From Distracted to Distributed Attention: Expanded Learning through Social Media, Augmented Reality, Remixing, and Activist Geocaching
Marina Hassapopoulou · Digital humanities quarterly · 2018
With the increasing proliferation of digital technologies into our daily routines, long-standing debates have resurfaced on the potential of prosthetic devices to extend our cognitive capacities and distribute intelligence across human and non-human agents. This article will propose ways in which we, as educators, can harness the distractions that new technologies can pose to teaching and research towards productive models of distributed attention and collective intelligence. By reflecting on the relationship between play and pedagogy through critical theory, as well as on the benefits of hyper-connected and collaborative learning, this article hopes to expand the branch of Digital Humanities that Holly Willis terms as the cinematic humanities. Remixing, recontextualization, and the non-linear/non-sequential reconfiguration of information can provide us with new modes of distributed attention and critical making in the digital age. This article focuses on low and no-budget process-oriented collaborative projects for Cinema, Media Studies, and Digital Humanities courses (adjustable to other subject matters) that incorporate remixing, social and locative media, and augmented reality into experimental modes of connected and collaborative learning. The first assignment is a live film scoring remix, where students collectively brainstormed on picking sound clips/samples to add new soundtracks to early silent films. Remixing practices can offer new insights into cinema's legacy and challenge ocularcentric notions of film spectatorship by, in this case, reversing the conventional hierarchy of image-sound into sound-image and reflecting on how our minds attempt to process the impulse of sensory synchronization in cinema. The second sample assignment proposes new ways of using easy-to-learn and accessible GIS (Geographic Information System) and AR (Augmented Reality) tools to create projects related to civic engagement and local/online activism. The drifts from pre-determined learning outcomes are meant to be active disruptions to any prescribed limitations that delimit what digital humanities should or should not be, and other issues that often undermine the potential contributions to digital humanities that derive from the intellectual and material labor that happens in the networked, expanded and distributed classroom. The remix aesthetic, the unfinished and makeshift nature of these projects is something that I find adds value to this kind of process-oriented pedagogy because it remains in touch with the pre-institutionalized experimental ethos that prompted the formation of the digital humanities and other disciplinary cross-pollinations.