
The first physical post-Covid19 pandemic event that I attended was at Coventry University – the Teaching and Learning in the post-digital world. It was organised by the Disruptive Media Learning Lab (DMLL) and funded by E-DigiLit and the EscapeRacism Erasmus+ projects.
Helen Beetham, whom I co-authored with for an article in the Digital Culture & Education, gave a brilliant keynote on ‘Critical Digital Literacies’. She proposed a ‘critical thinking’ framework in response to the postdigital HE environment, where dichotomies such as digital vs analogue, virtual vs real or online vs offline no longer operate as useful categories because of the nature of today’s media being immersive, compulsive, attention seeking.
By ‘critical thinking’, Helen Beetham suggested to (re-)think, reason and analyse what new opportunities can digital tools and media provide, what new barriers can they present to students becoming ‘critical’, what new questions or problems demand critical attention, what are the affordance of the digital tools (annotation, curation, remixing)?
She positioned teaching as a collaborative labour with students and labour to re-engage and question digital technologies (and as those delivering hybrid teaching would know, it’s difficult labour to converge participation online and offline). How can students collaborate and remix content, as seen in The Mosaic Web Browser being an annotation tool 1995/6? How can diverse media (e.g., Lego, see Gunther Kress, Multimodality, 2001) be integrated in teaching? Instead of writing yet another essay, how can we encourage students to express their arguments in sonic or visual forms (e.g., asking students to create sound, music, podcast, video, photographs)? For example, in light of Gunther Kress’s concept of multimodality, how can we encourage students to use image and writing jointing, to communicate creatively using diverse media technologies (e.g., creating viral meme that’s safe (and this could inoculate the students to misinformation).
A postdigital curriculum can constitute four elements: 1) Critical activities (Task, structure, purposes) 2) Thinking media (code, decode, annotate, translate, remix, create) 3) contextual frames (different perspectives, narratives, cultures, positions) 4) relational spaces (groups, interactions, rules, roles, norms, codes, agency, dynamics).
Kahn & Kellner (2005) who argued in their article ‘Reconstructing Technoliteracies‘ that “techno-literacies must be reflective and critical, aware of the educational, social and political assumptions involved…”. In light of Kahn & Kellner (2005), Beetham offered a set of ‘critical thinking toolkits’ in approaching a postdigital HE environment: 1) History and context (why this tech? How did it get there?) 2) Business model (Who pays? Who gains?) 3) Equity (Who is excluded / disadvantaged?) 4) Power (Who produces the rules, designs, categories, codes? who uses them?) 5) Data/Info Flows (who controls it? Who can access it? Who is monitored?) 6) Futures (What consequences follow? How could it be different?)
Lots of useful resources were included in Beetham’s keynote, including the DigitalCultureBooks, Janneke Adema’s book on radical open access and experimentation, Open Data Institute‘s data literacy programmes and events on data and diversity, Douglas Rushkoff’s ‘Program to be programmed’ (2010) that highlights the importance of ‘computational thinking’.
To end her talk, Beetham revealed some initial findings from her current research into ‘platformed university’, which investigates how adoption of multiple platforms shapes a university’s core practices and values. When a university buys a platform, it is engaged with a cloud of platform systems and data and capital flows. Platformed universities can be easily disrupted (just imagine if Google’s service is down). We are observing a unhealthy HE sector where decisions are made based on metrics, algorithmic governance and surveillance practices, despite a growing literature firmly confirming that algorithmic bias, automated discrimination, surveillance of the poor and the disadvantaged, possible harms by algorithmic decision making, patriarchal by design, embedded racism, lack of transparency in AI, really do exist (see Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism). A social futures as imagined by Meta is very dangerous and alarming.
What can we do? How should we act? As a HE practitioner, we need to think critically how not to be retired, deskilled by machine / AI. Beetham reminded us that being critical about digitally-mediated experiences that have become so pervasive in teaching, learning and everyday life at large is the only way forward.






