Digital pedagogies post-COVID-19: The future of teaching with/in new technologies

Pedagogies in the 21st century still exhibit certain uneasiness in relation to digital technologies. Instead of rapid speeds and rhythms of networked technologies and their endless streams of information, these pedagogies are marked by a strong preference for what Hayles (2007) refers to as deep attention. This form of attention is able to focus on one single object for longer periods of time, has the capacity to tune out distractions, and a high tolerance for boredom. Hayles depicts this cognitive mode with an image: ‘picture a college sophomore, deep in Pride and Prejudice, with her legs draped over an easy chair, oblivious to her ten-year-old brother sitting in front of a console, jamming on a joystick while he plays Grand Theft Auto’ (2007: 187–88). The disciplinary norms upheld by education at all levels are still univocally grounded in this form of attention, while the restless excitement-seeking mode of attention associated with playing video games, but also with browsing the web or scrolling through different feeds, is seen as the enemy. This adversary mode of attention, characterized by constantly switching between different tasks in pursuit of stimulation, is referred to by Hayles as hyper attention, and is, as she rightly points out, regarded by educational institutions as ‘defective behavior that scarcely qualifies as a cognitive mode at all’ (2007: 188). One of the aims of education today, it would seem, is to remedy the influence of digital media and immunize us against it.

Yet, pedagogy is not alone in its mistrust of the digital. As aptly summed by Paasonen (2021: 1), according to ‘a plethora of cultural diagnoses, networked devices, apps, and social media are atrophying our attention spans, eroding our capacity to focus and think, addicting us, boring us, and stealing our time, as well as stopping us from truly relating to one another, engaging in critical thought, or contributing to public life in a meaningful way’. Paasonen, who maps some of these accounts, draws attention to a range of such analyses put forward by journalists, critical theorists and philosophers alike. Perhaps the earliest popular account that warned us of the dangers of digital technologies was Nicholas Carr’s best-seller The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (2011). There Carr with unease observes the way that interacting with networked devices has rewired his brain. He suggests that the Internet has cultivated a new way of processing information, namely, in the form of a fast-moving stream of easily digestible chunks, rather than through contemplation and concentration. As this has in his view eroded his capacity to read and think deeply, he ultimately embarks on a journey to rehabilitate his brain to its pre-internet state. Carr also suggests that neurological research points to the fact that reading off digital devices results in lower degrees of comprehension and retention than reading a printed page.

Similar gloomy observations are put forward by different cultural theorists, who also see digital technologies as detrimental to our mental and mnemonic capacities. Franco Berardi, for example, sees the life of online subjectivities as being subject to a certain compression. ‘The greater the density of the info-sphere’, he suggests (2009: 119), ‘the scarcer is the time available for memorization. The briefer the mind’s lapse of exposure to a single piece of information, the more tenuous will be the trace left by this information. In this way, mental activity tends to be compressed into the present, the depth of memory is reduced and thus the perception of the historical past […] tends to disappear’. As digital subjectivities operate merely in the present moment, Berardi suggest that they are cut off from the individual’s past experience, and therefore unable to form any new associative connections that constitute learning. Comparable accounts of sensory overload brought about by networked media are put forward by Crary (2014), Han (2017) and Andrejevic (2013). Pettman (2016: 121) roughly sums up these accounts when he characterizes social media in terms of the ‘four courses of the apocalypse. […] Compulsion. Distraction. Procrastination. Addiction’. Conversely, the disaffected sentiment that often underlies these accounts is most forcefully expressed by Giorgio Agamben. Lamenting the supposed alienation caused by digital technologies, Agamben (2009: 16) reports that he has developed ‘implacable hatred’ for smartphones and admits that he found himself ‘more than once wondering how to destroy or deactivate those telefonini, as well as how to eliminate or at least to punish and imprison those who do not stop using them’.

