For this session I’d like to talk about or brainstorm other sorts of assignments that can take place across campuses.

The last two times I’ve taught my Intro to Digital Humanities course, in 2011 and in 2014, I included an assignment that responded to Mark Sample’s 2011 blog post, “The digital humanities is not about building, it’s about sharing.” The purpose of the assignments was to get students in my class working on something with students in other classes, at other universities. With digital technologies, there’s no longer a reason to pretend that the only class in the world reading this book. We can reach out to others and work with them on interpreting it or making a response to it.

The digital humanities, in other words, transforms not only our research but our learning.

In 2011, the resulting assignment was a collaboration with Mark, Zach Whalen, Erin Templeton, and Paul Benzon. We asked our students to re-network House of Leaves. That’s a fancy way of saying, we asked them to re-create the forums that accompanied the launch of the book.

In 2014, Zach and I decided we’d like to ask our students to create media objects for every page of House of Leaves. The result was A Million Blue Pages, a collaboration with Chuck Rybak, Mary Holland, Jeremy Douglass, Paul Hurh, and others.

Another good example of a cross-campus teaching project is Matt Gold and co.’s Looking for Whitman.

Again, for this session I’d like to talk about or brainstorm other sorts of assignments that can take place across campuses. How can we get our students talking to/working with one another? I imagine breaking into small groups and batting around ideas during the session and then presenting to the other groups.

I’d like to propose a session on annotating (especially on teaching annotation with) non-textual media. While there are quite a few tools available (and more cropping up regularly) for working with texts, I haven’t found any satisfactory out-of-the-box solutions for working with non-textual stuff. So many tools require active and ongoing support, or agile infrastructure (and agile infrastructure staff units), or developer tweaking that none have proven quite right for our environment. Am I just not looking in the right places? Does anyone else have this issue and want to talk about it?

THAT Conference New England, May 2014

Maureen Ebben, Communication and Media Studies and Julien Murphy, Philosophy

University of Southern Maine, Portland, Maine

TITLE:  Using MOOCs as a Resource for Teaching and Learning

This “Talk” session will explore the ways in which MOOCs may be used as a resource for teaching and learning.  Given the proliferation of MOOCs, it would seem that MOOC content might be usefully repurposed to a variety of other contexts.  For example, the elements that make up MOOCs such as videos, exercises, readings, potentially even the discussion boards, etc., might enrich a more traditional class, a project, or a community effort.

Some questions to explore in this session include:  What are the best ways to use MOOC resources?  Has anyone done this?  What are the pros and cons?  Is it possible to use just a piece of a MOOC, or do they not allow themselves to be carved up like this?  We’ve heard of professors signing up for a MOOC, along with their students, so that the whole class was enrolled in the MOOC for the duration of the regular class.  That is quite a commitment.  Are there other more nuanced ways to utilize MOOCs?  How open are MOOC resources to this type of a la carte approach?  Do MOOC copyright restrictions and packaging preclude this?  Are there aspects of the timing of MOOCs, such as the start and end dates, that would need to be considered?  These, as well as other questions, will be discussed.

Apologies for the tardy proposal. This could fall under either category of Talk or Teach.

The main focus of this session would be the use of Wikipedia (and other popular online tools, like Twitter) in the classroom. What has worked for you, what hasn’t, etc.  Part of this comes out of conversations around the Writing for Wadewitz Tribute Edit-A-Thons organized to honor a scholar who helped promote Wikipedia as a pedagogical tool (here’s the brochure she wrote on the topic).Given that there’s been multiple Tribute Edit-A-Thons in New England (plus the upcoming one in June), the session could also cover planning events like Wikipedia Write-Ins and Hack Days in academic settings.

Related to this proposal (but not its main focus): Part of what intrigues me about this subject is that there is a social justice element underneath the Wikipedia assignments and events (whether it is increasing the visibility of underrepresented groups as subjects and editors or more broadly, promoting the spread of basic digital literacy).  I haven’t observed this as much in other assignments using social media (e.g., connecting Twitter assignments to activist hashtags such as the current #YesAllWomen and the earlier #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen), but perhaps that is because I’m academically located in Early Modern and Eighteenth-Century discussions?

If anyone wants to learn how to use Omeka in a classroom (and/or talk about the benefits/challenges of doing so), I could lead a session on this.  I have had good luck using Omeka to start “Writing of Indigenous New England,” an archive of literature written by Native American people in this region (indigenousnewengland.com).  My students have partnered with local museums and historical societies, basically helping them to digitize their physical exhibits; they have also worked with contemporary Native authors, giving them personal pages (including Wikipedia pages–another topic I’d be happy to discuss). Using Omeka, humanities majors can learn a great deal about public writing, public history (including literary history), and public engagement. ..and come away with greater confidence about their “marketable” skills, as well.

What are you teaching students? What tools? What resources? What products are they producing?

In this session, I’d like to have an open discussion where attendees can share tools and experiences, and learn about new ones.

A side note: I will only be attending on Friday due to an emergency trip.