Tag: digital pedagogy

Imagining Digital Pedagogy at Fordham

This is your life:

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You just finished teaching your American History class. You slam-dunked a lecture on the transcontinental railroad’s influence on national commerce, communication, and territorial expansion. Students nodded, took vigorous notes, and were eager to participate in a lively discussion following your lecture. It was a good class. You think to yourself: tweed blazers with elbow-patches do help you scrutinize the past and question mainstream ideas more effectively. As you make a note to add more iron-on patches to your shopping cart on Amazon, you see a particularly eager student waiting to catch your attention after class.

This student–probably two weeks shy of declaring a history major–stays behind to tell you about her family’s connection to the U.S. railroad industry. As you wipe the dry eraseboard clean, she draws insightful connections between your lecture and her family’s experience in Tennessee. Apparently, this student’s family owned a company that helped establish, build, and expand railroad lines in the region in the 1880s. She’s excited about the connection. She wants to understand her family’s influence on railroad growth in a broader historical context. She’s eager to use the research tools you’ve helped her cultivate. You know, there might just be elbow-patches in her future.

You give a passing nod to the frazzled composition instructor who teaches in the room after you; he’s carrying a stack of freshly graded three-paragraph essays and looks tired. In the hall, you continue talking to the student, asking leading questions, and giving insights–just as you begin to encourage her to explore the topic in her final paper, you realize: “I don’t want to read that.”

Let me rephrase. It’s not a question of what you want, exactly. You care about the student’s development as a writer, and you don’t question their ability to make a convincing historical argument. Rather, this student’s project presents a genre problem. An 8-page research essay on a Tennessee railroad, regional geography, and national commerce could indeed be compelling (hell, I’d read it). Academic prose, however, might not be the most appropriate genre for communicating geographical expansion over time; papers are an inherently limited, linear format. This research is perfectly suited for something more dynamic–like a digital map.

Anelise H. Shrout, Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Studies, shared an experience similar to this in her workshop on Digital Pedagogy on Friday, October 16th. In this session, Shrout encouraged an interdisciplinary group of Fordham graduate students and staff to thoughtfully integrate digital assignments into undergraduate courses.

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Not only are some assignments better suited for digital media, but, according to Shrout, an online publication platform will give student work a life beyond the classroom. Student research doesn’t have to be limited to a conversation at the dry eraseboard or a document, stapled with one-inch margins. For example, if the aforementioned student created a Neatline map that tracked the growth of their family’s railroad over time, she could share her final product with her family and circulate it to people within the region of influence. Encouraging students to share the fruits of their research with people outside of academia might just spark intellectual curiosity and critical thinking in the vast elsewhere incorporated by the internet. Believe me, as a kid who grew up with spotty dial-up in the middle of nowhere, access and exposure to quality humanistic work can be transformative. And, yes, I’ll go there: if we are truly committed to “the discovery of Wisdom and the transmission of Learning” as our Jesuit mission would suggest, incorporating digital pedagogy can do a world of good.

Bringing computer power to old questions does not water-down the values humanists hold dear. Instead, digital innovation can help breathe new life into our teaching and research. As Shrout puts it, computers can help free up brain space for us and give us more mental energy to tackle big questions. Why not help our students understand humanistic inquiry through, against, and alongside the digital media that binds many of our social networks together?

Throughout the workshop, Shrout offered useful insights on evaluation and implementation of digital projects based on her extensive experience. She warned teachers that the guidelines need to be clear and evaluation must be explicit and fair. Even if you free yourself from the mountain of three-paragraph essays, you face new obstacles of evaluation. As someone who has enthusiastically embraced digital research and pedagogy, I’m with Shrout–I think these obstacles are worth taking on.

And in case you missed it, she offered several good avenues for the hows of digital pedagogy. I challenge you to take from this grab-bag of stellar digital tools (ranking from easiest implementation to most complex):

Post by: Christy L. Pottroff

Exciting Spring Events!

After a hiatus last semester, the Fordham Graduate Student Digital Humanities Group is back with a bang.  We’ve got a great list of events coming up, and two series going on.

