Today we see increasing possibilities of teaching with existing online materials and tools ranging from recorded lectures to podcasts and virtual exhibitions, the diversification of ‘open pedagogies’ (Mays ed. 2017, DeRosa&Robison 2017, Clifton&Hoffman 2020), and a fast-developing cultural landscape of electronic and especially algorithmic media. Humanities scholars critique social media for their effects on attention spans and reasoning skills (see Serres [2012]2015 for the opposite assessment). And they (we) prefer face-to-face small-group conversational classes to platforms onto which the ‘sage on the stage’ (King 1993) makes an online return. But what do the rise of technology-mediated educational formats and the cultural ‘algorithmic condition’ (Colman et al. 2018) afford for teaching? I will bring in the ‘desktop documentary’ or ‘desktop collage’ as artistic formats that use found (digital) footage, screen captures of oneself or made by others, and montage (Bešlagić 2019) so as to produce a rigorously curated play with multi-perspectivism (Shapins 2012). I will read these artistic formats through newly emerging academic formats such as ‘database documentaries’ and ‘browser-based lecture designs’ (see e.g. Bühlmann&Hovestadt 2015) as to develop a (self-)reflexive, critical, and creative evaluation of these new ways of lecturing as generous ‘borrowing’ for 21st-century interdisciplinary teaching and learning.