Introduction to Issue Twenty-Two: Looking Again

Courtney Dalton, Cornell University

Benjamin Miller, University of Pittsburgh

Michael Rifino, The Graduate Center, CUNY

One of the editors of this issue is a long-time member of the Editorial Collective who last edited an issue a decade ago, while the other two joined the Collective within the past two years. This issue is novel for all three editors, however, in that it is the first issue to be staged directly in Manifold rather than on the WordPress platform upon which we’d relied in our first ten years as a journal. By transitioning to an open-source platform with a focus on collaborative engagement, JITP is honoring its commitment to scholarly discourse that is transparent and participatory. We encourage everyone to take advantage of the highlighting and in-line discussion features for a robust, grounded conversation about our authors’ ideas and exhibits.

While assembling the articles for this issue, we noted that several pieces seem to pick up on threads started in previous issues of JITP, particularly our themed issues on open educational resources, surveillance, and extended reality. This is hardly surprising, since the nature of interactive technology and pedagogy is such that one special issue is never enough. It is likewise unsurprising that the issue invokes new conversations, some of which were not predictable from the state of the field when JITP’s first issue was published more than ten years ago.

Building on Issue 21’s theme of Open Educational Resources (OERs), Suzanne Dell’Orto’s article reflects on the process and rhetorical design choices involved in developing an OER for instructors in graphic design—a template for a course website in Basic Graphic Communication, built with remix and customization in mind. Alongside her text, titled “Rethinking Graphic Design Pedagogy for the CUNY Academic Commons: On Process, Generosity, and Creative Collaboration in Mapping a Foundation Graphic Design Course for Faculty and Instructors,” we’re also publishing a downloadable static version of her website template that readers can explore in depth. Why this additional modality, when the site is already available elsewhere on the internet? Because we know that the web is dynamic, with new versions of platforms (and new versions of spambots) making sites obsolete or harder to navigate as time goes on. By archiving the site alongside the article, we aim to enable continued engagement with both the content and its arrangement in ways that are more interactive and navigable than screenshots alone would allow.

Solmaz Kive’s “Architectural History Other-Wise: A Practice of Uncovering Implicit Bias” also asks students to make use of flexible templates: in this case, Excel files that feed into the data visualization platform Tableau. Through a series of assignments, Kive guides students in measuring the attention granted to different geographic regions and time periods across several architectural history textbooks, before synthesizing their histories into a collaborative narrative of a chosen place. In addition to revealing the prevalence of Eurocentric approaches, Kive’s assignments foster metacognition around the messiness and constructedness of framing terms, including the ways that even books that focus on “non-Western” traditions reinforce the idea of “the West” as a central category.

Focusing on another kind of online affordance, Martin Danahay examines the risks of expecting a virtual reality classroom to be either a faithful simulacrum of an in-person seminar (as he’d initially planned) or a gaming environment (as some of his students assumed). His article, “Avatars and Social Engagement in a 3D Classroom: Teaching a Stick of Butter,” interrogates a moment of rupture between these two stances, when students in an online literature course taught using immersive headsets began to swap out their human avatars for more fanciful appearances. Danahay incorporates student reflections to highlight the range of affective responses to both the 3D meeting space and the altered states it allowed: though some students found it empowering and more engaging than other synchronous online platforms, others found it distracting and even uncomfortable. As more schools build capacity for developing immersive online media (see, e.g., Neville et al. 2020), and as the hardware needed becomes more affordable, Danahay’s work reminds us that these tensions ought to be considered from the outset and discussed among students, faculty, and VR designers.

Lynette Yuen Ling Tan, Helena Whalen-Bridge, and Wee Ying Qin likewise describe ambivalent student reactions to a non-traditional learning platform in their piece “Transferring Gamification Across Disciplines: Determining the Efficacy of Migrating a Gamification Platform from a Language to a Law Module.” The authors were somewhat surprised to find that, when asked to compare a gamified learning exercise to a conventional online quiz, law students were roughly split as to their preference, with a slight majority favoring the traditional quiz. Like Danahay, these authors use this student feedback to examine the risks and tensions that accompany a switch from traditional to emerging media. In contrast with Danahay, however, the risks that the authors highlight are primarily concerned with the labor and resource requirements associated with developing gamification modules. The authors suggest that institutions should seek to weigh financial constraints against the expected benefits in order to determine the feasibility and sustainability of adopting such modules in the classroom. They further observe that, while this study’s approach of adapting a single platform to multiple curricular contexts still requires labor, such a strategy nevertheless holds promise for offering instruction and assessment that meets a diversity of student needs and preferences while also controlling costs.

