Digital Communities of Learning: Bridging Technology, Pedagogy, and Community-Engaged Practice

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Capacity Building or Community Making? Training and Transitions in Digital Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

At the junction of contemporary approaches to digital and community-engaged scholarship, there is an augmented spirit of openness and collaboration that has the potential to reconfigure authority, ownership and power in connecting with the past by transforming digital training and capacity building. However, the complexities of ethics, digital literacies, protection and inequity also raise difficult questions about what learning archaeology should look like in the 21st century, for students, professionals, and communities alike. This paper will use case studies developing hybrid interventions in public archaeology through collaborations between students, museums and descendant communities to draw inspiration from the ways in which maker culture(s), hackathons, and coding communities can be deployed in combination with critical inter-community dialogue, digital literacy training, and community outreach to disrupt traditional archaeological practice, education and dissemination. These experiences demonstrate the value of the process of doing collaborative digital archaeology as dynamic and meaningful opportunities for collective and inclusive teaching and learning. A critical assessment of the practicalities, infrastructure, and disciplinary structures that create both opportunities and barriers to building diverse and inclusive communities of learning is pivotal to re-envisioning publicness, openness and collaboration to decolonize the digital and make contemporary archaeology innovative but sustainable.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Capacity Building or Community Making? Training and Transitions in Digital Archaeology

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24179