MUSE in Focus:
Charting the Digital Humanities

In a reassessment of peer review practices, Lee-Ann Kastman Breuch explores how computer technology changes our understanding of this activity. She defines “virtual peer review” as the use of computer technology to exchange and respond to one another’s writing in order to improve it. Arguing that peer review goes through a remediation when conducted in virtual environments, the author suggests that virtual peer review highlights a unique intersection of social theories of language and technological literacy.

How traditional learning institutions can become as innovative, flexible, robust, and collaborative as the best social networking sites.

Over the past two decades, the way we learn has changed dramatically. We have new sources of information and new ways to exchange and to interact with information. But our schools and the way we teach have remained largely the same for years, even centuries. What happens to traditional educational institutions when learning also takes place on a vast range of Internet sites, from Pokemon Web pages to Wikipedia? This report investigates how traditional learning institutions can become as innovative, flexible, robust, and collaborative as the best social networking sites. The authors propose an alternative definition of “institution” as a “mobilizing network”—emphasizing its flexibility, the permeability of its boundaries, its interactive productivity, and its potential as a catalyst for change—and explore the implications for higher education. The Future of Thinking reports on innovative, virtual institutions. It also uses the idea of a virtual institution both as part of its subject matter and as part of its process: the first draft of the book was hosted on a Web site for collaborative feedback and writing. The authors use this experiment in participatory writing as a test case for virtual institutions, learning institutions, and a new form of collaborative authorship. The finished version is still posted and open for comment. This book is the full-length report of the project, which was summarized in an earlier MacArthur volume, The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age.

<P>Nearly a century ago, famed educator John Dewey said that "if we teach today's students as we taught yesterday's, we rob them of tomorrow." That wisdom resonates more strongly than ever today, and that maxim underlies this insightful look at the present and future of education in the digital age.</P><P>As Darrell West makes clear, today's educational institutions must reinvent themselves to engage students successfully and provide them with the skills needed to compete in an increasingly global, technological, and online world. Otherwise the American education system will continue to fall woefully short in its mission to prepare the population to survive and thrive in a rapidly changing world.</P><P>West examines new models of education made possible by enhanced information technology, new approaches that will make public education in the post-industrial age more relevant, efficient, and ultimately more productive. Innovative pilot programs are popping up all over the nation, experimenting with different forms of organization and delivery systems.</P><P> <I>Digital Schools</I> surveys this promising new landscape, examining in particular personalized learning; realtime student assessment; ways to enhance teacher evaluation; the untapped potential of distance learning; and the ways in which technology can improve the effectiveness of special education and foreign language instruction. West illustrates the potential contributions of blogs, wikis, social media, and video games and augmented reality in K–12 and higher education.</P><P>Technology by itself will not remake education. But if today's schools combine increased digitization with needed improvements in organization, operations, and culture, we can overcome current barriers, produce better results, and improve the manner in which schools function. And we can get back to teaching for tomorrow, rather than for yesterday.</P>

How online learning could help control the exploding cost of higher education

Two of the most visible and important trends in higher education today are its exploding costs and the rapid expansion of online learning. Could the growth in online courses slow the rising cost of college and help solve the crisis of affordability? In this short and incisive book, William G. Bowen, one of the foremost experts on the intersection of education and economics, explains why, despite his earlier skepticism, he now believes technology has the potential to help rein in costs without negatively affecting student learning. As a former president of Princeton University, an economist, and author of many books on education, including the acclaimed bestseller The Shape of the River, Bowen speaks with unique expertise on the subject.

Surveying the dizzying array of new technology-based teaching and learning initiatives, including the highly publicized emergence of "massive open online courses" (MOOCs), Bowen argues that such technologies could transform traditional higher education—allowing it at last to curb rising costs by increasing productivity, while preserving quality and protecting core values. But the challenges, which are organizational and philosophical as much as technological, are daunting. They include providing hard evidence of whether online education is cost-effective in various settings, rethinking the governance and decision-making structures of higher education, and developing customizable technological platforms. Yet, Bowen remains optimistic that the potential payoff is great.

Based on the 2012 Tanner Lectures on Human Values, delivered at Stanford University, the book includes responses from Stanford president John Hennessy, Harvard University psychologist Howard Gardner, Columbia University literature professor Andrew Delbanco, and Coursera cofounder Daphne Koller.

