B”H

OK, I have already made a facebook page for us and suggested some sessions, but I got this idea today and thought I would throw it out there.

I am going to be teaching World Literature next semester, a class I have never taught at this school.  On their exit exam is Tartuff, which I have never even read, lead alone taught.

I thought it would be fun, as a kind of “Iron Chef” challenge, to ask that we do a session on  digital humanities solutions to teaching Tartuff.

How can I make it interesting, relevant, and make sure my students know the text as well as they possibly can?

Maybe everyone can come with their favorite programs, ideas, and teaching suggestions.  What do you think?

As a teacher educator and educational psychologist I am broadly interested in how technology changes and elevates learning.

Questions:

*How do we create a culture at a small liberal arts college that both embraces traditional pedagogy/ways of knowing and new technologies that expand the arena for learning?

*As faculty, how do we decide when a particular technology will elevate learning?  How do we understand the “value-added” by the incorporation of a technology and how do we document this impact on student learning outcomes?

One of the most significant reasons for having a THATCamp organized specifically for liberal arts colleges is to address the not uncommon isolation of digital humanists at smaller institutions.  Some  – maybe many – of those attending THATCamp LAC may be the only person doing DH in their department, and so are without the support structures found at larger research institutions or major DH centers.  Such isolation can easily leave lone DHers without access to or awareness about ongoing projects, standards, technology, and expertise for their own work.

THATCamp LAC will itself help by forging connections and discussing the dynamics of the profession, but one other initiative that would be useful to discuss here is DHCommons.org, a digital humanities collaboration initiative and hub that was born out of THATCamp Chicago.  DHCommons hopes to connect isolated digital humanists and break down larger silos on several fronts:

• A new hub at dhcommons.org to help digital humanists discover and contact potential collaborators and to find and join projects.
• Microgrants to encourage scholars to develop curriculum in conjunction with existing projects, travel to partner digital humanities centers for training or project mentoring, etc.
• Expertise sharing among schools without digital humanities infrastructure to promote mentorship and expansion of the field

Both myself and others from the core group organizing this effort – Rebecca Davis, Quinn Dombrowski, and Ryan Cordell – will be at THATCamp LAC and would love to have input on two fronts.  First, we seek the opinion of DHers who are at LACs as to how this site and initiative might be made (more) useful to you, how we might encourage participation among DHers at small institutions, how we might create or improve functionality of the site, etc.

We would also like to get your direct participation in DHCommons.org if you have (or know of) an ongoing DH project that could benefit from collaboration of any kind.  One of the major efforts in getting the hub off the ground is populating it with projects in order to show functionality to others in the DH community.  We’d like for anyone interested to add his or her projects, thoughts, and opinions during a panel.

Hi gang!

More of a series of questions and less of a proposal (I suppose that’s why were at THATCamp LAC, right?)…

Musicians (specifically composers) in academia are behind the curve in our pedagogical evolution apropos technological advancements and an increase in the number of digitally-native students in music classes.  I’m hoping the questions/problems/concerns I’m going to raise are actually the same as or similar to ones you have already come across in your respective fields!

Here’s the gist: composition is the wielding and manipulating of a musical palette comprised of very small elements: notes.  While some music conservatories will allow undergraduate students to “specialize” in an area (wind ensemble composition), most colleges—particularly LACs—ask students to learn to write coherently and idiomatically in multiple styles and genres.  In these settings, technology has traditionally been used in one of two venues: as a tool for notation (many composers use software like Finale or Sibelius instead of pen and paper), or through the genre of electronic music.

So what’s wrong?

Students who are entering college are part of the iGeneration which touts applications like Apple’s Garageband as a device to aid in composing music.  Using Garageband, burgeoning composers typically manipulate “loops” rather than individual notes to create a piece of music that is self-performing; there is no resulting “score” and the computer is the performer.  Many in academic music feel this process is more akin to digital DJing and not true “composition” and should not be part of the undergraduate curriculum.

Like it or not (and I’m still very much undecided on the issue), Garageband has become a gateway for students interested in pursuing a degree in music composition and they often become upset when they get to college and see that what they’re creating “doesn’t count” as composition despite the process being remarkable similar.

Here are my questions:

What’s the difference between synthesis and composition?

Is analog composition (“traditional” writing) actually different from digital composition (Garageband)?  Is it even “digital composition” or “digital synthesis?”  Are the skills the same at any rate?

Does Garageband fit into the traditional “electronic music” genre that students typically study, or is it really a different animal?  If so, where does it fit into the curriculum?

If a student can compose in multiple genres through Garageband, do they ever need to write note-by-note?

More aptly: if I ask a student to compose a piece for strings and the student turns in a Garageband file that digitally puts together dozens of synthetic or prerecorded string sounds, has the student done what I asked?

Most academic composers I know do NOT consider Garageband as legitimate means of composing, but I’m not so sure…

I’d love your thoughts!  If this is something anyone is interesting in helping me think through, I’d be delighted to demonstrate both types of composition (and hear the products!) so you can see the similarities and differences for yourself!

As a future LAC faculty member leaving behind my doctoral work at an R1 institution where the numbers of resources and colleagues working with digital media tend to be more plentiful, I am interested in discussing what to expect in terms of differences between large research universities and small LAC campuses as they relate to digital/new media practices.  Specifically I am concerned with the following:

• How does one create careful, thoughtful, and effective relationships with the college’s IT (instructional technology) or ET (educational technology) department staff?
• How does one balance being one of (possibly) only a few faculty who implement digital media practices into the classroom?  That is, how do we act as resource for other faculty who are interested in doing this kind of work without becoming overwhelmed as the “go to” person (or one of a few) for tech advice?
• How does one help administration to better understand the range of necessary resources and ever-evolving platforms, applications, software packages that comprise “new” media?

At my current (research) institution we have an Institute for Teaching and Learning (<a href=”http://www.albany.edu/teachingandlearning/”>ITLAL</a>) that handles a lot of the faculty training in working with the digital.  I am curious to learn about smaller/LAC models of this and/or how to create these kinds of resources on LAC campuses.

One of the conversations that we have around these parts revolves around the implicit connection between emerging platforms and texts (Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, remix video) and the ways that they could best be channeled to help students practice the skills/core competencies that liberal education prides itself on: critical thinking, analysis, synthesis, etc.  (These are just the ones that show up in our institutional mission statement—feel free to add others!)

I’m hoping that people might like to brainstorm some ideas around the following:

• What do these competencies look like in new media forms, as opposed to the research paper format?  (In other words, how do we know critical thinking in a remix video when we see it?)
• What pedagogical strategies and examples can we explore with our students to highlight these?
• What versions of these competencies are site-specific (e.g., analysis on YouTube vs. analysis on Twitter), and which are transferable? Are there some platforms/practices that are more amenable to developing these competencies than others?

I’ve been interested in tracking the pedagogical innovations that are coming out of Project NML and HASTAC, but hopefully others have examples as well!