Greetings NUDLers! recently posted a report on a presentation on Yellowdig, a discussion-board plugin for Canvas (and other CMS platforms) on the CSCDC blog and I wanted to invite you all to check it out and share your experiences with this or other course discussion tools in the comments section.
Author: Beth Corzo-Duchardt
Call for Responses: Teaching with Technology
http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/content/cfr-teaching-technology
The MediaCommons Front Page Collective is looking for responses to the
survey question: What does the use of digital teaching tools look like
in the classroom?
Several educational institutions
(NCTE<http://www.ncte.org/cee/positions/beliefsontechnology> for
example) have addressed teaching with technology, including both the
necessity for it and the need for using technology within sound pedagogy.
Teaching with digital tools is growing and offering online sections is
becoming the norm. With this survey, we hope to bring together teachers and
scholars who utilize technology in their own classrooms to talk about not
only tools that scholars can apply, but also some of their findings in
their own classrooms. This project will run from May 20 to June 21.
Responses may include but are not limited to:
- Digital tools used in the classroom
- Digital tools for grading/class organization
- How digital tools shape the classroom
- Creating multimodal assignments
- Using digital tools from a student’s perspective
- Unexpected/unforeseen outcomes of using digital tools
Responses are 400-600 words and typically focus on introducing an idea for
conversation. Proposals may be brief (a few sentences) and should state
your topic and approach. Groups may also submit a cluster of responses.
Submit proposals to mediacommons.odu@gmail.com by *May 10* to be considered
for inclusion into this project.
In case you are unfamiliar with *MediaCommons*, we are an experimental
project created in 2006 by Drs. Kathleen Fitzpatrick and Avi Santo, seeking
to envision how a born-digital scholarly press might re-conceptualize both
the processes and end-products of scholarship. MediaCommons was initially
developed in collaboration with the Institute for the Future of the Book
through a grant from the MacArthur Foundation and is currently supported by
New York University’s Digital Library Technology Services through funding
from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment
for the Humanities.
WGBH Media Library and Archives
From: Allison Pekel <allison_pekel@wgbh.org>
Date: Wed, May 1, 2013 at 12:04 PM
I am working with a project that I thought might be of interest to the
American History Community.
I work for WGBH, Boston in the Media Library and Archive and the Archive
has been funded by the Mellon Foundation to work with academic scholars who
have interest in utilizing our moving image and sound materials through the
course of their research. We hope to increase public awareness of the vast
collections that digital repositories hold by publishing our entire
archival catalogue online, for open access and use.
Placing the catalogue online however is only the first step, as records may
be incomplete or misleading. To help enhance the quality of our records, we
are inviting scholars, teachers and students to research our catalogue and
contribute their own discoveries and findings back to us. There are even
limited opportunities there to catalogue and curate an online collection
specific to your field of research as part of Open Vault (
http://openvault.wgbh.org<http://openvault.wgbh.org/>). Final products
could include essays on your topic, streaming public access to one
selection of media in your collection, supplying metadata for the items in
your collection and/or presenting your findings at a conference.
As a producer of Frontline and Boston Local News, we have quite a few
materials in the American History genre, so if you have an ongoing research
project and would consider utilizing moving image and sound materials in
your work, please don’t hesitate to contact me.
Allison Pekel
WGBH Media Library and Archives
Allison_Pekel@WGBH.org
Postdoc in digital humanities
For those of you who will be done with your PhD by July 1st, UC Merced is offering a postdoc opportunity: see http://jobs.ucmerced.edu/n/academic/position.jsf?positionId=4587
Why I use WordPress instead of Blackboard
I know that Blackboard and NUIT have worked very hard to make it a centralized location for course content and provide the tools for productive online dialog among students. I think this is a great idea.
But I hate Blackboard.
More importantly my students hate Blackboard.
Why?
It’s ugly. Also it buggy. But for me, the visual design is key.
This is what students see when they access the automatically-generated Blackboard home page for the course I taught last fall:
And there isn’t even any actual content on this page!
This is what students see when they access the home page of the course website I created for Cross Gender Performance in Popular Culture, using a standard WordPress template:
The design is cleaner and much easier to navigate. (You can click on the link above and poke around the entire website to seem more.)
This is not a question of mere aesthetics (as if aesthetics were not always important!). It a question of visual communication. We recognize the pedagogical importance of presenting students with a clearly articulated paper prompt that does not make them work to figure out what is being asked of them. The visual presentation of a course website should be held to similar standards, even if the course content has nothing to do with visual communication. Even though science courses do not teach writing, we still expect a syllabus for a science course to be free of grammatical errors.
I created this site to replicate what I find to be Blackboard’s most useful aspect for my own teaching, the fact that it provides one centralized “place” for course content, assignments, and student work that my students and I can access 24/7. There is much more that one could do with a WordPress site, as Micheal Kramer‘s course demonstrates. And WordPress is not the only platform one can use. I like it because its supported by Weinberg.
I’d love to hear from others who have used other alternative to Blackboard, who can point towards other pedagogical uses for these tools, or who disagree with my ideas about the importance of the visual aspect of our communications with students.
About Me, My Work and DH
Me: I am a doctoral candidate in the Department of Screen Cultures and an Instructor for the Gender Studies Department at Northwestern University. I specialize in early 20th century cinema and intersections between race, gender and ethnicity in the media. [My user name is “Instructor Beth” because I have a Weinberg wordpress site for my course and I needed a way to distinguish my posts from my student’s posts.]
My Research: Much of my research has benefitted from digital archives, and I’m interested in how we can make these better for future scholars (though I have to say, I would hate to give up doing actual research trips to actual archives).
My Teaching: This quarter (which begins tomorrow) I’m ditching Blackboard for a WordPress course blog in the hopes that it will help foster more active and productive online dialog among students. In the past, I’ve tried to use the message board function on Blackboard, but it never really works. I think the clunky design has a lot to do with it and I’m hoping that the clean look and user-friendly interface of WordPress will make things better.
My Thoughts on Digital Humanities: The best description of DH that I’ve encountered (this week’s readings included) was here, on a HASTAC message board. Krista White breaks explains DH as a constellation of activities which she breaks down into 3 categories: Research/Analysis, Teaching/Learning, and Preservation/Access. As I wrote in my response to her post, it was the first time I actually read something that helped my get a grasp on the nebulous term. I think its more productive to think of DH as a set of activities, rather than an ethos. This is especially important for describing it to people who are not already “in the know” because to an outsider, insiders’ refusal to define the term has the opposite of its intended effect: it feels less inclusive.