This Is Your Brain on the Early American Novel

I've blogged several times this semester about my undergraduate class,"This Is Your Brain on the Internet."  Not so much on my wonderful gradclass, "Early American Novels and Other Fictions."   But it is asinventive and imaginative and field-changing as the course on cognitionand digitality since both come from the premise that digital learningis not about throwing a lot of technology at students--it isreconceptualizing how we think and should be thinking given a changedset of learning tools already part of the repertoire of everyday life.

That is, the "IT" model of instructional technology emphasizes putting new hardwares and softwares at the disposal of students but not necessarily changing the structure of pedagogy, not addressing the new ways we think about learning when we work collaboratively or have a globally-edited volunteer resource such as Wikipedia, not addressing a massive consumer switch away from authority-based models of knowledge delivery (such as the NY Times) to consumer-produced authorities (blogs, YouTube, twitter feeds).   What do these enormous trends do to how students process the world and what can we teach them about their own participation in that world?

Similarly, some models of digital humanities are about building complex tools to represent humanities materials or explore them in new ways.  That is a fantastic contribution to knowledge.  But yet another form of the new humanities comprehends that we are in an age of information and it should be the centrality of the humanist that makes this age not only comprehensible but beneficial.  Here, the model of the humanities is not enhanced by new tools of representation, discovery and analysis (a fine goal in  and of itself) but rather the critical skills of the humanities--the ability to evaluate sources, to credit sources, to interpret sources, to combine complex data streams into a logical and sound theoretical argument--become essentials of a prosumer age.

So in the one graduate English course I teach a year, we are talking about every word in the title "Early American Novels" and asking what those teams really mean if we divorce them from professional disciplinary histories that support their conventional meanings.  If we know early America is dominated by immigrants (coming of their own accord or forced), what do we mean by "American."  Why do English Departments even continue to make the "British" and "American" divide when it is not constitutive?  But the students are also required to contribute to public knowledge in the course, as their duty as humanists in the world, and most are not only editing or creating Wikipedia entries but are actually now thinking deeply about their role in the world, what they have to offer in terms of a world that needs to understand far more about credibility, communication, collaboration, language, analysis, authority, and on and on.

Thrilling for me today was reading an abstract by one of the MAT students who is proposing a panel on what kinds of humanistic epistemological skills can be used in the secondary classroom to teach students how to understand their own thinking by contributing to Wikipedia pages and studying the pattern of editing, how an edit is made, why, with what process and justification, and so forth.  It was a beautifully reasoned abstract that includes Piagetian developmental theory along with work on credibility and Internet culture.  "This Is Your Brain on the Early American Novel."   It is ALL "humanities" and all "digital" all the time . . .