The Chronicle of Higher Education

How Digital Personae
Can Unlock

18th-Century Satire
By AARON SANTESSO
THE TERM “digital pedagogy” has now achieved the same status as “interdisciplinarity” or “entrepreneurial scholar- ship.” We express enthusiasm about it publicly, while pri- vately confessing that we don’t exactly know how to do it. My own early efforts might charitably be described as
clumsy. (Example: my horrible tic, since cured, of blurting out “It’s
like the Internet!” whenever the conversation touched on information
sharing or mass audiences.) While many Web sites, conferences, and
blogs dedicated to digital pedagogy have since been created and offer
invaluable help, some of us still face particular challenges. I teach 17th-
and 18th-century literature at a science-and-engineering university,
meaning I must make the great era of “paper-based textual artifacts”
accessible to students who are more comfortable with the virtual. My
students are smart, eager, and creative. Yet when it comes to that era’s
literature, they lose confidence and energy. They see Robinson Crusoe or
Gulliver’s Travels as museum pieces—works to be preserved and studied
under glass. They are inert, and all the Google Maps and Prezi presen-
tations in the world won’t change that. In fact, when it comes to his-
torical literature, pedagogical technology for novelty’s sake can make
things worse. It implies that new forms of media supply something that
old ones lack.

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