ThatCamp Philadelphia 2014: Turning Analog Class Assignments Into Digital

This session was proposed and moderated by Michelle Moravec. Some of these notes were taken from the shared Google Doc for the session

• Curricular transformation question as opposed to a pedagogical question

• How are you differentiating between a project and an assignment?

• How do you align course outcomes with digital assignments?

• Misconceptions: DH projects are “fun” as opposed to work

• Class assignment ideas:

  • Lauren Fonseca's students use Wikispaces to create end of term work

  • Group work rubrics are established and they are graded based on their goals.

  • Wikipedia: What would you add to this page to make it more credible?

    • Immediate rebuttal if you post something inappropriate

    • Wikipedia is very useful for background information and the genesis of secondary research

    • Student familiarity is also important

  • If you are going to try to have your students use a program, make sure you as the instructor know how to use it or support it.

• Faculty should always begin small. Big myth that digital is easy.

• Some potential platforms...

  • Pinterest

  • Poetry Genius

  • Curriculet

  • ThingLink

  • Video Ant

  • Transcribe Bentham

  • Dirt

  • Dipity

  • Tiki-Toki

  • ScreenCast-O-Matic

  • Voyant

  • Timeline JS

  • Google Docs

• Scaffolding projects

• Create accessible moments within each project.

ThatCamp Philadelphia: Digital Humanities In The Classroom

The first session I attended at ThatCamp Philadelphia was on the digital humanities in the classroom. This was a great session that gave me a few ideas for my own classes.

• Is WordPress good for archival or manuscript work? Maybe Omeka is better for that? There seem to be pretty significant differences between the hosted and non-hosted versions.
• Someone mentioned making three minute “Ken Burns-y” videos with students.
• Student created digital editions are a good thing to have on a CV. Could help with getting teaching or alt-ac job.
• Loved the idea about students making timelines. We are trying that in my Shakespeare course with Dipity.
• What do students need to learn besides WordPress to be effective and/or employable?
• Suggestion to learn HTML and CSS.
• Students should have project to create a website for future web presence.
• I want to have students create websites to put online portfolios up, which could kickstart them to consider their web presence.
• Putting work online forces students to consider audience.
• Discussion of rewards during project as it goes instead of at end. I love this idea.
• Student Writing Assessment: Did this project achieve what you set out to do?
• Some discussion of Wikipedia projects, which I have done with mixed results in the past.
• I brought up the shared Google Docs I use with my Literature classes.
• How to deal with student concerns about online privacy.
• Deal with privacy issues at beginning of project...make sure it is clear project will be public...should put this in syllabus
• Students should consider general online presence and that future jobs will have some sort of online component.
• Students should, with that said, be permitted to post anonymously. However, should also consider anonymous posting in regards to future CV/job stuff.
• Good idea to have students search themselves online to see what their web presence is currently.

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.