There are so many things I’m curious about, but the one that comes to mind immediately is the use of specialized websites…

I’ve used Moodle and Chalk/Blackboard to some good ends and find them very helpful, although I never feel that I’m in any way deploying them optimally. I’d like to learn more about using an alternative class-specific website for links, resources, forums, maybe collaboration on papers – but especially to disseminate materials in a dynamic/interesting way that encourages students to engage the materials and course focus more creatively and independently.

I also would like to explore establishing and maintaining my own website in a way that would dovetail with teaching – maybe to help students see how my general (or particular) interests relate to a specific course that we share.

I’d really like to see a panel on managing student assignments that require them to create multimedia/multimodal documents. What are some of the best ways to grade videos, audio recordings, etc.? How much technology do you teach (using Photoshop, iMovie, etc.) vs. how much do you force them to learn on their own? How do you handle video hosting – since YouTube and Vimeo have some FERPA implications? And, more simply, how do you handle the byte size of these files since students end up emailing really big files to you and to each other (my University doesn’t give much cloud storage to the students)?

I’ve got some experience with these issues, but I’d like to hear ideas and solutions from the rest of you.

Okay, so, two (related) things:

1) Digital humanities projects—and really most kinds of pedagogical innovations—work best when they’re supported by faculty and librarians who understand each other’s aims and abilities. But we often … don’t. I have an odd and rich perspective on the faculty-library relationship because I’m currently a reference & instruction librarian at a SLAC where I’ve worked previously in a faculty role … and where I’ll be resuming a faculty role next year. The worlds of scholarship, pedagogy, and librarianship are deeply interdependent but rarely communicate and collaborate as effectively as I’d hope. I would love to contribute to a conversation about faculty-librarian collaboration and communication. It might also be helpful to talk about how faculty and librarians imagine each other—how we think about each other’s and our own jobs, skills, limitations, quirks, and roles in teaching/learning/scholarship.

2) As the library’s liaison to the history department, I often find myself teaching students strategies for finding primary sources. I am delighted with the increasing accessibility of these cultural materials. But of course it’s more complicated than that. What I’m seeing in classrooms and at the reference desk is a major shift in pedagogical practice within history—a shift toward substantial primary research and primary source analysis in undergraduate (even first-year) courses—which springs from the ongoing digitization of so many materials and which has important implications for students, librarians, faculty-library dynamics, and librarians’ roles in student research. Any historians or other primary-source-teaching folk want to work through some of those implications together?