The degree to which students engage with the broader communities surrounding their academic institutions varies hugely. At campus universities, particularly those more physically separate from towns/cities, it can be common for students to remain ignorant of the current issues and past histories unique to their surroundings. Public humanities initiatives are increasingly offering an antidote to these divisions. At the same time, the open access nature of many digital projects and the growing number of accessible digital tools provide educators with a wide range of opportunities to collaborate with students on this type of work. By engaging in community education, students develop valuable skills such as writing for diverse audiences. Furthermore, breaking down some of the boundaries between their lives on- and off-campus helps show them the ways in which humanities scholarship might remain relevant to their lives after graduation.

This session will be focused on issues specific to Public Humanities projects with a digital pedagogy element, discussion of best practices, and the value of alternative modes of writing. A similar workshop is taking place at MLA16 (session #461, “Public Humanities Pedagogy Workshop,” Sat 8.30am). We can configure our session to serve as a complement to this workshop if there a number of THATCamp participants interested in attending both. If there is sufficient interest, we will also use the session to begin organizing a proposal for a Public Humanities workshop at the Digital Humanities 2016 conference in Krakow in June (proposals due 2/17).

Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Concepts, Models, and Experiments, edited by Rebecca Frost Davis, Matthew K. Gold, Katherine D. Harris, and Jentery Sayers, is a dynamic open-access collection currently in development in github (github.com/curateteaching/digitalpedagogy) and on MLA Commons (digitalpedagogy.commons.mla.org/). Each entry in the collection focuses on a keyword in the field of digital pedagogy (ranging from “queer” to “interface” to “professionalization”) and is curated by an experienced practitioner, who briefly contextualizes a concept and then provides ten supporting artifacts, such as syllabi, prompts, exercises, lesson plans, and student work, drawn from courses, classrooms, and projects across the humanities. New keywords will be added in batches throughout 2015-2016, with fifty keywords to be included in the final project. Currently, the second batch of keywords (Failure, Multimodal, Poetry, Professionalization, Project Management, Race, Sexuality, Text Analysis) is in open peer review on MLA Commons: https://digitalpedagogy.commons.mla.org/

The MLA has created a prototype platform for the ultimate publication of this project.  This demo and workshop will give an overview of the project, demonstrate the prototype platform, and invite you to try it out.  Please help us make this digital pedagogy resource as useful to you as possible by sharing your feedback on current and desired functionality. We will also will ask participants to reflect on and share their definition of digital pedagogy, as well as keywords, and artifacts. This crowd-sourced definition will be aggregated and analyzed through Voyant text analysis, with the results presented in our github repository: github.com/curateteaching Participants can also tweet their definition to our hashtag #curateteaching

See also our electronic roundtable session at #MLA16: Sunday, January 10, 2016, 10:15 – 11:30 AM in Lone Start G, JW Marriott: Session 736, “Curating Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities.”  Details are here: github.com/curateteaching/digitalpedagogy/blob/master/MLA2016.md