Still, perhaps the paradigmatic account of digital disenchantment can be found with Stiegler (1998, 2008, 2010), and his analysis of networked technologies and their impact on our capacities of attention. His philosophical approach assumes that humans are constitutively dependent on different technical objects, which can inhibit or/and enhance our abilities, and thus condition our horizons of expectation, attention and desire. The technique of writing, which has for Stiegler effectively cultivated a sustained form of attention that founds the basis of Western rationality, is also seen as a source of inhibition as it can generate ideas that are not entirely mentally assimilated. When it comes to networked technologies, Stiegler is insistent that, co-opted by commercial interests, they currently exhibit only hindering, toxic tendencies. By short-circuiting the exercise of our cognitive and mnemonic skills, which have been outsourced to search engines, apps and social media, smart technologies block the production of knowledge and engender expectations of immediate gratification, which correspond to a dissipated, restless form of attention. To overturn this socially destructive trend, Stiegler suggests that our attentive capacities should be rehabilitated by means of literacy-based disciplinary education performed by schools and bourgeois families.

Correspondingly, Fisher (2009) sees students today as trapped in the mismatch between disciplinary demands of educational institutions and the pre-digested joy provided by networked technologies. Fisher draws on Gilles Deleuze’s seminal essay ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’ (1992), where Deleuze traces the transition from disciplinary societies organized around enclosed spaces of the factory, the school and the prison, to control societies, where all institutions are embedded in a dispersed corporation. Observing students at the college where he was teaching, he suggests that the disciplinary regime of schools, with its strictly prescribed segmentation of time, activities and bodily postures, ‘is being eroded by the technologies of control, with their systems of perpetual consumption’ (2009: 23). ‘During lessons at our college, students will be found slumped on desk, talking almost constantly, snacking incessantly’ (ibid.), while never too far removed from the entertainment matrix provided by their smart devices. Habituated to ‘the constant flow of sugary gratification on demand’ (ibid.), Fisher claims that students are incapable of grappling with difficult texts not prepared for easy consumption, such as, for example, that of Nietzsche, whose work requires patience, persistence and acceptance of ambiguity. He adds that, as a result, pedagogues are ‘put under intolerable pressure to mediate between the post-literate subjectivity of the late capitalist consumer and the demands of the disciplinary regime (to pass examinations etc.)’, and are thus caught ‘between being facilitator-entertainers and disciplinarian-authoritarians’ (2009: 25–6, 26).

From the perspective of these accounts, the fundamental incongruity of education requiring deep attention and the pursuit of dopamine hits enabled by networked media is intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic. When teaching is relocated on Zoom, out of reach of the remaining disciplinary tactics of pedagogues and in the immediate proximity of shallow pleasures of infinite feeds, the conditions for learning would seem very dire. This alleged incompatibility of any form of worthy intellectual activity and online connectivity resonates with the disdain for digital media displayed by Johnathan Franzen, one of the most celebrated contemporary authors. Franzen, whose 600-page works of prose would seem at odds with the present-day attention spans, has repeatedly stressed that for him it would be utterly impossible to write on a computer with access to the Internet. According to these accounts of digital disenchantment, it seems like the mere closeness of a networked device is enough to induce a state of fidgety restlessness, which disrupts any possibility for an effective pedagogical process.

The aim of this special issue is to go against these one-sided accounts and to explore not only dangers and risks, but also possibilities and potentials, that digital technologies hold for pedagogy. We maintain that COVID-19 and the subsequent relocation of teaching online, has forced us to rethink what was long overdue, namely, the educational institutions entirely based on literacy, print media, disciplinary knowledge and teaching. These institutions are increasingly falling behind the world and subjectivities that inhabit it, both of which have been utterly restructured by computational networks and the logic of capital. ‘Writing has never been capitalism’s thing’, remind us Deleuze and Guattari (1983: 240). ‘Capitalism [and the machines it produces are] profoundly illiterate’ (ibid.). Even if we haven’t fully taken account of these changes yet, the teaching spaces of today in many ways sit at odds with the social, economic, and technological reality in which they are embedded. ‘The classrooms of yesteryear are dead’, declares Serres (2015: 34), ‘even if we still see classrooms everywhere, even if they are the only thing we know how to build, even if the society of the spectacle is still trying to inflict them upon us’.

