Interrupting Processes of Inquiry: Teaching and Learning with Social Media in Higher Education

As leaders in the integration of digital media into higher education, it is important that digital humanists model ways of teaching with such media that are innovative, challenging, and highly complementary to disciplinary content in order to demonstrate the benefits of such instructional practices. In this paper, we offer an example of a writing project with social media designed to foster critical awareness and broaden understandings of textuality and intellectual property in a new knowledge economy. We describe a study with two instructors and thirty-five pre-service teachers in a post-degree education program. Students undertook a collaborative writing project in a wiki environment over the course of several months, the aim of which was to generate a communal response to a set of professional standards for teachers. This allowed an iterative process of learning whereby students were encouraged to interrogate their understandings of commonly held beliefs about knowledge creation and representation, as well as their subject position as learners, on an ongoing basis. This process, which was challenging but ultimately valuable, is described herein as an “interrupted model” of inquiry.