Sixteenth International Conference on Technology, Knowledge & Society

Abstract

Digital Humanities is anticipated to be at the leading edge of re-imagining higher education in the twenty-first century due to its promising ability to move beyond the epistemological dichotomies of the late 20th century (Garfield, 153, 2014). Digital Humanities as an emerging field provides endless opportunities for paradigm shifts of experience in higher education, and it opens doors for interdisciplinary collaborative students’ projects that can be the seed of the categorical transformation of students from users to producers. Blogging is a pedagogical activity that is used to enhance collaborative learning and social responsibility (Yu-Chun Kuo 2017), and it crosses the boundaries and conventions of traditional individual learning and provides models of collaborative creativity (Daskolia, 2015). It creates open access reservoirs of knowledge with endless possibilities of sharing and lifelong learning. Hajj Behind the Scenes is a students’ blog that is fully run by female students of Prince Sultan University in Riyadh. For the last five semesters, contributors to the blog post personal experiences and perspective to the largest Muslim annual gathering, which is Hajj or pilgrimage. It allows students to share personal experiences on one of the country’s most remarkable cultural features. The current study examines students’ blogs as a tool of providing open access mines of knowledge created by the readers. The study explores blogging as an activity, and its possible utilization to build cross-disciplinary online communities as well as to enhance societal involvement in the creation of dialogic knowledge.