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I see two main views of learning. The first is like stamp collecting. The person wants to collect more and more knowledge, mostly for the purposes of showing it off to people they want to impress. The knowledge here is largely inert and unimportant for their lives—it’s just a collecting hobby accruing more facts and ideas. There’s nothing wrong with stamp collecting. Knowing facts and ideas, even if they aren’t particularly useful or central to our lives, isn’t a bad thing. It’s probably a superior hobby to many other pursuits, since knowledge can, at least some of the time, spillover to more practical consequences. The other view of learning, however, is centered around unlearning. This is the view that what we think we know about the world is a veneer of sense-making atop a much deeper strangeness. The things we think we know, we often don’t. The ideas, philosophies and truths that guide our lives may be convenient approximations, but often the more accurate picture is a lot stranger and more interesting.

A good meta-belief to this whole unlearning endeavor is to be comfortable with the idea that everything you know is provisional, and that underneath what you know is likely a more complex and stranger picture. Human beings seem to be naturally afraid of this groundless view of things. I’m not quite sure why that is. It may be that this kind of epistemic flexibility might start to question societal norms and rules of conduct, and so people who think too much about things may have an amoral character. That’s certainly the perspective of many traditional religious viewpoints on things, which discourages open-ended inquiry in favor of professing allegiance to dogma.

One problem is that participation is largely taken for granted and under theorized in many classrooms. The way we make use of a term like participation is in need of rescuing: moving away from a limited view of participation as it is often linked to motivation, engagement, or hand-raising and toward the view that participation as a concept is more generative when connected to the idea of membership in communities of practice (Wenger, 1998). Our limited view of participation is evident by simply turning to the language included in most syllabi: often, syllabi list “participation points” as part of the grade of the course. I find this to be an odd way to think about participation. What we often mean is that we will give students some points for “talking in class” and “raising their hands.” But demonstrating engagement by hand-raising and talk are fairly limited views of participation, and in fact, these ways of being are more connected to performance — acting like a student — than participation. We certainly want students to participate more than 10 percent, or even half, of the time. Are they participating when they are listening and pondering the ideas of their peers? Of course they are, but how do they demonstrate that? In thinking about course design, we should consider how students become members of our classroom community and our disciplines. Social media sites can open up other avenues for participation, and further, connect students to communities of practice outside our classrooms that they hope to enter.

Although the phrase sometimes refers to issues surrounding copyright and open access and sometimes to scholarship analyzing the online world, digital scholarship—emanating, perhaps, from digital humanities—most frequently describes discipline-based scholarship produced with digital tools and presented in digital form.

Though the recent popularity of the phrase digital scholarship reflects impressive interdisciplinary ambition and coherence, two crucial elements remain in short supply in the emerging field. First, the number of scholars willing to commit themselves and their careers to digital scholarship has not kept pace with institutional opportunities. Second, today few scholars are trying, as they did earlier in the web's history, to reimagine the form as well as the substance of scholarship. In some ways, scholarly innovation has been domesticated, with the very ubiquity of the web bringing a lowered sense of excitement, possibility, and urgency. These two deficiencies form a reinforcing cycle: the diminished sense of possibility weakens the incentive for scholars to take risks, and the unwillingness to take risks limits the impact and excitement generated by boldly innovative projects.