This volume addresses the broad spectrum of challenges confronting the university of the 21st century. Elkana and Klöpper place special emphasis on the questions regarding the very idea and purposes of universities, especially as viewed through curriculum—what is taught—and pedagogy—how it is taught. The ideas recommended here for reform concern especially undergraduate or Bachelor degree programs in all areas of study, from the humanities and social sciences to the natural sciences, the technical fields, law, medicine, and other professions. The core thesis of this book rests on the emergence of a 'New Enlightenment', which requires a revolution in curriculum and teaching in order to translate the academic philosophy of global contextualism into universal practice or application. The university is asked to revamp teaching in order to foster critical thinking that would serve students their entire lives. This book calls for universities to become truly integrated rather than remaining collections of autonomous agencies more committed to competition among themselves than cooperation in the larger interest of learning.

Influential writings make the case for open access to research, explore its implications, and document the early struggles and successes of the open access movement.

Peter Suber has been a leading advocate for open access since 2001 and has worked full time on issues of open access since 2003. As a professor of philosophy during the early days of the internet, he realized its power and potential as a medium for scholarship. As he writes now, “it was like an asteroid crash, fundamentally changing the environment, challenging dinosaurs to adapt, and challenging all of us to figure out whether we were dinosaurs.” When Suber began putting his writings and course materials online for anyone to use for any purpose, he soon experienced the benefits of that wider exposure. In 2001, he started a newsletter—the Free Online Scholarship Newsletter, which later became the SPARC Open Access Newsletter—in which he explored the implications of open access for research and scholarship. This book offers a selection of some of Suber's most significant and influential writings on open access from 2002 to 2010.

In these texts, Suber makes the case for open access to research; answers common questions, objections, and misunderstandings; analyzes policy issues; and documents the growth and evolution of open access during its most critical early decade.

How are widely popular social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram transforming how teachers teach, how kids learn, and the very foundations of education? What controversies surround the integration of social media in students’ lives? The past decade has brought increased access to new media, and with this new opportunities and challenges for education. In this book, leading scholars from education, law, communications, sociology, and cultural studies explore the digital transformation now taking place in a variety of educational contexts. The contributors examine such topics as social media usage in schools, online youth communities, and distance learning in developing countries; the disruption of existing educational models of how knowledge is created and shared; privacy; accreditation; and the tension between the new ease of sharing and copyright laws. Case studies examine teaching media in K–12 schools and at universities; tuition-free, open education powered by social media, as practiced by the University of the People; new financial models for higher education; the benefits and challenges of MOOCS (Massive Open Online Courses); social media and teacher education; and the civic and individual advantages of teens’ participatory play.

All too often, defining a discipline becomes more an exercise of exclusion than inclusion. Disrupting the Digital Humanities seeks to rethink how we map disciplinary terrain by directly confronting the gatekeeping impulse of many other so-called field-defining collections. What is most beautiful about the work of the Digital Humanities is exactly the fact that it can’t be tidily anthologized. In fact, the desire to neatly define the Digital Humanities (to filter the DH-y from the DH) is a way of excluding the radically diverse work that actually constitutes the field. This collection, then, works to push and prod at the edges of the Digital Humanities — to open the Digital Humanities rather than close it down. Ultimately, it’s exactly the fringes, the outliers, that make the Digital Humanities both heterogeneous and rigorous. This collection does not constitute yet another reservoir for the new Digital Humanities canon. Rather, its aim is less about assembling content as it is about creating new conversations. Building a truly communal space for the digital humanities requires that we all approach that space with a commitment to: 1) creating open and non-hierarchical dialogues; 2) championing non-traditional work that might not otherwise be recognized through conventional scholarly channels; 3) amplifying marginalized voices; 4) advocating for students and learners; and 5) sharing generously and openly to support the work of our peers.

How does the digital divide affect the teaching and learning of historically underrepresented students?Many schools and programs in low-income neighborhoods lack access to the technological resources, including equipment and Internet service, that those in middle- and upper-income neighborhoods have at their fingertips. This inequity creates a persistent digital divide—not a simple divide in access to technology per se, but a divide in both formal and informal digital literacy that further marginalizes youths from low-income, minoritized, and first-generation communities.Diversifying Digital Learning outlines the pervasive problems that exist with ensuring digital equity and identifies successful strategies to tackle the issue. Bringing together top scholars to discuss how digital equity in education might become a key goal in American education, this book is structured to provide a framework for understanding how historically underrepresented students most effectively engage with technology—and how institutions may help or hinder students’ ability to develop and capitalize on digital literacies.This book will appeal to readers who are well versed in the diverse uses of social media and technologies, as well as less technologically savvy educators and policy analysts in educational organizations such as schools, afterschool programs, colleges, and universities. Addressing the intersection of digital media, race/ethnicity, and socioeconomic class in a frank manner, the lessons within this compelling work will help educators enable students in grades K–12, as well as in postsecondary institutions, to participate in a rapidly changing world framed by shifting new media technologies.Contributors: Young Whan Choi, Zoë B. Corwin, Christina Evans, Julie Flapan, Joanna Goode, Erica Hodgin, Joseph Kahne, Suneal Kolluri, Lynette Kvasny, David J. Leonard, Jane Margolis, Crystle Martin, Safiya Umoja Noble, Amanda Ochsner, Fay Cobb Payton, Antar A. Tichavakunda, William G. Tierney, S. Craig Watkins