We suggest that COVID-19 pandemic can function as a moment of reflection that for Heidegger (2001) occurs with the breaking of a hammer. He claims that when the hammer is ready-to-hand and functions properly, performing its task of hammering, we relate to it habitually and take it for granted. It is only when the hammer breaks down, fails in its operation of hammering, and frustrates our intentions that it draws attention to itself and invites reflection on its functioning. In a subtle inversion, COVID-19 did not break our technologies, but intensified our dependence on networked media, particularly when it comes to the pedagogic process. Our contention is that this can help us reflect on how broken our relation with new technologies have become in this regard. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ‘Zoomification’ of teaching, we seek to reassess the key issues facing digital pedagogy today. Our interest lies in analyzing the significance of the generational shift in the modes of cognitive processing and behavioral patterning engendered by digital technologies (search engines, apps, smart devices, AI generators, video games, augmented reality, etc.). Contributors explore how digital pedagogy can be understood in terms of individual (in)capacities relative to the institutional and disciplinary context of education writ large. In short, this special issue seeks to ‘explicate the future [of pedagogy] implicated in the new technologies’ (Serres, 2015: 38). And again, new technologies seem to emerge with greater speed and velocity than our response and appropriation of them – especially with regard to pedagogy.

There are many voices that we find helpful with negotiating the anxieties about digital technologies that characterize both contemporary pedagogies and critical thought. To begin with, we side with Paasonen’s critique of the mentioned accounts of digital disenchantment, which, while acknowledging the differences in their diagnoses, she rightly sees as totalizing and reductive. Networked media of different kinds, she points out, are used in different contexts, for different purposes, in different ways, and by different subjectivities. While it might be the case that in certain contexts an app can be used so that it erodes critical thought, causes distraction, or discourages reflection, one must try to avoid generalizations. Paasonen seeks to achieve this by working with the conceptual framework of ambiguity. ‘Ambiguity makes it possible to move away from strong narratives where the effects of media are seen to operate in uniform, predictable ways across populations’, she suggests (2020: 17). ‘It also helps in framing affect less as a theatre of positive and negative, enlivening and flattening intensities, than as complex fabrics where these coexist, and the patterns and rhythms of which remain in flux’ (ibid.). By working with ambiguity, Paasonen is able to demonstrate that online ‘distraction and attention, boredom, interest, and excitement enmesh, oscillate, enable, and depend on one another’ (2021: 4), and argue that degrees and ‘qualities of attention vary according to media content, platform and form of communication, from one moment to the next’ (2020: 19)¹.

A sympathetic voice siding with the supposedly distracted, bored and disaffected youth can be found with Michel Serres. Serres (2015) draws attention to how radically different the generation that has been reared by the Internet is. Foreign to its educators, young people today are being forcefully fitted into anachronistic pedagogic paradigms: ‘we are still teaching [students] in institutional frameworks that come from a time they no longer recognize’ (2015: 10). In our era, knowledge is no longer concentrated in classrooms, lecture halls and libraries, and a matter of their disciplinary hierarchies, but is rather distributed everywhere there is access to the Internet. ‘Our intelligent head has been externalized outside our skeletal and neuronal head’, suggest Serres (2015: 19). This externalization today concerns not only infinite databases of knowledge, but also AI text and image generators, chatbots and other software, capable of augmenting our imagination and cognition with computation stocked with millions of images, texts and patterns. ‘After the beheading’, finally asks Serres (ibid.), ‘what is left on our shoulders? An innovative and enduring intuition. The learning process, which has fallen into the [technological] box, has left us the incandescent joy of invention’. Without losing sight of the dangers that come with these processes of datafication, new pedagogies should seek to creatively mobilize the emerging algorithmic powers, and thus better navigate the risks and opportunities of ‘surveillance capitalism’ (Zuboff, 2019).

The work of N. Katherine Hayles is an equally valuable reference as it points to the positive potentials of digital technologies, and opens up venues for exploring new pedagogies. Hayles (2007), as noted, puts stress on the generational shift in cognitive styles, which can be seen in the contrast between deep and hyper attention. In alignment with Fisher and Serres, she (2007: 188) observes ‘serious incompatibilities […] between the expectations of educators, trained in deep attention and saturated with assumptions about its inherent superiority, and the preferred cognitive mode of young people who squirm in the procrustean beds outfitted for them by their elders’. While Hayles anticipates a looming crisis if this situation remains unaddressed, she also seeks to propose ways for achieving a productive synthesis between the contrasting forms of attention, an interweaving that should in her view orient emerging pedagogical methods. For instance, she (2007: 193) explores neurological research looking into the ways playing video games rewires brains of preschoolers, and, building on its findings, suggests that appropriately structured media stimulation can in fact contribute to the cultivation of deep attention. On the other hand, Hayles (2007: 195) examines how classrooms could incorporate interactive high-stimulation technologies capable of catering to hyper attention. These kinds of investigations should, in her view, help us figure out to what extent pedagogy should try to change hyperattentive students to fit the environment, and to what extent the educational environment should be changed to fit the students.

