Braun offers suggestions for “creating and sustaining a technological ecology for digital media teaching and scholarship” (6). Her suggestions include “official policies supporting such work, the chair’s leadership in speaking on behalf of and advocating for such work, similar advocacy from other digital media leaders in the department, public forums, for digital scholarship and teaching, curricula and course requirements, appropriate facilities and opportunities/spaces for talking about digital media work, and mentoring” (6).
Through the book, Braun lists questions concerning the following issues: “the nature of textuality (what English departments count as a ‘text’ and the hierarchies that influence their decisions), the nature of reading (what methods or lenses we being to texts), and the nature of production (the kinds of texts/composing that result from encounters with reading/analysis)” (15). These issues “occur…along three intersecting dimensions: scholarly values, curricular values, and institutional or cultural climate (technological ecologies)” (29). She maintains that digital media challenges and changes teacher and scholarly identities (19). With this, she states that “individuals’ disciplinary identities influence how they approach integrating digital media into teaching and scholarship…Conversely, the ways that individuals work with digital media have an influence on those disciplinary debates and values and count eventually lead to new traditions and new language about the nature of pedagogy and scholarship” (23).
She encourages a level of risk: “There is nothing wrong with being cautious and critical about how to integrate digital media into pedagogy. But thinking about the implications of digital media pedagogy shouldn’t prevent us from experimenting with digital media in order to figure out what works and what doesn’t” (47). Also, “we need to move beyond critical assessment of technology toward critical engagement, teaching students how to analytically and creatively engage with technological systems in order to change them…This redesigning involves both a rethinking of [our] teaching methods and how [we] teach…as well as modeling for students ways that they can intervene in the technology and redesign it for their own purposes” (61).
“Departments, consciously or not, maintain stances on the role of digital media in teaching, which emphasize some aspects of digital work of others. As a result, individuals must negotiate these stances and situate their digital media teaching in particular ways in order to ‘fit’ with the departments’ culture. The department chair plays a crucial role in framing the conversation about digital media, greatly influencing the departmental culture of support for digital media teaching” (64).
“If we choose not to engage in a deep and sustained manner with the digital infrastructures that shape our universities, our presses, the media, the health care system, and the very engines of late capitalism, if we persist with the business of the humanities in the old and familiar forms, we also cede the opportunity to work as agents of change in those networks…This and many other current arguments stress the importance of reimagining the methods and products of scholarly inquiry in order to keep the field vital” (83). Also, we need to reconsider what we value in terms of medium, methods, and evaluation (such as peer-to-peer review) of scholarship.
Braun argues that “teachers need to collaborate with students in order to use technology in ways that meet the students' needs and expectations” (132-3). She also emphasizes “the importance of professional development opportunities specifically focused on digital pedagogy as well as of investments in material technologies and spaces appropriate to those pedagogies” (133). She states that teachers can turn the “classroom into a research lab in which [the teacher] and the students… explore together the potentials that different technologies might offer” (133). In training teachers to build these kinds of classrooms, Braun argues that teachers-in-training should be given the opportunities to play with technology and to take part in mentorship with experienced teachers (150). This mentorship can occur both ways, bottom up and top down. More, digital scholarship and digital pedagogy should be considered important in teacher training (162). We need to start considering digital scholarship and pedagogy in tenure and promotion. “[T]hat digital media scholars must often do their digital work on top of more traditional work. This has the effect of shutting down or postponing a lot of potentially innovative or important work while individuals create the scholarship that their departments will value” (96-7). “Tenure and promotion policy is only a part of that support. Faculty and graduate students also need material resources, spaces, and low-stakes opportunities to learn (and the time to devote to learning)” (131).
She suggests that how departments define support matters; for instance, some departments believe that digital support needs to be essentially technological (the how to) while others believe it is pedagogical (how to incorporate digital resources into the classroom) (140). This definition of support is tied to the department’s believe about the purpose of technology in the classroom (141).
Key Terms
- Digital management: “the processes that are enabled and disabled by digital media. It describes uses of digital media that involve management of professional activities but do not necessarily change, fundamentally” (34)
- Analysis of digital media: “use of digital media that involve the analysis of alternative texts – including visual images, films, websites, and other digital texts – as well as the analysis of technologies as cultural artifacts and/or analysis of the uses of those technologies in various contexts (classroom, workplaces, persona, and so on)” (38-9)
- Digital media production: “uses of digital media involving the production of alternative texts, such as websites, digital videos, visual arguments, and the like. It can describe the texts that faculty and/or graduate students create as part of their scholarly activities or the texts they ask their students to create” (39)