Crumpling the Timeline, Online

• Published in: Pedagogy : critical approaches to teaching literature, language, culture, and composition language, culture, and composition, 2025, Vol.25 (1), p.123-133
• Main Author: Morreale, Laura
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Literature and Literary Studies; Pedagogy and Higher Education
• ISSN: 1531-4200; 1533-6255
• DOI: 10.1215/15314200-11463055

Although the collected essays in this special issue were not expressly intended to address the impact of the digital environment on current pedagogies, all the contributions demonstrate in one way or another how computer‐based communication modifies the work of teachers and students. Using the key concepts of hybridity, spatiality, connectivity, and user response, this essay describes how the internet, as the dominant twenty‐first‐century medium for knowledge exchange, has become the filter through which medieval ideas are presented and received. refers to a teaching approach that combines face‐to‐face with virtual, computer‐mediated (and often asynchronous) methods, whereas an awareness of emerges from the advanced geo‐location tools now used unthinkingly. allows for the creation of virtual communities and communications among their members, while refers to the many ways that the digital world supports and even encourages input about computer‐based ideas. Since the medieval and digital eras share many characteristics not found in cultures of print communication, making such connections, and thereby crumpling the timeline, can often be automatic and perhaps even unintentional for instructors. The methods described in all the contributions demonstrate the validity of medieval themes for the modern world, which in turn can be effective tools to reach learners beyond traditional academic settings.