Another voice, which, as we suggest in this issue, deserves more attention from scholars and pedagogues alike, is that of Gregory L. Ulmer. Ulmer, who we see as one of the most interesting and accomplished theorists of the digital era, has over decades of dedicated research developed an extensive theoretical project termed electracy (1984, 2003, 2004, 2019). Electracy is a skill-set intended to operate with networked technologies, in the same manner as literacy is an ability related to alphabetic writing. While literacy enables the mind to develop complex lines of reasoning, electracy augments it by seeking to enhance the affective capacity of the body. In a more general sense, Ulmer conceptualizes electracy as the era, or, as he also puts it, an apparatus, dominated by digital technologies. To theorize various aspects of this apparatus, Ulmer compares and contrasts it with the other apparatuses (that of literacy and orality).

For the purposes of this special issue, we have conducted an interview with Ulmer, which, we hope, will be able to draw attention to his incredibly rich and theoretically sophisticated work. As suggested by one of its peer-reviewers, our interview, which is entitled ‘Theming Electracy’, offers ‘a fascinating ‘crash course’ on Ulmerian theory’ by providing a thorough overview of the various theories, terms, and projects guiding his work. The interview also seeks to couch Ulmer’s insights within our current cultural context of a post-COVID world, and engages with issues such as digital misinformation, the waning trust in epistemological authorities and institutions, and the Anthropocene. Finally, our conversation with Ulmer explores the pedagogical implications of current social, political and ecological shifts. For instance, it analyses the resistance of our existing educational system to digital technologies, and speculates on the strategies for overcoming the antagonistic forces that obstruct the emergence of the new paradigm of electrate pedagogy. Ultimately, Ulmer remains hopeful that the COVID-19 quarantines could serve as a collective existential epiphany that can help overcome this resistance, and usher in the much-needed reappraisal of our pedagogical methods.

Building on with these and a number of other theoretical voices, our contributions explore a wide variety of issues related to digital pedagogy and its futures. Rethinking the function and purpose of the screen – how one views it (actively or passively, individually or collectively, on a computer or on a projection screen) – is central to Alexia Kannas, James Douglas, and James Thompson’s article, ‘Gazing or glancing? Mapping student engagement when film studies moves online’. Kannas et al. use the pedagogy of film studies to examine the benefits and drawbacks of student screen consumption during the pandemic, asking us to reconsider how we understand and approach screen culture writ large. The article examines a qualitative and quantitative study of student experience across the 2020 and 2021 cohorts for this course, making use of surveys and focus groups. In this study, the authors demonstrate the application of the intellectual resources of the film studies tradition to contemporary digital pedagogy scholarship. The study shows how the perspectives and reflections of the student cohort on encounters with screen spectatorship theory reveal a complex scenario in which remote learning practices both hinder and enhance learning experiences.

Collette Gordon considers new ways of thinking, reading and writing, as well as how such can be taught via post-COVID digital technologies, in ‘Reading literature in/against the digital age: shallow assumptions, deep problems, expectant pedagogies’. She details how the digital institution offers pedagogical affordances not available in print/codex or face-to-face learning. Following Hayles’s concept of hyper attention, Gordon addresses the manner in which a ‘hyper active’ mind, as enculturated by the conditions of what could be considered as the electrate paradigm shift, can be of benefit – if pedagogues choose to embrace such a potential. Following Rosenblatt (1978), it makes sense that ‘aesthetic reading’ would be eroded in educational contexts, which are product-oriented, and not just because of the erosion of deep reading and deep attention. Where hyper active reading exacerbates this, training in literary departments leads, ironically, to a loss in the ability to read and understand literary texts and to draw on multimodal narrative literacies that students do possess. Rather than framing the digital sphere as the source of the problem, they argue that it offers unique affordances to address a problem that has existed in the English literary department almost since its inception. A practice of social online annotation that calls students not to interpret, but to note expectations, can re-center reading and restore narrative and affective frameworks of expectation, that are, as reader response critics have noted, constitutive of literary meaning, while embodying the contract between reader(s) and text, and facilitating socially distributed reading.

