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: Making An 18th Century Text Engaging Online

• Session runner is looking to crowd source marginalia transcription
• Twitter/Facebook accounts in character to promote
• Example: @queenvictweets
• The Alchemical Quest...a "Harry Potter" style interactive book

PhillyDH: Editing Wikipedia Workshop

After my students created Wikipedia pages in one of my classes this past spring, I was looking forward to the workshop on Wikipedia...
• Session runner is the Wikipedia editor in residence at Chemical Heritage
• How does Wikipedia define notability?
• Best practice: Let facts tell the story
• Wikipedia limits what users can do until they make X edits
• On user page there is sandbox to practice edits
• Important that students know what is appropriate about using Wikipedia

ThatCamp Digital Pedagogy: Art and Craft In The Writing Classroom

The session I proposed at ThatCamp Digital Pedagogy was on the role of art and craft in the writing classroom...
• Can in class writing help with divide between art and craft?
• Do we need a greater variety of models?
• Who is the audience?
• Assignment: During peer review, report to professor on what you see in other students papers that make you want to change/fix in YOUR paper.

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?

ThatCamp Digital Pedagogy: Digital Story Telling

An interesting session I attended at ThatCamp Digitial Pedagogy was about digital story telling...
• Hyperlink allows readers to make connections authors did not realize
• Collaborative narrative hypertext for classes
• How do we demystify DH for our own publications
• How mobile friendly is your document?
• What about accessibility?
• Twitter cosplay of characters in the classroom
• Storify could help with digital storytelling
• A few of us brought up hypertext fiction like The Unknown
• If you summarize what happens in a hypertext you will get many different answers
• Mentions of IFTTT and Yap

New Book Review

I have a new book review out in the Polymath journal. I reviewed the Hacking The Academy anthology that came out last year. Here is a direct PDF link.