Digital Pedagogy

Most students who learn both the theory and practice of the academic Classics and the academic digital humanities currently do so primarily in a physical classroom.⁷ However, digital tools and resources often serve as a supplement, and, for a significant minority, a replacement for classroom education. This has sparked a growing field of digital pedagogy—teachers, researchers, and students experimenting with effective strategies for online learning. The next section will provide an illustrative selection of relevant literature from the per-spective of the digital Classics, with the intention of defining relevant terms for the resource reviews and case study later in the chapter.

3.1 Growth out of Prior Pedagogical Thought

A brief review of some terminology commonly used in Anglo-American aca-demic discourse on pedagogy serves as a useful introduction to the discussion of resources later in the chapter. Frontal teaching, also known as ‘chalk-and-talk’

or teacher-centered instruction, refers to the practice in which a teacher stands

in front of a class, often with a textbook, doing most of the talking in an effort to impart knowledge to the student. By contrast, in the various forms of student-centered instruction, ‘knowledge is “discovered” by the learner.’⁸ We consider con-structivist, problem-based, and experiential learning to all be forms of student-centered instruction—in other words, learning by doing. Kirschner, Sweller and Clark describe the common elements of these different methodologies: ‘first they challenge students to solve “authentic” problems or acquire complex knowledge in information-rich settings based on the assumption that having learners con-struct their own solutions leads to the most effective learning experience. Second, they appear to assume that knowledge can best be acquired through experience based on the procedures of the discipline.’⁹ They go on to critique these forms of instruction, which they describe as using ‘minimal guidance.’ Part of their criti-cism is the idea that a student scientist will never draw the same conclusions from an experiment as a professional scientist, and can be led astray by those that they do draw. While some of the resources described here take a student centered, minimally-guided approach, we suggest that they do not fall into this trap, since those resources cater primarily to scholars who are learning mostly new tech-niques, rather than new concepts—the idea that one can enclose a paragraph in a

<p>, as opposed to idea that one can separate text into paragraphs at all.

Classroom teaching can be described as discursive, adaptive, interactive, col-laborative, and reflective.¹⁰ A classroom teacher draws out discussion, a form of discursivity. They adapt their syllabus according to the needs of a particular student or group. They ask their students to reflect, giving critical feedback on an activity or concept. They ask their students to think together, collabora-tively, enabling students to learn from one another, but respond with individual answers. They interact with the source text, in the form of a book or manu-script, writing their own translations or commentaries.

In a purely digital environment, the same activities and ways of going about things are reinvented. The environment itself can be designed to foster produc-tive dialogue online, either in real time or not; the interface can be designed to adapt to the needs of a particular user, whether that means enlarging the type for someone with a visual impairment, or flipping the placement of elements on an HTML page for someone who reads in a right-to-left script. Dynamic exercises interact with the user, and the ability of the learner to communicate their feedback to the designer encourages reflection on the success of the envi-ronment for learning. We will return to these parallels between traditional and digital instruction in a few pages, when we begin to review some of the resources available for learning markup.

3.2 Adult Learning

Since most of the currently-available resources that introduce Classicists to digital methods and markup are targeted at adults, it seems appropriate to briefly review some of the theoretical tenets of adult education. In this chapter, we define ‘adults’

as those no longer in obligatory education, whatever the degree of obligatory edu-cation in their context may be. This definition considers university students to be adults, as well as professional scholars and researchers. Research suggests that for this cohort, task-based, also called use-directed, curricular organization is criti-cal.¹¹ In other words, because adults operate under logistical pressures that are often absent from the lives of children, they expect the process of learning to be as compelling and worthwhile as the product.¹² A Classicist learning TEI markup might reasonably expect that they can further their work while still learning the best ways and technical arguments to encode their text. ‘The approach to adult education will be via the route of situations, not subjects.’¹³

Online resources for Classicists learning to encode in XML must therefore seek to anticipate those situations in which a Classicist unfamiliar with the digi-tal humanities might turn to XML encoding—whether as a way to work col-laboratively with far-flung colleagues, to create a digital edition that sparks the imagination of members in their local community, or to build dynamic exercises to help their students learn a language. Moreover, these resources must support an approach that is self-directed,¹⁴ although not necessarily minimally guided.

While in the classroom ‘one cannot equally serve both objectives—the generalist as well as the specialist—in [a short time],’¹⁵ a digital learning environment can, and usually should, provide resources for both. Perhaps one of the most impor-tant points with respect to the final section of this chapter, which discusses the Perseids platform, is that people can learn without necessarily being taught.¹⁶

3.3 Digital Pedagogy

Much of the recent thought in digital pedagogy discusses how best to take advantage of the increased student autonomy and flexibility granted by the digi-tal environment, as well as how best to cope with the accompanying distraction and possible lack of rigor. Through ‘transferring to students the responsibility for accessing, sequencing and deriving meaning from information, hypertext was seen to provide an environment in which discovery learning might flourish.’¹⁷ Moreover, the collaborative yet geographically unbound nature of the digital environment allows expertise to be shared across boundaries of geography and language,¹⁸ although there are technical barriers to this exchange that we will con-front in later sections. This enables early, graduated, and supervised participation in the creation of content, provided that designers ‘redesign the learning environ-ment so that newcomers can legitimately and peripherally participate in authentic social practice in rich and productive ways, in short, make it possible for learn-ers to ‘steal’ the knowledge they need.’¹⁹ The flexibility of the digital environment benefits learners by providing resources that are accessible on the learner’s own time and that suit the learner’s existing familiarities and motivation.²⁰ Ruell, how-ever, draws on data from the online instruction offered by Harvard University to caution that resources for digital learning must impose external time limits and routine assessment to ensure student progress in the face of constant distraction,

the downside of the increased flexibility.²¹ Scardamalia and Bereiter discuss the need for resources grounded in pedagogical thought; they call for ‘intentional learning environments’ that are able to identify ‘knowledge lacks,’ or student areas of unfamiliarity, as well as to make use of ‘multiple pass strategies,’ that ask learn-ers not simply to repeat, but to reflectively re-interpret.²²

Chickering and Ehrmann formulated seven ‘good practice’ elements in online instruction. We list them here, in the hope that they might serve as ini-tial guide for evaluating resources discussed later. According to these criteria, a pedagogically sound online instructional resource:²³

1. encourages contact between students and faculty 2. develops reciprocity and cooperation among students 3. encourages active learning

4. gives prompt feedback 5. emphasizes time on task 6. communicates high expectations

7. respects diverse talents and ways of learning.

We would recommend appending at least two more to the original seven:

8. acknowledges and makes every contextually reasonable attempt to accom-modate the multilingualism of a global digital space

9. enables learners to contribute as soon and as helpfully as possible to research in the field.

This theory is the lens through which we view and evaluate the resources dis-cussed below. Although terms may shift in meaning or even become metaphors when applied to digital resources—students become ‘learners’ or ‘users,’ unre-sponsive or static lists of facts can be a form of ‘frontal instruction’—we find this thinking useful as we evaluate the digital landscape.

The following sections will examine the development of various online resources for learning TEI markup, moving from those that are more static, or frontal, to those that are more collaborative and responsive. We will focus on the EpiDoc and papyrology communities for their particular success in teach-ing digital humanities methodology in an online environment. Finally, we will address the role of the Perseids project as a platform for collaborative editing that has grown out of these communities, including EpiDoc, the Perseus Digital Library, and the Alpheios Project; in particular, we will recount our experience using the Perseids platform to teach markup ‘by doing.’