The WWW as Curricular Method in the Digital Humanities

The National Panel Report released by the Association of
American Colleges and Universities (2002), calls for a
“dramatic reorganization of undergraduate education” to address
the challenges faced by higher education in a time of
transformation from an industrial to a knowledge-based society
(vii). The report states that “education practices invented when
education served only the few are increasingly disconnected
from the needs of contemporary students”(viii) and the demands
of citizens of a diverse and interconnected world.
The Report recommends an invigorated and practical liberal
education offering knowledge that all students, regardless of
backgrounds, fields, or chosen higher education institutions,
should acquire. The college student of the twenty-first century
needs to become an “intentional learner” who can thrive in a
complex world, and who can adapt to new environments,
integrate knowledge from different sources, and transform
information into knowledge and knowledge into judgment and
action (xi.). The Report urges an “end to the traditional, artificial
distinctions between liberal and practical education” and
advocates a kind of instruction and learning that looks beyond
the classroom to the world’s major questions” (xii).
The changing nature of colleges and universities and the
reconstruction of education it calls for is in great part
conditioned by what Douglas Kellner calls the “Great
Transformation,” powered by one of the most dramatic
technological revolutions in history (2003, 51). The revisioning
of higher education is increasingly seen in correlation with the
development of digital technologies, which are changing not
only traditional models of work, leisure and communication,
but also the nature of knowledge itself, as well as models of
acquiring and processing information cognitively. In the Report
it is asserted that the “intellectual and practical skills that
students need are extensive, sophisticated and expanding with
the explosion of new technologies” (xi). Like the AACU Report,
Kellner too argues that traditional and specialized aspects of
education need to be overcome in order to develop alternative
pedagogies and multiple “literacies” to meet the challenges of
an interconnected global society. The study of interrelationships,
connectivity, transfer, and integration, leading to the
development of critical judgment, is proposed as the basis of
the new liberal curriculum in all disciplines of the humanities. The five key concepts for the new curriculum are in fact not so
much concepts as they are markers of cognitive processes. As
such, the reform of higher education is to take place primarily
in terms of methodology of teaching. Given that “hypertext is
a mental process, as well as a digital tool” (Gilster, 137), and
the WWW is “an embodiment of human knowledge”(W3C),
exploring the relationships between cognition and technology
in the context of the new humanities and pedagogy can be
useful. I would like to suggest that the digital media offer a
useful concrete, but also a cognitive tool for teaching the five
processes that are to be the core of the new humanities. This
claim has theoretical and practical implications. Theoretically,
it calls for becoming more aware how the computer is altering
our ways of engaging with specific disciplinary questions
cognitively and methodologically (McCarty, 1). My concerns
in this paper, however, have to do with the practical applications
of the impact of digital media on cognition within the area of
the humanities. Practically, the claim calls for explicit
instruction within the context of each discipline in the methods
of organization and manipulability that underlie the presentation
of material on the WWW.
The main vehicle of the digital media, the WWW, in its nature
embodies, illustrates and enables through its functioning all
four of the processes suggested as the basis for the new liberal
curriculum--interrelationships, connectivity, transfer, and
integration. By their very nature “the new media technologies
externalize and objectify reasoning” (Manovich, 59). The
WWW resists attempts at standard systematization, and
demonstrates the co-existence of and interrelationships between
multiple and apparently contradictory perspectives on a single
issue. One GOOGLE keyword search will retrieve hundreds
of documents linked by one single term, but applied variously
in different contexts, emphasizing the importance and nature
of connectivity, transfer and integration.
In relation to a given subject of inquiry or task, the non-linearity
in the presentation of material and ideas on the WWW
encourages “intentional” involvement on the part of learners,
as there is no longer one “solution” or a single “interpretation,”
but a variety, all situated within their own context and
knowledge. In order to find solutions to given questions or
problems, learners have to engage in a process of discovering
connections among apparently disparate materials and contexts,
then find ways of transferring and integrating parts of materials
into a new context. The WWW also offers alternative models
of grouping materials, such as scaffolding, and it promotes the
idea that conceptual knowledge cannot be separated from the
contexts in which it is represented (Wiles and Littlejohn, 2003;
Campbell, 2004; Cole, 2000; Carr, 1998;). The ready
availability of various information on the WWW turns research
and interpretation not so much into an exercise that depends
upon finding information, but one that strongly emphasizes
cognitive operations depending on critical thinking:
classification of it (finding meaningful interrelationships) and
making use of it (transferring it) by arranging it meaningfully
in a give context (integrating it). Scholarship and instruction
in the humanities has always relied on these processes; however,
with computer connectivity and the speed with which these
processes happen, the WWW amplifies them, enables them
“physically” and “on-demand” and thus makes them more
explicitly and self-consciously “teachable” than before.
In addition, because the WWW offers multiple presentations
of information, it illustrates that knowledge and heuristics are
not absolute, but situated within various communities of
knowing. Conceptually there is no “closure” or “ending” online,
but rather a constant process of evaluation of materials (Rhodes
and Sawday, 12) that are open to revisions, additions and
remodeling. Becoming aware of the implications the nature of
the WWW has for understanding what constitutes knowledge,
argument, opinion, analysis and interpretation, leads to the
development of critical discernment, evaluative capacity and
judgment.
While traditional “mass education tended to see life in a linear
fashion based on print models and developed pedagogies which
broke experience into discrete moments and behavioral bits,”
a new critical pedagogy of the digital humanities could produce
skills that “enable individuals to better navigate the multiple
realm and challenges of contemporary life” (Kellner, 9). Making
the WWW, its capabilities and operating functions explicit
models of intentional learning can help educators in the digital
humanities illustrate how knowledge in the humanities is
positively affected by the digital medium, and how the new
pedagogy leads to learning as an active, social process bound
up with experience connected with wider socio-political
paradigms of change.
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