Last night, while reading DHDebates, I came across Chapter 22, titled Where’s the Pedagogy? The Role of Teaching and Learning in the Digital Humanities by Stephen Brier, which focused on CUNY and the CUNY Graduate Center’s involvement in the digital humanities in recent years. Reading this particular chapter opened my eyes as to how progressive and revolutionary CUNY has been in growing field of the digital humanities in the midst of the Information Age. Brier manages to briefly describe some examples of these progressive and revolutionary actions, one of which happens to be the CUNY Academic Commons. In regards to the Academic Commons (which he abbreviates as AC), he notes that it acts as a digital meeting place for academic individuals who are interested in digital technologies and pedagogies and who want to share information and projects (whether they are academic or digital) with their peers. Furthermore, Brier mentions that the AC is so successful and popular that other colleges are looking into creating their own academic commons. Before ending the chapter, Brier states that CUNY’s digital pedagogy projects such as the Academic Commons have managed to support the digital humanities movement by making teaching and learning the digital humanities more relevant for modern college professsors and students alike.
I agree that Brier’s “Where’s the Pedagogy” was quite heartening, especially after reading a lot of information in earlier chapters that seemed far less community oriented, and in some cases lacking in established research goals. I am currently in his ITP Core I course, and already the readings have been impactful… Books like Hailes’ How We Became Posthuman and the historicization of internet development in readings like Roy Rosenzweig’s “Wizards, Bueaucrats, Warriors and Hackers” have in only a few weeks helped me in my personal attempts at articulating my own goals in this DH program I am just stepping into.