Digital Pedagogy and the Library

Amy Barlow, Assistant Professor, James P. Adams Library

English Department Lunch Talks

February 20, 2019

"Digital pedagogy is the use of electronic elements to enhance or to change the experience of education.”

Brian Croxall

“Digital Pedagogy is precisely not about using digital technologies for teaching and, rather, about approaching those tools from a critical pedagogical perspective. So, it is as much about using digital tools thoughtfully as it is about deciding when not to use digital tools, and about paying attention to the impact of digital tools on learning.”

Digital Pedagogy Lab

Defining digital pedagogy

I'm interested in how digital pedagogy can be deployed to encourage critical thinking about information resources, such as:

• bibliographic databases
• digital reference shelf, including Wikipedia
• digital archives
• and digital libraries and repositories

because asking questions about information resources, the logic behind them, and our assumptions about them is part of information literacy. 

Digital pedagogy and the library:

Assignment 1 - FYS students select and interpret digital objects from the Rhode Island Postcard Collection for presentation on social media.

Assignment 2 - Students create data visualizations using extant metadata from bibliographic databases during library instruction.

Assignment 1 - Rhode Island Postcard Collection: The Social Media of Its Time

Jonathan Oliveira's "Memorials Made for Love" Instagram post

Image source: Rhode Island Postcard Collection

"Are we allowed to be critical?"

Assignment 2 - How NOT to read 1,355 critical articles

Distant reading is “the idea of processing content in (subjects, themes, persons, places, etc.) or information about (publication date, place, author, title) a large number of textual items without engaging in the reading of the actual text.”

Johanna Drucker, Professor of Information Studies, UCLA