What Does it Mean to Connect?
With the gigapixel imaging of the Google Art Project, you can get closer to Van Gogh’s Starry Night through your computer than you could by visiting the MoMA. Although this is totally cool–and you should definitely check it out if you haven’t yet–the novelty of digitization has worn off for many of us. We know that digitization allows for expanded (and arguably different) access to humanities artifacts. What we don’t really know is what that potential access means for the way humans engage with those artifacts across contexts. If, for example, art students can “zoom into” paintings from anywhere they have internet access, how does that influence their understanding of and engagement with visual arts? This open question is especially relevant at the intersection of digital humanities and learning science: We want to know how digital tools mediate transcontextual engagement with humanities artifacts, most often in terms of how in-school learning “transfers” into other contexts of students’ lives.
“Transfer” is an umbrella term for the concept that what people know and do in one context will not necessarily be reproduced in another context. One approach to thinking about transfer can be called the “ecological approach.” This paradigm seeks to examine how knowledge, skills, practices, and identities circulate within and across the “ecosystem(s)” of one’s learning. A prominent and recent example in educational research is “Connected Learning,” which focuses on making connections between “in-school” and “out-of-school” learning. An image that might be paradigmatic for this work is a broken bridge: The “bridge” between school and out-of-school learning is broken, and this is harmful for the overall health of students’ learning ecologies. By fixing the bridge (i.e. “connecting” in-school and out-of-school contexts), often with digital tools, educators can facilitate a virtuous cycle of learning that will result in lifelong and “lifewide” learning.
This optimistic notion of connecting “in-school” and “out-of-school” contexts with digital tools is complicated by post-structuralist thinking about space. For example, Henri Lefebvre argues that contexts should not be imagined as a kind of container in which stuff happens, but as a nexus of flows. He offers the image of a house which seems solid, stable, and immobile, and then suggests that it is anything but: A house, Lefebvre argues, does not really “contain” much, but a lot of stuff “flows” in and out of it; it is not so much a container as it is an intersection.
If, like Lefebvre’s house, “in-school” and “out-of-school” contexts are not bounded and distinct spaces, but are rather intersections of flows, what does it mean to “connect” them? What does it mean to connect contexts that are, perhaps, always already connected? One rather straightforward implication of this perspective is simply that “connection” cannot be understand as binary: The question cannot be simply whether or not contexts are connected, but how they are connected. In other words, it is not “connection” per se that should interest us, but “modes of connection.”
This shift in thinking suggests that a bridge (broken or not) is probably not the best metaphor for conceptualizing transfer. And if the issue is the quality of connection, one alternative arises from internet terminology: connectivity. It’s not a perfect metaphor, but the idea of placing nodes of a transcontextual network into communication with each other (as you do when you “connect” to the internet) at various degrees of facility (as you experience with different wifi signals or bandwidth levels) seems appropriate. With this metaphor, we might imagine school and out-of-school contexts as permeated by each other’s wifi signals–and those from other locations. You could physically be at home but virtually be on the school’s network, or vice-versa, and although both of these networks can impose some restrictions, they cannot really control how you use and experience the internet.
After all, students can be “in school” but not “do” school, just as they can do school at home, or do neither-home-nor-school at school. Consider, for example, the student who listens to Spotify during study hall, or the out-of-school blogger who writes about an Emerson essay he read in class, or the teenage feminist whose blog and school work are both subsumed within her efforts to navigate what it means to be a high-achieving female in a sexist society. In each of these moments of “connectivity,” contexts are brought into relation with each other in ways that defy description in binary terms.
Although these are real-life examples from my research, I intend this blog post to simply be a thought experiment about the implications of this new conceptualization of contextual connectivity. What do you think? What are the implications of this view for education and/or the humanities? How might the concept of “modes of connection”/“connectivity” apply to your work?
(Reference: Lefebvre, Henri. The production of space. Blackwell: Oxford, 1992.)