Sergio Figueiredo’s ‘Rhetoric in the metaverse’ places a premium on our return to an understanding of embodiment and affect viz-a-viz ‘alternate media-scapes’ such as the metaverse. He generatively and generously examines the productive potential of artificial intelligence within the context of learning, namely with regard to rhetoric and rhetorical construction. In many respects, he asks what it is to feel in our digital age and, perhaps more importantly, how the primacy of feeling (ie affect) can or should inform digital pedagogy. His article offers a speculative and pragmatic re-imagining of rhetorical pedagogy for the metaverse. For instance, in place of reading Plato, how might students come to understand Plato’s philosophy by walking and talking with the Socrates trope or engaging in a dialog with an AI Plato? How might students feel the affective significance and impact of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s ‘I Have Dream’ by attending a virtual simulation of the speech or sitting alongside MLK in a jail cell while the author pens ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’? The metaverse holds potential for creating these sorts of embodied and experiential learning experiences to enhance traditional pedagogical and post-pedagogical methods, as well as foster a new level of engagement with arts and humanities curricula, at a time when administrative leadership and governing bodies in higher education are exploring new options for delivering high-quality, engaging learning experiences.

The titular question of Bryoni Trezise, Maria White, and Alexandra Talamo’s ‘How to play in slow time: Embodying creativity literacies in digital learning environments’ could not be more appropriate. The acute sensibility with which these young voices evoke COVID’s unexpected re-temporalisation of embodied states both asks and answers a driving question for the pedagogical context at hand: how do we ‘be’ as a community of learners in this kind of time? And following, how might the hasty pivot to digital learning nonetheless model relational attunements toward self and environment in ways that activate sense of agency within the ‘what is to come’ of things? This article promotes the building of creative subjectivities, especially those willing to take risks, so as to better collaborate and collectively discover – and to breathe (literally and figuratively). The pedagogical imperative therein, of what is to come, is nonetheless contingent on us better understanding who our students actually are (Serres, 2015), as well as how we can best cultivate their creative (and not just analytic) potential.

Riccardo Pronzato and Annette N. Markham return us to the basic, feminist principle that the political is personal (and vice versa). By ‘Returning to critical pedagogy in a world of datafication’, Pronzato and Markham use student auto-ethnography as a means to utilize the agency of one’s own life within digital spaces to rethink the collective. Such an approach enables us to better glean what is broke(n) or breaking – before we have to take that for granted. Given the colonialist, oppressive and exploitative dynamics through which digital platforms work, several scholars supported the need to embrace an openly activist role to help individuals contrast the ways in which they are trapped in loops of dependency and trajectorism. Drawing on the results of 40 auto-ethnographic diaries, this article showcases the usefulness of critical pedagogical techniques in enhancing critical awareness regarding hegemonic datafication structures, while also arguing that despite a good level of consciousness raising, it remains difficult for people to go beyond subalternity and make more concrete changes in personal and collective behaviors. The authors contend that to break persistent feelings of dependency, it is necessary to go further with a two-step process. This process combines autoethnographic tools, aimed at increasing critical algorithmic awareness, with the development of data science skills that can help individuals acquiring more precise knowledge schemes and scaling down the power of giant corporations, thereby building individual and collective capacities to use data for developing counter-narratives about possible futures.

Josie Barnard’s article, ‘Cyber nuts and bolts: effective participatory online learning, theory and practice’, presents emergent findings from an empirical research study that was conducted during Covid lockdown with 52 undergraduate students at a UK university November 2020–April 2021. The research study, which adopts a teacher–practitioner stance, builds on a 2012–2019 program of research that explores the potentials and dangers that digital technologies hold for pedagogy and education. The contention of this article is that, to maintain quality in the delivery of participatory online teaching, it is necessary to ensure an ongoing feedback loop between individuals’ bodily existence ‘IRL’ (‘In Real Life’) and the section of cyberspace that they carve out and inhabit collaboratively during virtual seminar groups. It considers how the cliché of the ‘digital native’ can inhibit learning and the role of affect in enabling productive online engagement. In taking initial steps toward development of a pedagogy of affect in which a ‘neutral terrain’ is established that enables students to apply and develop close reading skills in an online environment, it presents a new theoretical position on what constitutes effective pedagogy in the context of participatory virtual classrooms.

ORCID iD

Jernej Markelj https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0267-6955