Abstract
The digital humanities have developed in concert with online systems that increase the accessibility and speed of learning. Whereas previously students were immersed in the fluidity of campus life, they have become suspended and drawn-into various streams and currents of digital pedagogy, which articulate new forms of epistemological movement, often operating at speeds outside the lived time and rhythm of human thought. When assessing learning technologies, we have to consider the degree to which they complement the rhythms immanent to human thought, knowledge, investigation, and experimentation.
In this paper, we examine learning from a humanities perspective, arguing that reading, writing, and thinking are ways of learning underscored by various genres of movement that segue with or diverge from the movements inherent to digital technologies, especially those deployed in learning systems. Using the work of thinkers such as John Dewey and Michel Serres, we examine the importance of movement in dialogue, where to truly learn involves embedding oneself in the flow of thought, accepting the flexibility of concepts, and aligning oneself with a community of thinkers.
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29 March 2024
A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-024-09931-w
Notes
Pierre Bourdieu refers to this as “an academic habitus”, in which the subject “realize[s] the law of the social body without intentionally or consciously obeying it” (1988: 143).
As Brodsky notes, for philosophers such as Descartes and Husserl “the objectivity of geometrical intuition originates in writing” (1996: 70). Writing indicates the very movement of thinking through a problem and not just the axioms and conclusions central to a proof.
Cassirer, working within the German tradition, uses the term Kulturwissenschaften to refer to the humanities, a term that incorporates both the study and science of culture.
In the history of recent technology, examples of how technology privileges speed abound. As far back as 2010, Google was claiming that search results could appear faster than the time it takes to articulate a query (Mayer 2008). Contemporary share trading operates at such high speeds trading companies “colocated” with servers so that they could save a few milliseconds of time in a trade (Hayles 2017: 157).
Although technology is often evaluated from the viewpoint of instrumental reason, originally the term technologia referred to the systematic treatment of grammar or “the art of arranging the contents of the curriculum properly” (Ong 1983: 197).
Consider here Caygill’s assessment of the teleological implications of organization via certain technologies (1997).
Notably with the increasing emphasis on the use of learning platforms (Moodle, Blackboard, and the like), the question of learning moves away from the openness of the academic question and the variability of debate. Each stage of learning has to be scripted thus precluding pauses and moments of uncertainty.
As Socrates asks rhetorically of Meno (85d2-5) regarding the slave boy, “he will come to have knowledge… having recovered this knowledge himself, from himself?” (Plato 1985: 78–79, emphasis added). Although anteriority is posited here in terms of logical and transcendental conditions, there remains a residual temporality.
While digital technologies demand reflection on an information intensive environment, the question of coming to terms with a surfeit of information is certainly not a recent phenomenon. “In the seventeenth century, especially in the work of Johann Valentin Andreae and Jan Comenius, the mass of books is often cast in a nautical metaphor, in the context of navigation: a sea of scholarship, a flood of books. The metaphor carries a threatening and challenging semantics” (Krajewski 2011: 147).
For Serres, knowledge is always unfinished and emergent, and he consequently foregrounds the importance of attending to the minor movements, background events, the hum of coenaesthesia, randomness, noise and the multiplicity of the sensuous: “For thirty-plus years I have watched the flight of flies, wasps and bees, against the teacher’s orders; forty years of laziness in which I watch the flight of hope. I do not fear the chaotic and Brownian leap of the wasp.” (Serres 1989: 23). Learning via the open portal of the smartphone or computer allows information to find new patterns and ideas that are not controlled by the narrowness and barrenness of the school curriculum.
Cassin (2018: 20) argues that “one of the main challenges for every form of teaching and every form of pedagogy today is learning how to use the Internet, learning to ‘critique,’ to problematize, and to construct just as much as to search, find, and cut and paste”. This critical awareness, however, depends on accepting that knowledge has to be performed, incorporated and rethought.
Warburg’s novel bibliographic structure was devised to develop a science of culture (Kulturwissenschaft) that would bring a range of disciplines together in addressing cultural questions, particularly those in art historical research (Warburg 2012: 117).
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Atkinson, P., Flanagan, T. Humanities on Demand and the Demands on the Humanities: Between Technological and Lived Time. Stud Philos Educ 43, 143–160 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-023-09912-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-023-09912-5