It was very interesting to read these two articles together, and think about the potential for Instructional Technology in the late 90s, and where we are now with technology and education. I think that in many ways Bass’s article is an early vision of the more open, creative, and egalitarian web-based educative model that Groom and Lamb argue for now. Of course Bass doesn’t know yet where web-based learning will eventually lead (MOOCs, etc), but for that reason it is all the more interesting as a model for thinking about where we are headed in technology-based learning. It seems that Lamb and Groom are locating an issue inherent in the larger problem of the corporatization of the university: Rather than promoting an open, dialogic model, our current online “courses and systems…are distracting colleges and universities from the conversation that we should have been having since the late 1990s: how can we leverage open platforms and open access to augment our teaching and learning mission?”

Bass asks a connected and equally important question: “What aspects of good teaching, and contexts of good learning, do particular technologies serve well?” I am interested in the various assignment models Bass presents, particularly his example of the use of online archives in a late nineteenth century American literature course. I’ve actually thought about doing something very similar also in an American literature course, and I think the use of online archives would be extremely beneficial both to teaching students about archives, and exposing them to texts and materials outside of the traditional canon. Specifically, I imagine that teaching a nineteenth century American literature course with canonical writers like Hawthorne and Melville could be nicely supplemented by digitized popular literatures like dime novels and newspapers. In the ENG2800 course (on Ancient global literature) that I currently teach at Baruch, I think this kind of model would work equally well and could be expanded to include visual art, artifacts, and material history. Following Groom and Lamb’s ideas about an open and collaborative online learning environment, I think students (in this hypothetical archive assignment) could eventually create an online archive of their own, through other databases and perhaps their own visits to museums and libraries.

This is all to say that I think the argument put forth in “Reclaiming Innovation” is of particular relevance to the humanities, especially as we increasingly move towards the “digital humanities.” A lot of their ideas about collaborative, open, disciplinary boundary-crossing online classrooms (as opposed to the “severely limited” online courses we often see now), are already foundational to the study of the humanities. In other words, an education in the humanities aims to challenge accepted norms, and to get students to think differently through various cultural encounters, new literatures, and new ways of reading. With these ideas already at the core of the humanities classroom, it makes sense to look to technology to expand and enhance this kind of thinking and make sure it doesn’t limit our students instead.