Digital media (blogs, emails, tweets, wikis, ect) and traditional media (books, magazines, newspapers, film, radio, and television) are tools to use to communicate and shre information. However, traditional media are usually broadcast media; instead digital media are bi-directional and addressable. Moreover, digital media allow storage of information via networks, hard drives and cloud services. In conclusion, digital media are equipped with interactivity and connectivity: interactivity allows users to form groups with real or virtual interlocutors; connectivity allows users to access all the information in all places at all times.

What is the role of digital media in education? Because of its interactivity and connectivity, students and teachers can interact everywhere, whenever and however among each other and with other entities. They become co-creator of multimodal texts. The video produced by PBS Digital Media- New Learners of the 21st Century (2006) features many inspiring digital media integrations in education.

I will show the “didactic pedagogy” and “reflexive pedagogy” applications of digital media in education starting from a University of Oregon project, the Oregon Petrarch Open Book, a web side dedicated to Francis Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (also known as the Canzoniere). Petrarch’s scholar professor Massimo Lollini co-created over the years the Oregon Petrarch Open Book (OPOB) with his undergraduate and graduate students of Italian Literature and various other interdisciplinary collaborators. My presentation of OPOB is limited to its pedagogical applications and not to its immense scholarly and cultural value that reaches beyond academia. In my opinion, the pedagogical features of this project are:

1. The rich and interactive archive of Canzoniere’s multiple versions
2. The OPOB’s multimodal knowledge representation tools

1. The OPOB database shows the Canzoniere’s complex history (from manuscript to printed edition) including variants of individual poems conceived by Petrarch; it makes also possible to read and compare multiple commentaries, translations, adaptations and re-writings of “petrarchism” as well as the iconography and musical settings of Petrarchs’s poems. Below you may visualize one of the OPOB’s Canzoniere manuscripts.

Petrarch’s Canzioniere Manuscript Copy from the Queriniana Library in Brescia, published by Vindelin de Speier (Spira) in Venice in 1470

If we use OPOB only for its database feature, as a teacher we apply didactic pedagogy transmitting passively knowledge in a digital format. Many digital repositories are constructed simply in an archival format. OPOB, instead, adds something new…

2. OPOB’s multimodal knowledge representation tools allow students to become active learners-as-knowledge producers and discerning knowledge discoverers/navigators. First of all, OPOB’s knowledge representation tools allow students to visualize different versions of the same poem.

OPOB Interface Prototype

Secondly, the OPOB’s tools allow students to become co-creators of multimodal and meaningful texts on and about the Canzoniere. The OPOB contains students’ translations, paraphrases, summaries, tweets and more (see OPOB Apparatus). Below I will present two OPOB’s knowledge representation  tools. 

1. OPOB’s tweets. Professor Massimo Lollini presents OPOB's tweets making as following:

 …reading was not exclusively aimed at a simple comprehension of the literal meaning (littera) of writing. This first stage consisted of a movement from the original text to the paraphrase. This initial comprehension was followed by the composition of the summary of the general meaning (sensus) of the poem. Finally, the individuation of the keywords and the writing of the tweet allowed the students to arrive at a proposition that more nearly captures the profundity of the poem (sententia) (M. Lollini and R. Rosenberg, 2015)

1. OPOB’s semantic mapping. Groups of students used close reading (human process semantic analysis) and distant reading (machine process semantic analysis) techniques to extrapolate colored semantic markups based on occurrences in the Canzoniere’s 366 poems. Moreover, all of the symbols identified as the most important in the poems were included in a drawing that reflected the color and the intensity-occurrences of the semantic markups (M. Lollini and P. Spagnolo, 2015). 

Canzoniere's Semantic Markups Diagram (2015)

Canzoniere's Conceptual Drawing by Pierpaolo Spagnolo (2015)

As it is evident in the OPOB’s tweet transcriptions or in the above semantic mapping representations, students worked collaboratively and differentially to co-create these ‘synesthetic representations’ of the Canzoniere’s 366 poems. 

Even though professor Massimo Lollini taught Petrarch’s courses in face-to-face format he applied reflexive pedagogy principles: ubiquitous learning, active knowledge making, multimodal meaning, recursive feedback, collaborative intelligence, metacognition, and differentiated learning. I think this project shows to all of us how digital media may become an integrative, sophisticated and innovative tool for multiliteracies.

(Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis (eds), e-Learning Ecologies, 2016, forthcoming).

Massimo Lollini and Rebecca Rosenberg (2015) E-philology and Twitterature in Humanist Studies & the Digital Age, vol. 4, n. 1 (2015), special issue: "Lector in Rete: Figures of the Reader in Digital Humanities"

Massimo Lollini, Pierpaolo Spagnolo (2015) Re-Reading Petrarca in the Digital Era in Humanist Studies & the Digital Age, vol. 4, n. 1 (2015), special issue: "Lector in Rete: Figures of the Reader in Digital Humanities"