Regardless of financial cost, Tan et al. emphasize the benefits of collaboration across departments as a way of uncovering structural continuities and differences that can support learning transfer. Similarly, Raymond Oenbring and Deniz Gokcora illustrate the value of collaboration across institutional, geographical, and linguistic boundaries in their article, “Reimagining Sociolinguistics Courses with Virtual Exchange at Access-Oriented Postsecondary Institutions: The Bahamas Meets New York City in a Linguistic(s) Exchange.” In the project that these authors describe, which took the form of a collaborative online international learning (COIL) exchange in the context of a linguistics course, students at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, a two-year institution with a linguistically diverse student body, partnered with students at the University of The Bahamas, the national public university in the Bahamas. Through interviewing each other to understand their counterparts’ opinions on second-language learning and multilingualism, students at both institutions gained a broader understanding of prevailing ideologies around language and language acquisition, as well as of their own linguistic choices and experiences.

In “Developing Digital Skills through a Student-Facilitated Asynchronous Learning Activity,” Allie Loughry, Kelly Schrum, Sophia Abbot, and Chase Catalano recount the experiences of students who were asked to create an educational website of their own using Google Sites in a graduate-level course on the history of higher education. While a number of students initially approached the assignment with feelings of trepidation and overwhelm, students’ final reflections on the exercise were broadly positive, and many perceived direct applications of their newly acquired digital competencies to their future practice as educators. As with Oenbring and Gokcora’s COIL exchange, peer-to-peer conversations were vital to the outcomes that Loughry et al. demonstrate in the article: in the process of engaging with and providing feedback on their classmates’ projects, a number of students became aware of additional possibilities for the technology that had not occurred to them while they were crafting their own websites. The authors also critically reexamine the notion that today’s students, at least those below a certain age, are “digital natives” who require no extra instruction in technology. Listening attentively to students’ own reflections on their digital skills, as Loughry et al. did in this case, reveals that many learners lack self-efficacy when faced with the task of learning a new digital tool from scratch.

Finally, Jacob Fortman’s piece “Neoliberalism and the Rise of Online Proctoring” reinforces the need for educators to listen to learners rather than position themselves as experts on students’ experiences and motivations. The article rounds out the issue with a high-level analysis of neoliberalism in higher education as demonstrated by the persistent and growing popularity of online proctoring technologies. Continuing the conversation that we witnessed in JITP’s special issue on surveillance, Fortman uses his account of the history of neoliberalism in higher education to critique these tools and the dignity-eroding regime that they represent. What educational practitioners need, Fortman argues, is an ethic of participatory design and relationality that counteracts higher education’s growing tendency toward hyper-individualism. This article, like all the articles in this issue, was written before the release of ChatGPT made headlines, but the rapid popularization of generative AI technologies, accompanied by widespread fears of academic misconduct, has added a new layer of significance to Fortman’s argument. While some have been calling for the swift expansion of plagiarism detection suites and other technological countermeasures, Fortman’s article should remind us that our responsibility as educators is to respond in dialogue with students, resisting proposals that use the full might of academic surveillance to deter would-be plagiarizers without regard to the ideologies that structure our reactions.

We are grateful to all of the authors who submitted to this issue, as well as to the reviewers, copyeditors, and stagers whose labor was vital to its final form. We also appreciate, in advance, the contributions that our readers will make by dialoguing with these articles over a variety of online and offline channels (and we would be remiss if we did not suggest Manifold’s collaborative annotation tools as one such channel). We cannot predict how conversations around interactive technology and pedagogy will evolve over the next decade, but it is our hope that the digital pages of JITP will play host to these discussions for years to come.

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