Reflecting on the Hive: Digital Literacy Trends

Introduction

When face-to-face interactions were limited by the COVID-19 pandemic, the author and researcher drew upon their creative methods and experience with composing and sharing in online environments to serve as a source of inspiration (DeHart, in press; DeHart, 2020). This chapter explores the underpinnings and connections that occurred prior to and during the pandemic, and locates this work within classroom practices – particularly, spaces where digital instruction has been a primary or partial vehicle for educational processes.

While this chapter concerns the work of poets, the author has worked as a poet themselves and has worked with student author/poets from the elementary to university levels. The use of both poetic and digital composition, sometimes in unity, has been a reflective experience in the isolation of the pandemic (DeHart, in press), and has served as a site for engaging with others. Engaging students online in poetic encounters has been a driving force, stemming from the inspirational work of digital poets.

In considering the literacy practices of a group of digital poets who have created websites to feature their own writing and the writing of other authors, the author could almost frame this work as an autoethnographic approach (Chang, 2016). Indeed, this is a community of practice the author has been involved with since 2012, writing and sharing their work as a potential contributor. This direct interaction served as part of the impetus for this project, exploring the question of what drives creators to craft digital spaces and share literary work. In the context of the pandemic, reaching out to creators who work in digital formats was an essential part of this research project. The work is framed as a qualitative interview study (Brinkmann & Kvale, 2005; Kvale & Brinkmann, 2009).

In keeping with Hatch’s descriptions of such studies (Hatch, 2002; Kvale & Brinkmann, 2009), the questions were framed in an open-ended way that allowed for exploration and further data collection. The nature of the participants’ work as asynchronous members of a community of literary formation (Li, 2012) formed an additional support for sharing interview questions in a similar, asynchronous and online format.

The nature of the work as a hive-like structure is one that has stood out to the author as a potential metaphor due to the distant and yet connected ontology of online interaction, and has informed this author’s online teaching practices during the pandemic period. The linking of person to person, image to image, in a digital honeycomb is one that comes to mind with conferences software, but also when thinking of the links from site to site, space to space, and even identity to identity. The online self and in-person self are one and the same, and both online and face-to-face classrooms are punctuated by activity with creative direction, or the dull lumbering hush of passive reception of content as students encounter instructional spaces that are less active.

The implications of this connected and disparate structure are evident for composers who work online and share content to a vast audience – arguably, in their own space physically and yet tapped into a wider web or thread of interrelation due to the affordances of the online environment. Marinucci et al. (2021) have noted this dynamic of online interactions as a proxy for face-to-face encounters. The juxtaposition and tension of being connected and yet necessarily separated has contributed to the emotion of this time, and underscores the importance of reaching out, reflecting, and composing through a variety of means. The affordances of online spaces invite a unique and varied global audience (Smith, 2018), with complex goals and processes.