pedagogy

Call for Responses: Teaching with Technology

Beth Corzo-Duchardt

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.

Today, 5pm: Pedagogy in the Digital Age

Michael J. Kramer

The Searle Center for Advancing Teaching and Learning is hosting a workshop for graduate TAs and instructors, “Pedagogy in the Digital Age,” on April 18th, 5:00-7:00pm. Come learn about how to incorporate new technologies and tools into your classroom teaching! Panelists include NUDHL conveners, Michael Kramer and Jillana Enteen, as well as Josh Honn (Digital Scholarship Fellow, NU Library) and Beth Corzo-Duchardt (Gender Studies TA and HASTAC Scholar).  For registration and further information, please visit the Searle Center workshops website:

http://www.northwestern.edu/searle/calendar/index.html#tab3

Looking forward to seeing everyone there!

 

New Upcoming HASTAC Forums

Michael J. Kramer
HASTAC@NUDHL Scholars and other interested folks, HASTAC just announced three new upcoming forums.
Dis/Ability: Moving Beyond Access in the Academy:

http://hastac.org/forums/disability-moving-beyond-access-academy

  • What strategies do you use in your classrooms to increase accessibility or even to cater to or accommodate particular disabilities? What challenges have you faced making your classroom more accessible? Have some strategies backfired? Are there particular issues that have prevented you from making accessibility-related changes?
  • What technologies are people using (whether assistive technologies or broader tech like YouTube & Twitter) to meet the needs of students? What technologies are used to create and/or support online disability identities?
  • How can our own scholarly research be more accessible? I mean this both in terms of wider availability (open access publishing, perhaps) and in terms of ensuring that a range of people with various physical differences can access our new media projects. How might accessibility enhance a digital or multimodal project?
  • How does disability theory intersect with technology, particularly in relation to race & resistance studies; “assistive” technologies; innovation, hacking & appropriation; and gender & queer studies?
Alan Turing: The First Digital Humanist?
  • What does it mean to include Turing as a digital humanist?
  • Is the “uncanny valley” still a useful concept?
  • What does it mean to consider technology queer?  Is information queer?  How might both be queered and to what end?
  • In considering the idea of the posthuman as queer, can we understand disability and /or illness to always already be posthuman? To never be posthuman? something else? What is the role of the state in creating the posthuman through technologies such as Turing’s chemical castration?
  • Why has Turing been a particularly important icon when thinking about the history of computing? In which histories is he highlighted or ignored?
  • The history of cybernetics is full of other interesting thinkers and makers, and many have gone unsung. We’d love to hear about the people, inventions or movements that you can add to this history.
  • What are your most interesting questions about cybernetics, posthumanism or Turing?
Visualizing Geography: Maps, Place and Pedagogy
  • How can web tools represent the literary spaces that a reader encounters (or imagines) in literature? What types of tools would fill the existing technological gaps in geospatial information studies?
  • How do narratives travel and replicate over geographical space? What would mapping these processes yield? How can we do it?
  • Is it problematic to represent literary and historical geography with modern interfaces like Google Maps? Should we be concerned that these visualizations may not be accurate representations of how our subjects would imagine space, or can we be content in uncovering new (and previously impossible) readings of old texts?
  • How does using maps as a pedagogical tool affect our understanding of both real and literary environments? Does mapping change the way we make connections even when we aren’t thinking about geographical space?

NUDHL 4: Critiquing the Digital Humanities, Fri, 1/25/13, 12-2pm, AKiH

Michael J. Kramer

Please join us for the fourth NUDHL research seminar of the year on Friday, 1/25/13, 12-2pm in the seminar room of the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities.

Here are the details on readings and location.

Hope to see you there!

A Gentle Introduction to Digital Text Analysis, 11/14

Michael J. Kramer

Subject: A Gentle Introduction to Digital Text Analysis – SRTS event Nov 14th

 

Please join us for the last Scholarly Resources & Technology Series event of the fall quarter:

 

A Gentle Introduction to Digital Text Analysis

 

Date: Wednesday, Nov 14th

Time:  5:00pm to 6:00pm

 

Using computers to analyze and visualize literary texts is a practice with a long history in the digital humanities. This presentation outlines that history and also explores a few of the latest digital tools enabling scholars to use computational methods to analyze individual texts and corpora. The presentation will use Jade Werner’s work on the revision history of Lady Morgan’s Luxima,The Prophetess (1859). No programming experience required.