FGSDH Events
Rose Hill Campus, 2pm-3pm
February 4: Debates in the Digital Humanities
February 25: Digital Pedagogy
March 25: Building and Maintaining an Online Profile
April 18: Wikipedia Edit-A-Thon

Topics in Digital Mapping Events
Lincoln Center Campus, 3-5pm Workshops, 2-3pm Meet&Greet
February 11: Thinking about Time with Maps: Timelines/Palladio
March 4: Georectifying/MapWarper
April 15: Intro to CartoDB

THIS FRIDAY (Nov 15) New Directions in Digital Scholarship Event @ Yale

This is a reminder that  Yale University is hosting a New Directions for Digital Scholarship event THIS FRIDAY, November 15, 2013 from 3:00-7:00pm, and Fordham GSDH would like to send you to it!

Registration for the event is free, but you must register in advance.

We are happy to provide round-trip Metro-North tickets between Fordham and New Haven.

So, if you have registered and would like to take us up on the offer (or have questions), email kmapes@fordham.edu

The schedule is as follows:

3:00-3:10pm – Welcome, Susan Gibbons (University Librarian at Yale University)

3:10-4:00 – “Making Ourselves Indispensable: The UCL Centre for Digital Humanities at Three Years Old” – Claire Warwick (Prof. of Digital Humanities at University College London)

4:10-5:30 – “Showcasing Yale Projects”

Including: “EliScholar: A Platform for Open Access Scholarly Publishing”; “Teaching Across and With Yale’s Himalayan Collections: An Experiment in Crowd Cataloguing”; “Mining Magazine Archives”; New Image Analysis Tools for Manuscripts”; “Photogrammer: A Yale NEH DH Start-Up Grant Project”

5:30-7:00 – Reception

NYC Digital Humanities Inaugural Event, Saturday, 9/25

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The NYCDH Inaugural Event took place last Saturday at the Humanities Initiative at New York University.  Many attendees faithfully live-tweeted it at #nycdh, including a significant Fordham contingent: @kmapesy, @ecornell1, @mickimcgee, @diyclassics and @FordhamGSDH!

The two morning sessions on Building NYCDH were led by Lynne and Ray Siemens, two visiting professors from the University of Victoria, currently at NYU.  They discussed the process of building and running a digital humanities center, and the importance of dialogue, discussion and re-discussion, and interdisciplinary and inter-departmental (or inter-institutional!) work for the success of any DH project.  I can’t summarize their talks better than the working notes, so let me just say my biggest takeaway was that we may fail to conclusively define the digital humanities — and that’s okay, as long as we keep talking about it and trying to re-define it.

A summary of lightning talks on a variety of topics can alo be found in the working notes: the range of projects was fascinating, and a wonderful reminder of how lucky we are to be in a city like New York.

After the morning’s traditional conference presentations the afternoon was an unconference.  It was the first time I’d been to an unconference — I’ve heard a lot about them, but hadn’t ever attended one.  As it turns out, my unfamiliarity with the format ended up giving me a bit of a surprise!

During lunch, we wrote topics of interest on a whiteboard, and after lunch, we voted on which topics the group wanted most to discuss.  I was excited that other people wanted to talk about “metadata and DH project sustainability,” and it got through to be one of the final four sessions.  Then I found out I’d be leading it!  Fortunately, it was during the second time slot, so I had a little bit of time to prepare.  I have to admit, though, the first unconference session on pedagogy and DH drew me in pretty fast, and hearing the ways in which different people use DH tools in their classes, or even teach entire classes on the digital humanities, was fascinating, especially since I’m TA’ing this semester, and will be teaching my own classes next year.

The session on metadata was a small one, which isn’t all that surprising: not everyone is excited to talk about cataloging, project hosting and formatting our projects with the future in mind.  But we had a good variety of people in the room, library school students and academics, those with years of experience with DH and with technology and programming and those who were just coming to the field.

We ended up talking not only about metadata and its importance (why create something, if no one can find it?) and the persistence of projects, but about the role of digital humanities more broadly in the world of scholarship.  Questions of citation and of numbers of authors credited for a project came up, and the observation was made that the sciences seem to handle multiple-authorship more gracefully than the humanities.  We also discussed the question of the tension between open access and traditional scholarly publishing, and whether the digital humanities have any obligation to be open access, especially when they draw on open access sources.

The conference’s closing remarks included a list of recommended resources, which are listed in the conference notes (linked above).  At 5:30, we retired to the Swift Hybernian Lounge, just around the corner.

I would encourage anyone in the NYC area to join NYCDH.org and be part of the process of creating the NYC DH community!  As a newly-formed group, the options for where it might go are still very flexible, and it promises to help draw together expertise and opportunities in really beneficial ways.

