Session Proposal: Defining Digital Literacies

What are digital literacies in today’s world?  Have we moved past information literacy alone?  What other digital skills do our students need for personal, professional, and civic lives in the emerging digital ecosystem that is fundamentally shaped by networks and that is increasingly driven by data and algorithms that personalize information for users and inform human judgment?

What standards or frameworks do you use?  Here are a few examples:

  • Information Literacy: Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL). “Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education.” Accessed January 4, 2016. www.ala.org/acrl/standards/ilframework
  • Data Literacy: Carlson, Jake R.; Fosmire, Michael; Miller, Chris; and Sapp Nelson, Megan R. “Determining Data Information Literacy Needs: A Study of Students and Research Faculty” (2011). Libraries Faculty and Staff Scholarship and Research. Paper 23. docs.lib.purdue.edu/lib_fsdocs/23.
  • Multimodal Literacy: See examples here: Kuhn, Virginia. “Multimodal.” Rebecca Frost Davis, Matthew K. Gold, Katherine D. Harris, Jentery Sayers (Eds.), Accessed January 4, 2016. Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Concepts, Models, and Experiments. digitalpedagogy.commons.mla.org/keywords/multimodal/ and github.com/curateteaching/digitalpedagogy/blob/master/keywords/multimodal.md
  • Multiliteracies: Clement, T.E., 2013. Multiliteracies in the Undergraduate Digital Humanities Curriculum: Skills, Principles, and Habits of Mind, in: Hirsch, B. (Ed.), Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Principles and Politics. Open Book Publishers, Cambridge, England. www.openbookpublishers.com/reader/161 and
    New London Group, 1996. A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures. Harvard Educational Review 66, 60–92.

 

Digital Humanities and Academic Entrepreneurship

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?

 

 

 

Session Proposal: Engaging Students in Digital Projects

In the 21st century we face complex problems that cross disciplines and require collaborative approaches. Digital tools and information networks make it feasible to design project-based learning experiences that integrate students into the research process. This session will provide examples of how such projects, when integrated into courses, help students develop skills to work collaboratively, apply appropriate tools, and learn flexible problem-solving skills.  It will also invite participants to share more examples and effective strategies for integrating student digital projects into classes.  How do you break a project down?  How do you access available resources including other people.  How do you ensure students have the right skills?  How big a project is feasible?  How will you evaluate it?

Demo/Workshop Proposal: Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities

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

 

 

Session Proposals

There is still time to propose a session for THATCamp Digital Pedagogy ATX!  Please continue to post on our website through Monday, Jan. 4. If you miss your chance to propose here, you will be able to write in a proposal on the spot during the voting session on Jan. 5. We look forward to seeing you soon!

Session proposal: Making Student Work Public

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.

Session proposal: Fail Stories

Just as scientists prefer to publish positive results, discussions of digital humanities pedagogy tend to focus on success stories — great projects, student engagement, polished websites. But just as negative results are important to science, so that scientists don’t keep repeating the same fruitless experiments, negative pedagogical experiences are important for teaching. This session will encourage participants to share their digital pedagogy fail stories, with an emphasis on what went wrong, why, and how we all might avoid similar problems in the future. Stories involving any aspect of the teaching process — assignment development, syllabi, student engagement, specific tools, etc. — are welcome. Ideally, we will be able to identify some common pitfalls and come up with some shared strategies to avoid them.

Session Proposal: DH Tools and Platforms

My intention for this session is in part to engage in a conversation about sharing what types of tools have been used successfully or unsuccessfully with regards to mapping, timelines, and online exhibitions. I think, however, the conversation should also consider how to critically choose a tool that best supports the learning objectives and research questions of  the students. Each tool/platform has both strengths and weaknesses that need to be evaluated within the context of the goals of the class and project.  Often we get caught up using the new or the shiny but we cannot forget to consider the theoretical framework and methodologies before choosing a tool.

Session Proposal: Teaching DH in the Online Setting

DH practitioners are accustomed to (and rapidly overcoming) suspicion from colleagues that practice traditional forms of research and dissemination; however, resistance to online education persists even among the DH community. This proposed Talk session about online DH pedagogies will build upon an unconference conversation at DHSI 2015 on DH and online education. Participants will confront questions such as: Why is there a resistance to online pedagogy among DH practitioners? What are some approaches to teaching an online DH course? What are some of the benefits and challenges? How does a class overcome the constraints created by the LMS? Are there examples of successful online DH courses?

Session Proposal: Using Crowdsourcing Tools and Methods Productively in Pedagogy

For a number of years now, labor-intensive DH projects–especially those involving text editing and transcription, data tagging and markup, image and text analysis, metadata and data creation, etc.–have incorporated crowd sourcing tools and methods into their workflows. In this session, we propose that participants investigate, discuss, demonstrate, or design methods for integrating this DH building work into teaching practices and student learning objectives.  What are best practices for incorporating DH-scholarship into the classes we all teach or facilitate as members of the academic community?  How technical can these projects be? How can DH-crowdsourcing engage students at multiple levels of humanistic study? In what ways can involvement in DH-crowdsourcing projects develop students’ academic skills both within and beyond the scope of a particular humanistic discipline? How can DH projects open themselves up to pedagogy in the most productive ways (without sacrificing quality work)? And what ethical standards should we use when we incorporate student labor into our projects?