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Here are a few specific examples you can apply to your instructional design process to help learners with metacognition: Model the metacognitive process during instruction (or in one-on-one consultations) to ask and reflect on big picture questions such as: “What questions can you answer with this tool?” “What can you not do with this tool?” Keep in mind some answers may be simple (e.g., this tool can only work with data in this way, so it is excluded automatically). Also, “Did I get the results I expected? What could I have done differently?” Start with inquiry and build conversations based on the learner’s answers. “Is it the data that does not work? Or is the research question fundamentally wrong to begin with?” Collaborate with faculty to teach together, modelling your practices while demonstrating a specific tool. This could include thinking aloud as you make decisions so learners can self-correct assumptions. Also, be aware of your own expert bias so you can demonstrate how to clear obstacles. Ask learners to specifically define what is difficult for them during the process of instruction. Digital humanities tools are complex and are based on complex methodologies and research questions. By constructing opportunities for learners to self-question as they move from one task to another, they learn to self-assess their progress and adjust accordingly. There are several instructional design activities that promote metacognition: think-pair-share, one minute paper (“share a key concept learned” or “what comes next?”), and case studies.

There are specific strategies we can implement to help learners escape the recursive spiral of the liminal state they experience while managing complex digital projects: One of the most challenging aspects of teaching digital tools is forgetting what it is like to be a novice learner. Sometimes being a near-novice oneself helps you better prepare for the basic problems and frustrations learners are facing. But recognizing liminality is a reminder to you as a teacher that the learning process is not smooth, and it requires anticipating common difficulties and regularly checking in with learners to make sure you are not leaving them behind. When meeting with learners one-on-one, make sure to use your in-depth reference interview skills to engage in methods discussions. When a learner is in the liminal state, they are not always able to “see the forest for the trees.” Your directed questions will illuminate the problems they are having and the solutions they had not seen. Pay close attention to the digital humanities work and discussions happening on your own campus, as well as across the academic community. Working through the liminal space may require helping learners make connections to others facing similar problems. Also follow online discussions in order to point your learners to a wide variety of group learning opportunities, such as the active digital humanities community on Slack.9 When designing instructional opportunities, such as workshops and hackathons, pay particular attention to outreach strategies that may bring like-minded learners together, as well as diverse voices. For example, invite the scholar whose project was completed last year to add a more experienced voice to the conversation. By encouraging the formation of learning communities on your campus, you are creating safe spaces to help learners navigate the liminal state with others who may be on the other side of struggling with specific digital project issues. In designing instructional activities, guide learners through visualization exercises that help to identify “stuck” places. Making graphic representations of one’s thoughts (e.g., concept maps) can highlight areas that require clarification.

The typical university is in constant tension between autonomous academic departments, which control curriculum and faculty hiring and promotion, and a strong president, who controls funding and is responsible only to the lay board of directors who own the place. Also thrown into the mix are a jumble of independent institutes, research centers and academic programs that have emerged in response to a variety of funding opportunities and faculty initiatives. The resulting institution is a hustler’s paradise, driven by a wide array of entrepreneurial actors: faculty trying to pursue intellectual interests and forge a career; administrators trying to protect and enrich the larger enterprise; and donors and students who want to draw on the university’s rich resources and capitalize on association with its stellar brand. These actors are feverishly pursuing their own interests within the framework of the university, which lures them with incentives, draws strength from their complex interactions and then passes these benefits on to society.

The biggest problem facing the American system of higher education today is how to deal with its own success. In the 19th century, very few people attended college, so the system was not much in the public spotlight. Burgeoning enrollments in the 20th century put the system center stage, especially when it became the expectation that most people should graduate from some sort of college. As higher education moved from being an option to becoming a necessity, it increasingly found itself under the kind of intense scrutiny that has long been directed at American schools.

The danger posed by this accountability pressure is that colleges, like the K-12 schools before them, will come under pressure to narrow their mission to a small number of easily measurable outcomes. Most often the purpose boils down to the efficient delivery of instructional services to students, which will provide them with good jobs and provide society with an expanding economy. This ignores the wide array of social functions that the university serves. It’s a laboratory for working on pressing social problems; a playpen for intellectuals to pursue whatever questions seem interesting; a repository for the knowledge needed to address problems that haven’t yet emerged; a zone of creativity and exploration partially buffered from the realm of necessity; and, yes, a classroom for training future workers. The system’s organizational messiness is central to its social value.

These studies demonstrate some evidence for the existence of disciplinary differences in technology adoption, which suggests that there is not a homogeneous form of “scholarship” within academia.

Dive into the past and you will see this theme will emerge time and again: the purpose of studying history, philosophy, and poetry is to help us lead better lives and be better people. The humanities are an education for the soul. Placed next to these paeans to education, the aims of the "Theology of Dostoevsky" course are crippling. Reading Dostoevsky will help students will learn how to "contextualize literature within its anthropological milieu." Dostoevsky will teach them to see "the unique interpretive problems inherent in studying creative genres" and discussing his works will help them "communicate more effectively, verbally and in writing, about theological literature." That is the purpose of reading a man regularly called the best novelist in human history! We read him to "meet academics standards for writing and notation!" How painfully limited.

I’ve found students to be very insightful when it comes to understanding and assessing their own learning and very forgiving of my “mistakes.” Just about 100% of what I now do in the classroom has been “authorized” by student feedback, not given through end-of-semester evaluations, but collaborative discussion. Ask students if something worked, and they will tell you. The best part of moving the professorial pedestal out of the room is that all of us get to be a little less fearful, and little more brave.

I am increasingly convinced that a mass defunding of public higher education is coming to an unprecedented degree and at an unprecedented scale. People enjoy telling me that this has already occurred, as if I am not sufficiently informed about higher education to know that state support of our public universities has declined precipitously. But things can always get worse, much worse. And given the endless controversies on college campuses of conservative speakers getting shut out and conservative students feeling silenced, and given how little the average academic seems to care about appealing to the conservative half of this country, the PR work is being done for the enemies of public education by those within the institutions themselves. And the GOP has already shown a great knack for using claims of bias against academia, particularly given the American yen for austerity.

But his critics can’t see something that, for all of his myopia, he always has: that our political divide is increasingly bound up in a set of class associations and signals that have little to do with conspicuous consumption and everything to do with a style of self-performance that few people ever talk about but everyone understands. It is the ability to give such a performance convincingly that, in part, people buy with their tuition dollars. That this condition makes egalitarian politics a part of elite class formation has gone little discussed in my political home, the radical left. I have been excited to see a recent groundswell of young left-aligned people, and many of them are bright and committed. But almost none of them seem aware of the fact that their ironic Twitter accounts and cultural references and received opinions on all manner of political issues are as sure a sign of their class identity as a pair of wingtips and a blazer once was. And until and unless they understand how powerfully alienated the great mass of this country is from their social culture, we cannot hope to build a mass left-wing movement and with it do good things like defend public education. I agree: it’s the economy, stupid, and we must appeal to them by making the case that things like universal free college are good. But if recent political history tells us anything it’s that no economic policy, no matter how sensible, can win if its proponents refuse to grapple with the politics of resentment. The left, broadly, has not done a good job of that. The professoriate? My god.