I have two main goals for this weekend:

First, I would like to brainstorm new and effective ways to use technology in the classroom that move beyond he use of Blackboard or Moodle. For whatever reason, my past attempts to use those particular platforms have been spectacular failures. I’d like to rethink the way I approach collaborative student work, adding class components that add value rather than merely provide additional assessment opportunities for me.

Second, I’d really like some help thinking about how the broader framework of the “digital humanities” can help push my research forward. Medievalists have done a great job of connecting the digital to medieval thought and manuscript culture, finding ways to illuminate the work they do as well as bring the insights of medieval studies to how we think about digital or collaborative creative work. I feel like early modernists have availed ourselves of these emerging tools less ably. While digital archives are changing the way we access primary source materials, I want to think about the way digital culture and technology might illuminate my work in theoretical as well as practical ways. I’m not really sure how to go about doing that, but I’m hoping this weekend will be a step in the right direction.

Groups often define their members (and their opposite Others) with jokes and joking. Jokes (speaking as a folklorist here) can be serious stuff, can lead to real discussions about life, work, the universe, and everything. Is DH a mature enough field to have jokes about its identity? What would those jokes reveal? Could we come up with jokes? Could we tell jokes? Could we have our very own THATCamp standup? What would happen?
www.ucl.ac.uk/dh-blog/2012/03/22/stand-up-for-digital-humanities/

When people mention that I use digital technology, I believe the comment is often returned with silence and a blank stare. This is often due to the fact that such comments seem to infer that I strive specifically to use such resources in my teaching. A focus in teaching is engagement. I teach mathematics, and many people find the word “math” and “engagement” in the same sentence to be describing an experience they have yet to encounter. I find a variety of teaching techniques (digital and otherwise) help reach a wide spectrum of students with their differing interests, preferred learning styles, and background knowledge.

Given this is an unconference for digital technology in the humanities, my place as a mathematician may seem to involve an attempt to fit a square (I’m the square) in a round hole (you are well-rounded). This may or may not be a fair, general assessment of my field. Fortunately, we can pivot quickly from this point and move in a different direction. I tend to learn more as an artist then a mathematician. I have professional training in both puppetry and mime and use both (although currently more my mime than puppetry) to teach math. Initially a surprise to me, mathematicians love seeing their world of thought visualized in the invisible world of mime. In a way, the mime makes the invisible world of math visible. For those who describe themselves as non-mathematicians, a performing art, like digital technology, can present ideas in a new format, possibly allowing for a new perspective and insight.

My current interests lie in several directions. First, I’m a contributing writer/blogger for the Huffington Posts’ Science blog. I’m very interested, especially in this format, in finding innovative ways to present math. You can see an example of my mime and how I folded it into a posting in my article To Hold Infinity and Beyond.

Next, I’ve been working on webinars this term. I have 7 colleges participating with about 70 participants consisting of both professors and students. To see an example of my first webinar in which I discuss how ideas from algebra can help you play Angry Birds, you can visit Algebra and Angry Birds webinar. Or you can see the entire webinar project at Life is Linear. Next week, we will be posting “posters” of our respective explorations in the topics.

While I’m interested in ideas related to either of these activities in scholarship, my overarching interest is how to have students engage in creating digital resources. Can students produce webinars that are helpful to others and satisfying to the students who produced them? I’d like to have students both math major and non-math major (by this I mean a student in what is likely his or her last math class taken as a distribution requirement) produce webinars. The webinars would be viewed by children and youth. If you had to engage a child or youth about math, what would you do? Many students will find themselves in this position at a dinner table with their own or a friend’s child. How can I help students learn to produce such media? think about tackling such a project? be comfortable enough with the process that their energies are engaged creatively rather than technically in the steps of production? My main fear is throwing students into a digital sea too turbulent for them to swim or even float. I have no experience with creating videos using iMovie or other software. Is it easy? If so, can someone help me? How can students learn? What type of commitment is necessary in helping them learn?

Finally, I’m interested in having students create cartoons of math concepts. You can read more about this idea at Comic in Calculus. This is very new for me but an idea that attracts me. Creating such cartoons requires a student to examine material in a new way, think about how to be cute or funny about a concept, and then create a cartoon. What can I do to support the creation of such art works? I don’t mind simply having them draw them by hand. Still, I wonder about other techniques.

These are interests that I have but engaging in them is not what pulls me to attend our THATCamp. This posting merely describes my starting spot from which I can be propelled into places of inspiration as I learn from the work and innovations of others.

I hope ThatCamp will not only give me great ideas for integrating technology into my pedagogy, but also the technical skills and confidence to do so. On the practical side, I want to learn ways to use WordPress. I teach a collaborative research seminar that uses WordPress as a platform for a bibliographic database that is open to the public, but the collaborative research has always been conducted through Blackboard, public folders, or Moodle. I’d like to use WordPress for organizing, exchanging, and publishing student research projects. On a visionary scale, I would like to explore ways to use digital studies to keep the humanities, especially literary studies, vibrant and relevant today. I’d like someday to help build a “literary lab” or a virtual “writers’ house,” in which students work independently and collaborate to conduct and “publish” their research in innovative ways, using the resources of digital technologies.

We are excited to announce that THATCamp Piedmont will be held on the campus of Davidson College on May 5, 2012. This technology and humanities unconference will begin at around 8:30am and wrap-up in the late afternoon. Please read more about the THATCamp ethos to find out what THATCamp Piedmont will be like!

Registration run from March 1 through April 15. We welcome professors, students, technologists, librarians, and archivists of all levels who work in the humanities! We’ll be accepting the first 75 registrations. We’ll add more details soon about the schedule, social events, travel information, and so on. In the meantime, please contact thatcamp.piedmont@gmail if you have any questions, and follow us as well on Twitter at @THATCamp_Pmont.

Quiet Spot photograph courtesy of Flickr user mystuart / Creative Commons License