Reading Respone #3 – Week 12 “Pedagogy”

I cannot help but go down a dark worm hole when I hear the terms ‘post-colonial digital pedagogy’ and feel like all of our digital teaching tools are still littered with very old ideas. I was surprised to be analyzing the lyrics of a Rihanna song with this weeks course materials in the recording of the Digital Caribbean Pedagogies conference, but then again I had also just recently stumbled upon one of the world’s only recorded Sanskrit language digital library on the internet when I was researching what tools may already exist when it comes to ancient eastern philosophies, after spending thousands of dollars on yoga teacher training and never learning that something like this exists when we literally speak this ‘dead’ language every day. When I personally try to understand the origin of the digital pedagogical tools that have life already, my thoughts sadly just go to their shortcomings and then I simply just want to blame our nations past and institutional racism, ablism and and the not so feminist male to female ratio in software development, for whatever is lacking. How can we use the word ‘care’ in the digital aspect of these tools if most academic institutions do not normally afford enough support to help students develop positive tech habits as it pertains to their education, at least in the United States? This is a concern that should be addressed as early as kindergarten. How is it possible that, traditionally now these personal entertainment and communications tools are now expected to be transformed into educational devices? We are facing almost the same problem that television has in the past, just generally speaking how many of us are still tuning in to public access television for educational purposes? Of course, I am merely asking this question to a group of likely native to technology graduate students so the response would probably be a higher amount, but here’s my other question, how many of us are turning to modern social media resources like Instagram to learn new things? In the Digital Carribean Pedagogy conference, they mention that the the sharing of the self and small bits of knowledge has become so fragmented across all of these platforms, my hope is that the digital learning experience doesn’t become so fragmented in itself, but I am afraid with the upheaval from in-person to zoom sessions may contribute to just that, more fragmentation. Roopika Risam alludes to digital humanities pedagogy as an intervention to the post-colonialist just in general, and I think she is correct and Cordell reaffirms this with his eagerness to share Digital Humanities with undergrads, but his mistake in not changing the name effectively ahead of time confusingly so, made the topic uninteresting to young people. This topic is interesting to young people, it just needs to be scaffolded in the right way.