What is Academic Entrepreneurship?  How can one become a Humanist Entrepreneur? What does that mean?

AE education – How do we adapt and how do we apply to a Humanities ecosystem the training and resources about becoming an entrepreneur that are available to scientific disciplines? Why is AE so important to those disciplines? Is it equally important to the practice of DH?

Is the marriage of DH and AE a powerful instrument of democratization of cultural values? Does AE contribute to the scientific debate of a Humanities discipline? What are the major roadblocks, psychological, cultural, and institutional that make it challenging to blend Humanities research with business?

The digital sphere offers humanities instructors a rare and valuable opportunity to have students create knowledge that can transcend the classroom and the class assignment. Whether this knowledge takes the form of Wikipedia entries, websites, contributions to crowdsourcing platforms, or online maps and timelines, it shows undergraduates that they can be contributors to our disciplines, not just consumers. But for this work to become “real”, it must be publicly available online. This raises a number of questions. How do we protect student privacy? What are our legal obligations with respect to student work published online and student online identities? How do we guarantee the quality of the information produced? Should we offer it to the world with caveats about its sources? What kind of citation practices should we demand of our students? How do we deal with the widespread copy-paste plagiarism that characterizes the web and frequently emerges in such assignments? How do we make it possible for students to participate while protecting their own privacy? How do we accommodate students who wish to opt out of the public component of such assignments?

This session will involve a frank discussion of these issues and how the participants have dealt with them in their own teaching. It will also include a review of FERPA laws as interpreted at UT Austin, as well as an overview of solutions some other institutions and individuals have come up with in this area.

In this session, participants will share ideas, challenges (either anticipated or experienced), and best practices for engaging students as scholar-collaborators in digital projects that extend beyond the classroom.  We will discuss digital projects that hinge on collaboration between classrooms and community partners such as non-profit organizations, archives, and libraries.  Such collaboration can provide valuable opportunities for undergraduates to conduct research and build digital literacies while advancing the mission of community and library partners by, for example, enhancing access to digital archival collections.  However, such collaborations require careful planning and execution to ensure relevance for everyone involved.  Whether you have led or contributed to a digital classroom collaboration with a community partner, or are interested in potentially doing so in the future, this session will provide an opportunity to pose questions and share expertise, experience, and considerations for planning and assessment.  Local faculty and instructor participants are encouraged to invite undergraduates they have supervised on digital classroom projects to contribute to the discussion about the benefits and challenges of undergraduate participation in collaborative, community-engaged digital projects.