I’m very much looking forward to THATCamp PMT this Saturday. I’m particularly enthused to hear what other folks are doing with social media, especially how they’re measuring success with social media integration.

I use a class blogs, we integrate some social media, and also use a lot of other current  blogs (i09, Jezebel, The Atlantic, NRO, various tumblrs, etc), as well as Skype interviews. This Fall, I’m ramping up my digital work by scheduling Twitterviews, moving 80% of student response to a blog in order to generate class discussion, and encouraging students to dissolve the separation remaining in their minds between “fun” stuff like Instagram, Pinterest, FB, Mashable, and Twitter and their “serious” work in class and school.

For my “Hip Hop, Gender, and Sexuality” class this fall, all students will have to have a SoundCloud and Spotify account, we’ll probably also develop a class hashtag for Twitter, and I’d like out blog to be robust (critical and creative responses, pics or vid of all art work go on it). I’m keen to have an archive for all the cool work that happens inside and outside of class. We’re also going to use Tahir Hemphill’s amazing The Hip-Hop Word Archive (I’m going to start contributing to the archive’s word count this summer).

Cheers!

SPS

@shanteparadigm

I know very little about things like text and data mining and would like to gain some skills in that area.

I propose a session in which we brainstorm what applications and documents might be included on a “Digital Humanities Creator Stick,” a collection of tools that could fit on a USB flash drive, allowing students, teachers, researchers, and anyone else to work on digital humanities projects. An individual would plug the stick into any computer and instantly have access to what she needs to get work done. Unplug the stick and she takes those tools with her.

(I’ve created an open, editable, collaborative GoogleDoc for this session: GWms.me/DHstick)

The idea came from my research into accessibility in digital environments: students (and others) with disabilities often need a special suite of software applications to access, use, and create digital resources. An organization called Michigan’s Integrated Technology Supports has developed something they’ve titled the MITS Freedom Stick: “The MITS Freedom Stick is a portable, use-anywhere accessibility solution. Install this software package on any 4gb USB Flash Drive (full) or 2gb USB Flash Drive (lite) and you create a set of tools for your students that they can carry in their pockets which will make any Windows computer highly accessible” (more here).

See also Julie Meloni’s ProfHacker post titled “Using Portable Applications for Productivity.”

Questions for brainstorming the content of a “Digital Humanities Creator Stick”:

• What guides, tutorials, or essays should be included?
• What portable applications already exist that should be included?
• What portable applications don’t exist but would be great to include if they did?

[Creative Commons-licensed flickr photo by molotalk]

This isn’t very techy/dh-y, but I’d like to get some people together to figure out how to form a committee for humanities organizations to create a set of guidelines for recognizing teaching as scholarship. My inspiration for this endeavor is the recent revision of the Guidelines for Evaluating Work in Digital Humanities and Digital Media. I’m from an English Department, so I’d be primarily interested in an MLA committee, but this is an issue that (I feel) impacts all of the humanities. We hear statements about the importance of teaching all of the time, and yet to my knowledge the MLA currently doesn’t have any guidelines that recognize teaching (let alone digital pedagogy) as a legitimate form of scholarly contribution. As digital technology makes teachers more willing and interested in collaborating with students on scholarship and in devising innovative new projects that integrate social and digital media, I feel it is increasingly important that academic review boards see this work as worthy of tenure and promotion.

Two sources that we may draw upon (h/t Rosemarie Feal and Stacey Donahue):

1. TYCAs (Two-Year College Association) Discussion of Research and Scholarship for Two-Year Colleges. Since TYCs are traditionally more focused on teaching than larger research institutions, the association has some great recommendations for considering teaching as a form of scholarship. The document calls for an “expanded view of scholarship to include not only a familiarity with advances in one’s field but also an active integration of scholarship and sound academic practice.” I’m especially interested in their definition, following James Slevin, of a teacher-scholar as “that faculty member for whom teaching is informed both by reflective practice and by the applications of the best available theoretical approaches” and whose research “enriches the intellectual lives of their students.” The expanded document can be found here.
2. Ernest Boyer, Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate. This book is relatively old (1990), yet it also provides very progressive suggestions for how to conceptualize the increasingly flexible realities of the University and their impact on teaching. Particularly, it defines several categories of scholarship, one of them being the scholarship of teaching. Boyer complains that teaching is often seen as a “routine function” that “almost anyone can do,” when in reality teaching can only be “well regarded only as professors are widely read and intellectually engaged” (23). Boyer doesn’t give specific ways to evaluate teaching as a scholarly endeavor, apart from the evaluations of peers, students, and administrators. Perhaps this is a good place to start.