Designing Technology and Pedagogy to Promote 21st Century Literacies in the Humanities

Speakers): Brian Johnsrud, Emily Schneider

We’ve been told time and again: the information landscape is shifting, creating new ways of interacting with multimedia, sprawling archives, and digital, participatory cultures. These changes are (slowly) being echoed in the humanities classroom, as reading digitally, communicating online, and analyzing interactive, multimedia artifacts are being integrated into existing practices traditionally valued in the humanities.

In this talk, Brian Johnsrud and Emily Schneider will share their research on how traditional humanistic practices can be enlivened and extended with new digital tools and objects of analysis. The key questions inherent to this research include: What kinds of “21st century literacies” are required for productive engagement with new media and learning practices, both in and outside of classrooms? And how might courses in the humanities support students in developing these literacies?

Lacuna Stories, a digital reading and writing platform currently being developed in the Poetic Media Lab, takes on this challenge by merging academic texts and media with the interactive affordances of the Web. This talk will give an overview of “21st century literacies,” discuss their connection to the overall learning goals of the humanities, and showcase several “old” and “new” literacies that Lacuna Stories is designed to support.