I had a great time at PhillyDH's unconference last week. This was my first time attending one of PhillyDH's events; I missed last year's event by just sort of randomly not hearing about it. I attended very interesting sessions on making literary texts interesting in the classroom, Wikipedia, and crowd sourcing a digital project. I also ran my own session on Wikipedia in the classroom.
I will post notes in the coming weeks.
I had a great time at ThatCamp Digital Pedagogy last week. It was nice to go home to Stockton for the day (in fact, the main room we were in was where I had a class with Scott Rettberg back in 2005!). I will post my notes from various sessions, including the one I ran on the differences between art and craft in the writing classroom, in the coming weeks. Big thanks to Adeline Koh for organizing this ThatCamp! I was able to do some promotion for ThatCamp Community College next year and I believe a handful of campers will be coming.
Update: Here are the shared Google Docs from the unconference.
Adeline Koh beginning the day.
Some pictures from the fall...
I had a great time at this year's Lit Bash down at Stockton. It was nice to come home for an afternoon and, especially, for the first time, get to see some former students of mine down there. I spent time with a handful of those, attended The Bash, where I caught up with a lot of former professors, and then headed to dinner with my parents down the shore before going home late in the evening. This is always one of my favorite days of the year.
Here I am setting up in the morning. Picture by Gina Yanuzzi.
My co-coordinators Chris Gazarra and Gina Yanuzzi did a lot of work the morning of the unconference getting everything set up as I riffed ideas from previous ThatCamps at them. Gina drew this to give directions to those who were coming in.
After nearly a year of planning, the first ever ThatCamp Community College took place in the spring on our Mt Laurel campus here at BCC. We had a small group of about 10-12 at various times in the day (including a number of cancellations and no shows too), which led to very dense and productive sessions in the morning and then a rapid fire session to discuss proposed topics that did not receive enough votes.
Our morning sessions were about the key technological needs of community college students and how technology effects the form and logic of composition papers. I was so happy that our Dean in Liberal Arts, Nichole Bennett-Bealer, was able to sit in during the morning sessions for a bit.
After lunch we had one more session to discuss in rapid fire fashion some of the other session ideas that had been proposed in the morning. It was a small group, and mostly English and Literature faculty, so we could go into a detailed and deeper discussion.
I was so happy that our intern president David Spang was able to drop by for a little bit as well during the afternoon session. Dr. Spang has been extremely supportive since our first meeting back in August and I am grateful for his support and leadership here at BCC.
We will have information about next year's ThatCamp Community College later in the summer or early in the fall.
