3DI

3DI aims to construct and guide a values-based framework for understanding, shaping, and implementing digital learning theory and practice at Muhlenberg. The framework emerges out of five years of growing our practice within digital learning and foregrounds the values and principles that have implicitly and explicitly guided and sustained the work since it formally began in 2014.

3DI stands for:

Digital Imagination

Digital Inclusion

Digital Inquiry

Digital Imagination

“To be enabled to activate the imagination is to discover not only possibility, but to find the gaps, the empty spaces that require filling as we move from the is to the might be, to the should be.” –Maxine Greene

“When old and familiar things are made new in experience, there is imagination. When the new is created, the far and strange become the most natural inevitable things in the world. There is always some measure of adventure in the meeting of mind and universe, and this adventure is, in its measure, imagination.” –John Dewey

It is central to Muhlenberg’s liberal arts mission to strive to develop learners who are equipped with ethical and civic values and prepared for lives of leadership and service.  Philosophers of education agree that this work requires imagination. If we are to live into our mission, it is not enough to build upon reality as it is, but we must aim to construct a world as it might–as it must–be. A world that is more just and humane. We cannot achieve this based on our existing ways of seeing, thinking, acting. Change is constituted, in large part, through the imagination. We must be able to imagine other worlds are possible if we are to strive towards their construction.

Our liberal arts mission and fundamental values compel us to explore the possible uses and purposes of digital tools to help ignite students’ social imagination–their capacity to construct visions of what should be and might be in their fields of study, their communities, and a society in need of new solutions and approaches to repair some of our most intractable problems and renew our democratic ideals.  This requires an understanding that technology is not neutral. This requires that we do not mistake technology as itself the solution, but rather resources for assisting the ways we attempt to see in new ways, envision other possible futures.  

Our work in digital learning centers the social imagination.  This means that we prioritize tools and spaces that hold transformative potential 

Digital Inclusion

All learners require  meaningful access to and use of digital resources, technologies, and spaces.  Digital literacies are increasingly significant to students’ abilities to fully and meaningfully participate  in our community, and in our social world–to tell the . However, digital inclusion is more than access to technology–it also means all learners, and the faculty who teach them, have access to the human expertise and support necessary to guide, sustain, and grow digital learning practices and digital  literacies. Technology, and the training surrounding its pedagogical integration and application, must intentionally be designed and implemented to counter histories and structures of exclusion.

Mindfulness of inclusion underlies all digital learning initiatives, processes, and practices that we pursue and promote at Muhlenberg.  Understanding that technology is not neutral, we are intentional in our efforts to center inclusion as a principle of digital learning.

This means that our work pays critical attention to:

• How digital tools can be leveraged to help facilitate more equitable participation and inclusive pedagogies in teaching and learning
• The dominant corporate structure of edtech that extends surveillance capitalism and control into spaces of teaching and learning
• The necessity of imagining ethical edtech practices that unsettle the digital status quo to imagine more transformative technological practices that serve our liberal arts ideals of democratic participation, education as the exercise of freedom, student engagement and well-being.
• The implications of edtech platforms, systems, and tools on our students data and privacy
• The ways that edtech often reinforces patterns of exclusion and privilege and the possibilities for more equitable and inclusive visions of digital learning in the liberal arts

Digital Inquiry

“For apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, individuals cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.” –Paulo Freire

Inquiry is situated at the heart of liberal arts learning.  Increasingly, the ways that students explore, think and communicate about issues and ideas across the humanities, arts, natural and social sciences intersect with the digital.  Digital Learning endeavors to create opportunities for campus conversations about the role of digital technologies and spaces for helping students develop as scholars, “as critical thinkers who are intellectually agile.”  Through programming, initiatives, and partnership, Digital Learning aims to engage digital approaches that help scholarly inquiry and knowledge creation forward, and digital practices and platforms that enable us to share that knowledge within a community of practice and with the general public.

Critical inquiry meaningfully informs and guides our decisions about which digital tools, platforms and practices to introduce and promote at Muhlenberg.  We understand knowledge creation as a process in which people collectively work towards critically understanding and transforming their world. This means that we ask a series of questions about digital tools as we explore their possible uses and affordances within liberal arts teaching and learning.  

• How do digital tools and approaches help to push boundaries of current knowledge, create new ways of looking at and addressing problems?
• How do digital tools and approaches help to open access to the means of scholarly inquiry and new knowledge production?
• Given the prevalence of surveillance and control in academic and popular digital technologies, what are the risks and ethical implications of engaging digital tools for scholarly inquiry? 
• What are effective strategies for resisting the capitalization of student data captured in their use of digital tools and platforms?
• Where possible, how do we choose to engage open access tools to promote the liberal arts value of knowledge for the public good?

In sum, centering digital inquiry means that we promote and support the integration of digital technologies and spaces in activity that advances the College’s institutional values and commitments to the life of the mind and to knowledge in the interest of the public good.