TECHNOLOGY, TEACHING & LEARNING
Digital Space Carries Power to Perpetuate or Eliminate
Mere days after the passing of intellectual giant George Lamming, acclaimed author Professor Kwame Dawes urged Caribbean literati to take steps to protect their legacy and the history of the region amid ongoing rapid technological changes. He noted the potential for such change to affect access to their intellectual work and the consumption of material within the expansive digital space.
P rofessor Dawes was delivering the 11 th Annual George Lamming Distinguished Lecture entitled “Lamming Online: A Primer” , an annual commemoration honouring the Barbados- born, globally renowned author, poet and academic who died four days ahead of his 95 th birthday. It was a poignant occasion for the Ghanaian-born lecturer who spent most of his childhood and early adult life in Jamaica and grew up referring to Lamming as Uncle George. The University of Nebraska academic spoke of the eye- opening conversations he had with the late writer who was a close friend of his parents and had visited Ghana in the late 1950s. “Lamming will continue to affect us because of his art. As long as Caribbean literature is taught, we’ll have to contend with the great novels [that have influenced its] formation and shape. There are set
novels that are going to be taught. His books will be on the curriculum of high schools in the Caribbean, and we’ll find a way back to that work generation after generation. “Yet one has to be aware that for all that the perpetuation of knowledge that books taught in schools can achieve, there is a way in which, quite often, such work does not spill into the non- academic [space] … and a great deal is lost.” The award-winning author said although digital transformation has brought unprecedented access to audiences within the last two decades, with accompanying transformative implications, a downside was the pressures of commerce associated
Professor Kwame Dawes University of Nebraska-Lincoln
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