is something created for us, something we receive rather than construct. Headlines promise us that we are falling into our screens like Alice into the rabbit hole, and we may never emerge from the mind- and reality-bending places we go. This might be true—and perhaps it’s to our benefit. For teachers and scholars, engaging with digital environments need not be a lockstep march toward automation or a devaluation of our profession, but can instead offer chances to examine and revise knowledge and the many frames that shape it, for ourselves and for our students. Using new tools to examine old ideas can create a mutual sense of agency and empathy between participants in teaching and learning.
Drilling down into tools, environments, and processes, asking how they work and don’t work and where they lead users to and away from— these are all crucial parts of digital scholarship and teaching. The pieces that follow situate the project-based work of interactive technology and pedagogy within the university. They interrogate decisions big and small, weighing how biases may shape how various audiences perceive information. It’s important that this thinking be made explicit to students and to audiences, and these pieces do just that. Such pedagogical work differentiates scholars from entrepreneurs, and open systems from closed ones. It propels teaching away from transactional models of learning, forcing instructors to make the process transparent at every turn. Learning happens not only in the doing of things, but in processing and reflecting upon the why and the how of that doing. The eight pieces that we present in this issue explore different facets of these principles.
Continue reading the Introduction to Issue Fifteen on JITP’s website. The Journal for Interactive Pedagogy is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal that promotes open scholarly discourse around critical and creative uses of digital technology in teaching, learning, and research.