ThatCamp Digital Pedagogy: Quelling Digital Panic In The College Classroom

The first session I attended at ThatCamp Digital Pedagogy was about quelling digital panic in the college classroom. Here are my notes:

• Almost every student has a smart phone.
• How do we engage student in classroom with so many distractions?
• Shared Google Docs are a possible solution, but I have had mixed results with them.
• How do we get students to buy into doing shared notes?
• What is role of learning disabilities in this panic?
• Google Doc for digital behaviour norms in classroom on first day of class? Cool idea!
• Texting/social media break midway through class?
• How do we teach digital citizenship?
• Have students research terms of service/privacy of social networks.
• I could do an entire semester of ENG101 on this...
• Shared class Tumblr.

PhillyDH: Literary Analysis of 19th/20th Century Texts

My day at PhillyDH began in a session on the literary analysis of 19th and 20th century texts...
• Have students look at off the beaten path 19c texts to see what else is happening during the era (so say not Eliot, Brontes, etc).
• Looking at newspapers from a certain year and connect to a text/genre.
• Using keyword search to map out main characters---victim---tropes---linguistic patterns
• How can text analysis lead to better close reading?
• Google NGraw can help, but does have limitations...could help students see cultural influences
• I had a class figure out % of characters speaking in King Lear and then write response to how this affected their close reading.
• How does students lack of curiosity about technology hurt implementing digital humanities projects?
• How does automation further injure this?
• Collaboration between liberal arts and STEM classes.
• How do we get collaborative feedback during projects?

Updated Technology Policy

As I have done in the past, this year I formed a student committee to work with me in rewriting some of my classroom policies. This year, I decided that my technology policy, even though only a few years old, needed to be amended, updated, and changed in various ways. With the help of my student committee Nicole Cammarota, Meghan McCallister, Lauren Graham, and Matthew Shoppas, we met once in person and then edited a shared Google Doc. After some editing on my part, this is what I ended up with:

Technology Policy
Please mute your cell phone BEFORE entering the classroom. If your cell phone goes off more than once while class is in a session, you will be asked to leave. I fully encourage whatever technology suites your learning style, accommodations, or interests whether they are laptops, tablets, apps on smart phones, etc, as long as they do not distract from our purpose in the classroom. Paper is totally fine too.

With that being said, during opening and closing remarks in class focus should be away from technology and on discussing our goals and outcomes for the day. Please remove all ear buds before entering class and keep them removed until you leave the room at the end of class.

In my classes, I have an expectation students will have access to email and computers in general. All of your work will be submitted to via your BCC Gmail account and returned, with annotated comments, via Google Drive. Given there are public and school libraries, the ILRC, coffee shops, etc, students need to budget their time better; I do not see any excuse for having “no access” to email outside of the classroom.

Students are expected to check their BCC Gmail account on a regular basis. I do not accept the excuse, “I didn't check my email for two weeks” as a valid problem. Digital correspondence should be written using proper grammar and form. I will not reply to emails filled with texting speak (2, u, 4, lol, j/k) or poor grammar and/or misspellings.

Please include a subject and "sign" your email with your name, student ID number, and course section. If you miss class, please check the syllabus for information about assignments, due dates, and outcomes from class. Do not email the professor and ask “did we do anything in class today?” or any variations on that theme.

ThatCamp Philadelphia: Small Scale Publications & Digital Editions

The Stockton family ran a number of sessions at ThatCamp Philadelphia, including Deb Gussman’s session on small scale publications and digital editions.

• Gussman is doing a digital edition of the works of Catharine Maria Sedgwick.
• Deb’s steps of a digital project: Strategy and Approach, Scope, Content, Design, Development, Testing, Support.
• Collaboration is very important. Need to find others who have skills you don’t have.
• There are no guarantees that apps, websites, etc will work in a year.
• I suggested the use of emulators ala what is done in modern times with classic interactive fiction.
• Deciding on what app/website/cms to use can often come from other colleagues/friends.
• I brought up the work of Cory Doctorow and how, by releasing his work under a Creative Commons license, readers can create versions of his works for different platforms.
• It is helpful to be familiar with remix culture in general.
• A great idea from John Theibault: in grant applications, include money for development of emulators for later editions when platforms become obsolete.
• Creative Commons licensing allows others to care more about the preservation of your work than you do.
• A lot of Gussman’s work with Sedgwick is coming from Google Books.
• Theibault’s students digitized Philadelphia’s directories.
• Back in 2003, I worked on the digitization of the American Weekly Mercury in one of Tom Kinsella’s classes.

Deb leading the discussion.

Adeline Koh, John Thebault, and Rebecca Goldman listen to the discussion.

ThatCamp Jersey Shore: Online Collaboration

In this panel, we went around the room discussing different collaborative tools we use in our classrooms.

• Spicebird runs email, calendar, and chat all in one program. Spicebird reminds me of Google Wave.
• Prezi creates very pretty presentations. I am going to experiment with this in the fall.
• …along with Dipity, which creates timelines. I like timelines.
• Transcribe Bentham crowd sources transcriptions of digitized Bentham documents.
• At some point, I brought up my experiences using PBWorks in the classroom to create wikis for my classes.
• GroupTable organizes group projects and allows document management.
• Some discussion of the lack of ease of exporting files from Google Docs. I discuss the symposiums I put together using Google Docs in graduate school.
• Zotero.
• Academia.edu could become a Linked In for academics, but not a lot of work seems to be happening with it. I barely used my page until recently.
• DHAnswers can be helpful for finding out tools.
• Comment Press incorporates review into writing. Could be a replacement for gate kept peer review.

Links & Kinks In The Chain: Collaboration In The Digital Humanities

One of the best panels I attended was on the role of collaboration in the Digital Humanities. I got to meet up with some friends from Prof Hacker and Twitter like Jason Jones and Bethany Nowviskie, who were both on the panel. I also caught up with other friends who I have known for some time as well.

My notes aren’t really detailed, I suppose, but here is what I wrote down during the panels:

Jason Jones

• What does collaboration mean?
• Social media role
• Twitter is a crowd sourced search engine
• Institution based models of collaboration are 20th century

Laura Mandell

• Two point of views about collaboration
• Hybrid scholar: Interdisciplinary scholar who begins in English, but ends up in computer science
• Hybrid field: Experts in discipline come together (Example: An English professor and a java scriptor) to work on a project
• Hybirds don’t have fit in modern university
• Modern universities prioritizes those in ensconced fields

Bethany Nowviskie “Monopolies of Invention”

• Consider institutional status (staff, adjuncts, etc) “can’t afford to make trouble”
• Digital Humanities can fix intellectual property problems
• UVA must tell patent office about new patentable DH