 

Presenters: 

Jade Werner, Doctoral Student, English Department

Josh Honn, Digital Scholarship Fellow, Center for Scholarly Communication & Digital Curation

 

Registration not required. 

 

—————-

Also a reminder for this Friday’s event at noon in the Library Forum Room

 

Professor Owen encourages you to bring your iPad to follow along.

 

 

Sincerely,

Scholarly Resources & Technology Series team

 

 

Meeting #1 Reflections

Michael J. Kramer

A few themes I discerned from our first meeting. This is quickly written and meant to inspire corrections, negations, queries, wonderments, questions. Please add your own perspective, perceptions, affirmations, theories, frustrations, curiosities, concerns:

DH, D vs. H, D & H, DH as R&D

The question is not only what does the digital offer the humanities, but also what can the humanities offer the digital? Both questions are important, and the dialectic between them might be especially productive.

DH and Research

How does DH help us to frame old questions in new ways? How might it help to develop new questions? Can definitions of DH constrain? Can more constrained definitions of the emerging field be helpful at times? How might each of us in our work (as scholars, teachers, technology folk, librarians) dive into the the “transductive plasma of interpretation” that Rafael Alvarado describes in his essay on Debates in the Digital Humanities?

DH and Scale

DH seems to increase awareness of scale—of the oscillation, often rapid, between difference amounts of evidence or information. Does it have something to offer humanities scholars in this movement between the small (zooming in on the hi-res detail of a famous painting) and the large (a huge text corpus or dataset)?

DH and Speed

DH similarly seems to pose the possibility of both speeding up humanities research/teaching and also, more surprisingly, slowing it down. You can search across vast pools of data or text or information quickly. You can also use the digital to slow down concentration on particular evidence, arguments, phenomena, methodologies, practices. Once again the key modality to explore may well be the oscillation between different speeds of research/teaching.

DH as Episteme

How does DH relate to the current historical moment? Is it a weird instantiation in the academic world of new managerial practices and structural phenomena? Are we experiencing the transformation of knowledge into “information” so that the urge is not to understand so much as to “do something” with what we are studying? Is modularity replacing the specificity, friction, resistance of humanities theory and critique? Is there a rapprochement between poststructural critique and larger systems of which we are part (Lane Relyea’s fascinating observation)? Is there a growing emphasis on large-scale and small-scale levels of knowledge and interaction but a loss of the middle-ground between the macro and the micro? Is DH a kind of shadow world of larger structural and cultural systems? Does this mean that it is an ominous development or something that takes or even subverts the dominant ideas and practices of our era in potentially new directions?

DH and Democracy

Two very different (or perhaps not?) questions of inclusivity and exclusivity arose. First, in what ways do the digital humanities pose new linkages between specialized scholarly work and broader public outreach? Second, are the digital humanities an intervention, either explicitly or implicitly, in the existing hierarchies of the academy itself? The first question is about the kind of work going on with a group such as Imagining America or the Public Humanities in a Digital World initiative at University of Iowa (two of many examples in the US context alone). The second is far more fraught, particularly for graduate students and junior scholars, in that the modes of exploring scholarly questions through the digital humanities (cooperative rather than solo, through new modes of communication and publication, in new forms and formats) potentially reshape the ways in which individual distinction leads to prominence or even just a foothold or halfway decent position in a humanities discipline. How many risks does a young, aspiring scholar in the humanities want to take? What kinds of structural changes in the academy (tenure and promotion questions being the most fraught and pressing) would preserve the best aspects of vetting while allowing scholars to take more of these kinds of risks? Is it possible to picture a humanities landscape in which the current superstar system is replaced by something more democratic and egalitarian? Could the digital help in this project?

DH and Print Culture/Embodied Culture

We tend to start out by thinking of the digital as opposed to the book and print culture, as well as to face-to-face culture of the traditional classroom, but might we actually be able to find ways that the digital weaves through (streams through?) the material in transformative and productive ways? The digital not as a rupture from prior technologies, practices, and modes of scholarship/teaching/life but rather as a continuation? If so, how? In what ways? To what ends?

DH and Pedagogy

What should DH in the classroom look like? Coursera? New kinds of interactions between face-to-face and online teaching? Should it be more efficient and cheaper or more complex and expensive?

What else? What did I miss?