21st Century Literacies: Digital Knowledge, Digital Humanities
ENG/ISIS 890S with Cathy N. Davidson
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Or visit the public course website at https://sites.duke.edu/english890s_01_s2013/
The premise of English/ISIS 890 is that contemporary higher education is notbroken; rather, it is designed for a different world than the one we live in. If education were simply broken, we could fix it. If it is designed for a different set of social, technological, and global arrangements than are now relevant: we need a learning revolution, not just reform. We need to think deeply about what it would require to redesign education for a new, digital world. We do not merely want to MOOC education (digitize and massively scale existing systems). We want to revolutionize learning and learning institutions so that they provide support and preparation for those charged with shaping the future, not the past. The basic assumption of the course (and we may wish to refute this in the end) is that we need to reimagine education in profound, systemic ways.
The purpose of this course is to explore what it means to undertake academic research and teaching (re)designed and (re)purposed for the present. We will be thinking systemically about formal education, both the systems we’ve inherited from the Industrial Age and the ones we wish to propose for the digital age. We will be thinking about the social, philosophical, technological, and cultural systems that contributed to the current educational systems, and the stabilities and instabilities that persist within those (such as funding influxes after WWII and neoliberal defunding patterns in the late 1990s and 21st century). We’ll work to sort out problems caused by defunding (including issues of privatization, capitalization, and commercialization) from larger architectural and ideological issues embedded in either well-funded or defunded models of Industrial Age education. We will try to imagine a new form of education more suitable for the digital age.
INVITATION
The Duke21C community invites you to read, comment upon, or edit the principles we’ve set out below and to join us in seeking new ways to make our shared vision of the 21st century classroom a reality. This document may be used as a template for other documents, or may be edited here.
Duke 21C Community Manifesto v1.0
(live version on Google Docs)
Duke21C is an experimental collective committed to identifying, evaluating, creating and rethinking solutions to educational challenges that our changing society faces in the twenty-first century. We aim to seize opportunities to fully realize and harness the possibilities of twenty-first-century literacies, which we define as the mindsets, skills, and collaborative techniques needed to make full use of the Internet as a space of learning. We believe that the Internet and technology are changing how individuals and communities understand themselves and the world around them, and that this connected age offers a tremendous opportunity to make teaching, learning, and knowledge more accessible, more affordable, and more meaningful for everyone involved. Duke21C’s purpose is to examine the ways in which technology influences educational dynamics and to collaboratively propose and share new possibilities for the Information Age so that we–scholars, teachers, and students–can best respond collectively to the challenges this new paradigm poses for learning.