Welcome to the first blog post of Currents 2014 (and Currents ever)! Cate and I will be making regular posts uncovering and reviewing articles published in previous issues. Reader reception will determine which of these will be make it into the 2014 special issue where we’ll provide supplementary materials and interviews with the author. It’ll be digital overload!

This week traces questions of classroom pedagogy through major changes in technologies that were, at the time, more associated with forms of entertainment than with education or academia. Some of these articles cover issues that we no longer consider because they’ve been so integrated into our daily lives; others address topics that we are still experimenting with. Looking at this progression, we see that digital pedagogy is both cyclical and linear. There is a constant, circular struggle to adapt our own thinking to accommodate the changes introduced by new technology; at the same time this process of integration also moves our understanding of literary and rhetorical studies forward into new territory.

In March 1999, The Matrix was released in theaters and popularized concepts common to early cyber-punk. Viewers were forced to reevaluate their understanding of technology – specifically, the internet – and its potential to influence, distort, or even replace reality. Yet, at this time, sectors of academia were still learning to adjust to the very idea that the “Web” could offer pedagogical value, much less that it could become so seamlessly integrated into everyday life. In “Talking about the Web: The Web, Language, English Studies," Thomas Swiss begins with the basics – the language of the Web, distance-learning, and the economics of the Web in university teaching. His article highlights the need for literary studies to engage with and implement developing technology in the classroom and in academia.

Once the internet became inseparable from most aspects of modern life – education, entertainment, travel – the question then became, which aspects of the internet were the most necessary and valuable to pedagogy? As early as Spring 2002, Currents was in dialogue with virtual spaces and multi-user domains, ideas that were at the time familiar to niche audiences and PC gamers. Aimee Kendall and Doug Norman’s article, “Virtual Spaces, Actual Practices: MOO Pedagogy in the CWRL” shows where the University of Texas at Austin stood in this burgeoning digital revolution. If nothing else, read it to see how much has changed in a decade even in terms of browser preference: “Originally, a MOO interface was text-only; now, an Internet browser (preferably MS Internet Explorer) is used for a MOO's client interface” (paragraph 1).

Richard Hay’s “Virtual Conversations: The Use of Internet-Based Synchronous chat in Basic Writing” published the following year is a fascinating and still relevant look at something as basic and seemingly trivial as chat rooms. His descriptions of his classroom projects are essentially forms of crowd-sourcing and group learning. Now, chat rooms designated for pedagogical purposes are replaced by Google docs and student-run blog threads, and even Facebook groups for specific courses.

And last, but certainly not least, one cannot discuss cutting edge pedagogy without mentioning video games. Video games are currently (pathetic pun intended) introducing a new vocabulary and structure to classrooms, giving us a real-time glimpse into the transitioning process in which something which previously offered mere entertainment value is recognized as a legitimate source of learning. Kimon Keramidas suggests and offers ways that games can reinforce existing pedagogical techniques in “What Games Have to Teach Us About Teaching and Learning: Game Design as a Model for Course and Curricular Development.”

Pretty soon though, we’ll no longer be viewing video games in terms of its parallels to the classroom, but instead, attempting to re-evaluate our reality according to the new worlds and forms video games create. Tumblr user Zimbolt draws a humorous and yet entirely relevant picture of this very future.

And on that note, I sign off.

-Lily