Lulled into somnolence by five hundred years of print, literary analysis should awaken to the importance of media-specific analysis, a mode of critical attention which recognizes that all texts are instantiated and that the nature of the medium in which they are instantiated matters. Central to repositioning critical inquiry, so it can attend to the specificity of the medium, is a more robust notion of materiality. Materiality is reconceptualized as the interplay between a text's physical characteristics and its signifying strategies, a move that entwines instantiation and signification at the outset. This definition opens the possibility of considering texts as embodied entities while still maintaining a central focus on interpretation. It makes materiality an emergent property, so that it cannot be specified in advance, as if it were a pre-given entity. Rather, materiality is open to debate and interpretation, ensuring that discussions about the text's "meaning" will also take into account its physical specificity as well.

Following the emphasis on media-specific analysis, nine points can be made about the specificities of electronic hypertext: they are dynamic images; they include both analogue resemblance and digital coding; they are generated through fragmentation and recombination; they have depth and operate in three dimensions; they are written in code as well as natural language; they are mutable and transformable; they are spaces to navigate; they are written and read in distributed cognitive environments; and they initiate and demand cyborg reading practices.

The advent of online journals has opened a vast opportunity for small journals published by a variety of institutions. It also has given scholars many more options, from more general publications to far more journals addressing very narrowly defined subjects, and it suggests that in the near future the role of online journals and peer review will radically change. The author proposes roles for user-generated content and university libraries in the evaluation and publication of research.

This article examines the set of concerns occupying feminist educators and scholars in the 1990s to imagine what a feminist digital humanities (DH) pedagogy should look like in the twenty-first century. The article draws examples from The Wide, Wide World Digital Edition, a project involving intensive collaborations between students and faculty at a regional university. The article summarizes research that indicates one reason for the lack of women and people of color in the computer sciences is a pedagogy that does not emphasize social, historical, and global problem-solving. The digital humanities could be a site wherein a successful, equal partnership between the computer sciences and the humanities might address diverse approaches to global issues and, in this manner, successfully attract underrep-resented students. The institutionalization of the digital humanities, however, has limited the field’s range of concerns and topics. A feminist DH pedagogy must include students as equal researchers, operate with an infrastructure that makes the labor accessible to students with a variety of abilities, include the constant evaluation of underlying technological structures in a social context, consider content as well as technology, and create a community beyond the classroom. While projects that engage women and people of color in these ways are still occurring, the project argues that greater funding support and infrastructure would make opportunities like these more available to students and, as a result, ensure more diverse scholars and scholarship in coming the years.

abstract:

This article reflects on the relevance and transformative possibilities of incorporating a framework of "guerilla praxis" into digital humanities curricula in the early twenty-first century. Engaging in guerilla praxis in the classroom creates opportunities for students to use devices such as laptops and smartphones as tools for research and critical analysis and also for creating and sharing knowledge in ways that work with, rather than against, the technological shifts and social movements of the early twenty-first century. Turning classrooms into digital research hubs for studying and sharing knowledge about current grassroots movements for social change allows students and educators to collaboratively participate in advocating for new visions of democracy and participatory education. In addition to transforming the way students and educators approach the work in the classroom, critical digital humanities pedagogy that incorporates a framework of guerilla praxis has the potential to reorient twenty-first-century institutions of higher education as spaces of critical social engagement and public service.

Abstract:

This paper aims for a better understanding of the perspectives of contributors to Spanish academic journals regarding open access, open peer review, and altmetrics. Specifically, it explores how age, gender, years of professional experience, and perception and use of social media influence authors’ opinions of these developments in scholarly publishing. A sample of 295 contributors to Spanish academic journals participated in a survey about the aforementioned topics. They were found to hold a favourable opinion of open access but were more cautious about open peer review and altmetrics. The responses of younger and female scholars indicated more reluctance to accept open peer review practices. A positive attitude toward social networks did not necessarily translate into enthusiasm for emerging trends in scholarly publishing. Despite this, ResearchGate users were more aware of altmetrics.