The document explores critical digital pedagogy, emphasizing community, collaboration, and the importance of diverse voices in education, while critiquing traditional educational tools for their limiting effects on student engagement and learning. It advocates for a shift in perspective towards teaching that inspires trust and dialogue, urging educators to rethink their relationships with technology and students. Practical exercises are suggested to evaluate digital tools' assumptions about users and learning dynamics, promoting student agency and ownership in the educational process.

1. Introduction to Digital Pedagogy

2. Jesse Stommel
@Jessifer
Sean Michael Morris
@Slamteacher

5. The Rhetoric of the Room

7. Scaffolding can create points of entry and access but can also
reduce the complexity of learning to its detriment (e.g. Bloom’s
Taxonomy,ADDIE, etc.).

8. Photo by flickr userVictoria Pickering
Why do we attempt so often to resolve this...

9. Into this?

14. The less we understand our tools, the more we are beholden to
them. The more we imagine our tools as transparent or invisible,
the less able we are to take ownership of them.

15. Not all tools can be hacked to good use.

16. Critical Digital Pedagogy:
1. centers its practice on community and collaboration;
2. must remain open to diverse, international voices, and thus
requires invention to reimagine the ways that communication and
collaboration happen across cultural and political boundaries;
3. will not, cannot, be defined by a single voice but must gather
together a cacophony of voices;
4. must have use and application outside traditional institutions of
education.

17. Remote proctoring tools can’t ensure that students will not
cheat. Turnitin won’t make students better writers. The LMS
can’t ensure that students will learn. All will, however,
ensure that students feel more thoroughly policed. All will
ensure that students (and teachers) are more compliant.

18. When our VLE or LMS reports how many minutes students
have spent accessing a course, what do we do with that
information? What will we do with the information when we
also know the heart rate of students as they’re accessing (or
not accessing) a course? How can teachers see courses as
more than just a series of tasks and see students as more
than just rows in a spreadsheet?

20. We need to give students reasons less banal than points to
do the work of learning. I tell students in my classes, “You
should consider this course a ‘busy-work-free zone.’ If an
assignment doesn’t feel productive, we can find ways to
remix or repurpose it.”

21. There's a certain slant of light,
On winter afternoons,
That oppresses, like the weight
Of cathedral tunes.
Heavenly hurt it gives us;
We can find no scar,
But internal difference
Where the meanings are.
None may teach it anything,
'Tis the seal, despair,-
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the air.
When it comes, the landscape listens,
Shadows hold their breath;
When it goes, 't is like the distance
On the look of death.
~ Emily Dickinson
The digital humanities course I
teach for undergraduates has as
its first assignment the breaking
of something as an act of literary
criticism. Specifically, I ask
students to take the words of a
poem by Emily Dickinson,
“There’s a certain slant of light,”
and rearrange them into
something else.They use any or
all of the words that appear in
the poem as many or as few
times as they want.What they
build takes any shape: text, image,
video, a poem, a pile, sense-
making or otherwise.
Breaking Stuff as an Act of Literary Criticism

22. “Deconstructing Digital Literature” by Timothy Merritt

23. Winter Oppresses
Shadows the landscape like death
Tis heavenly when it goes
Haiku by Rachel Blume

25. "A Certain Slant of Light,Typographically Speaking" by Lans Pacifico

26. “Viscera” by Rachel Blume

27. OPTE Map of the Internet

31. “To teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our
students is essential if we are to provide the necessary conditions
where learning can most deeply and intimately begin.”
~ bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress
1. How is the Web changing the way we see teachers and students as
personally, socially, and emotionally situated in a learning space?
2. What is digital agency? What are its incumbent privileges and
responsibilities?
3. How does digital pedagogy examine, dismantle, or rebuild the
structures, hierarchies, institutions, and technologies of education?
4. What institutional obstacles do we face in our own specific contexts
as educators, administrators, graduate students, librarians,
instructional designers?

32. When we’re teaching online, we’re not teaching to a
screen--we’re teaching through a screen.

33. How can we use digital tools to help build relationships between
students, between teachers, between students and teachers?

34. CREATE TRUST

35. INSPIRE DIALOGUE

36. BE HONEST AND TRANSPARENT

37. BE OPEN TO CHANGE

38. “Unless the mass of workers are to be blind cogs and pinions in
the apparatus they employ, they must have some understanding
of the physical and social facts behind and ahead of the material
and appliances with which they are dealing.”
~ John Dewey and Evelyn Dewey, Schools of To-Morrow

39. bit.ly/ryerson-tools

40. Twitter / Mastodon
Genius / Hypothes.is
Canvas / Blackboard
Wordpress / Ghost

41. CRITICAL TOOL EVALUATION EXERCISE
1. What assumption does the tool make about its users? What kind of
relationships does it set up between teachers / students? School / the world?
Humans / technology?
2. What assumptions does the tool make about learning and education? Does the
tool attempt to dictate how our learning and teaching happen? How is this
reflected in specific design and/or marketing choices?
3. What data must we provide to use the tool (login, e-mail, birthdate, etc.)? What
flexibility do we have to be anonymous? Who owns the data? Will others be
able to use/copy/own our work there?
4. How could the tool be used in a way that puts the learning into student’s
hands? Does the tool leave students agency or choice in how they use it? Does
the tool offer a way that "learning can most deeply and intimately begin”?

42. “It is urgent that we have teachers. It is urgent that we
have teachers with great imaginations. It’s urgent that we
have teachers who can see in their students the potential
for something startling, something unlikely.”
~ Sean Michael Morris