Nostalgia and connection in academic imaginaries of digital pedagogies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Digital pedagogies have become integral to higher education, all the more so since the pandemic-prompted shifts of 2020. Despite this, there continue to be debates about the role of the digital in higher education teaching going forward, including emerging critical concerns about the social imaginaries that may be playing a part in driving the continued development and implementation of digitally based pedagogies. This paper draws on our 2023 interviews with very senior academics to consider what social imaginaries are shaping the development and implementation of digital pedagogies in Australian and United Kingdom universities. We interpret from their accounts three consistent imaginaries of the digital in higher education teaching which in different ways engage with ideas of academic nostalgia and the desire for connection: the pull of the past, a haunted, nostalgic imaginary which associates the digital with the loss or impoverishment of previous forms of connection; the launching pad, a more hopeful, replete imaginary within which the digital is employed as a means of enhancing connective educational practices, places and pedagogies; and the untethered future, which looks beyond the familiar to critique the limitations which arise from academic nostalgia and to imagine new connected educational futures.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.018 | 0.041 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.113 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.018 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".