Photo of Alisa Beer
–Alisa Beer

Omeka Workshop Was A Success

The vast digital humanities tent can seem overwhelming at times. The easier path would be to sit by the pleasant campfire at the site next door and toast marshmallows. But as 15 Fordham University faculty and graduate students learned during the Omeka workshop on April 3, the barrier to entry into the tent is quite low. Alex Gil, Columbia University’s Digital Scholarship Coordinator, did a terrific job leading the workshop.

Alex Gil, Digital Scholarship Coordinator, Columbia University
Alex Gil, Digital Scholarship Coordinator, Columbia University

Omeka, as Wikipedia defines it, is a free, open source, content management system for online collections. It was developed by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, and was given a technology collaboration award by the Andrew Mellon Foundation.  Omeka is used by researchers, archivists, museum curators, students, and teachers.

For this workshop, Alex showed us a few notable sites–or exhibits, as they’re called–that use Omeka, including “Lincoln at 200,” a collaborative project involving the Newberry Library, the Chicago History Museum, and the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission. Then he carefully walked us through the procedure for creating an Omeka exhibit. Workshop participants brought a diverse collection of material to work on: from medieval manuscripts to pre-Columbian art to personal photographs.

The group felt so enthusiastic about Omeka, that a few participants have decided to reconvene in a few weeks and help each other develop their work. Marshmallows will be served. If you missed the workshop and want to learn more about Omeka, you’re welcome to join us. More details coming soon.

The Omeka Workshop was sponsored by the Center for Teaching Excellence and the Fordham Graduate Student Digital Humanities Group.

Omeka Workshop Participants
Omeka Workshop Participants

ReformationVille: Utilizing Games and Social Media for Historical Role-Playing in the Classroom

When I began teaching as a graduate student at Fordham University, I was not only a first-time teacher with anxiety about the unknown territory that lay ahead, but I was also in the midst of preparing for my comprehensive exams. So I did what I imagine most do… I depended heavily upon the most familiar and “safe” pedagogical method of my own education: the lecture. Admittedly, I had some doubts about the effectiveness of lecture-driven teaching. But looking back, it made sense. Lecturing was what I knew and, while I still risked delivering a bad one, at least I would feel some control over the classroom. Over the past few years, however, I have come to realize that teachers and students alike miss out when multi-faceted learning activities are not utilized and students’ freedom to be creative is restricted. As a result, I have found myself more and more willing to branch out pedagogically-speaking. In particular, I am becoming increasingly interested in utilizing an experiential pedagogy, even though it would require me to relinquish that sense of “control” that I coveted as a first-time teacher. That said, what might this look like in a college course?

As I ponder new opportunities, I have been also reflecting on which creative and experiential activities made the biggest impact on my own education. In doing so, one thing keeps bubbling up to the surface. Role-playing. All these years later, I still vividly remember participating in an American Revolution simulation in 8th grade History. As Sean Devlin, a friendly tavern-keeper, I wrote an autobiography, networked with classmates to win others to our cause, and participated in mock continental congresses. Then again, in high school, my IB History class engaged in a series of trials derived from our study of the Cold War. I served both as a prosecutor in the case against American meddling in Latin America and a defendant (an East German president) in another team’s charges against the Soviet Union for doing likewise in Eastern Europe. Looking back at these experiences, I am convinced that they were invaluable for fostering those higher levels of learning (critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration, etc).

Now, as a historian of Christianity, I have been toying with developing a Reformation role-playing simulation wherein my class would become an “idealized” late medieval town. Not only could I plug this activity into a number of classes, ranging from surveys of Christian history to Reformation specific ones, it could offer unique pedagogical advantages. For example, my students could hopefully experience the important reality, which text-based courses can sometimes struggle to convey – that the Reformation, like most theological disputes, was not simply waged with pen and paper, but dramatically affected families, friendships, the workplace, and the public square. The challenge, of course, is getting students motivated and participating. But it seems to me that I might be able to get the most traction by incorporating some of the ways in which our students interact with games and social media. Using this approach, I could encourage them to invest in developing their persona’s theological convictions and supporting their particular faction by drawing explicitly upon the skills of character development and  alliance building found in games like World of Warcraft as well as the desire to garner comments and “likes” on Facebook status updates.

Admittedly, this is just the beginning. Building on this foundation, I hope to grapple in future posts with which digital tools (e.g., Twitter) and parameters (e.g., various game dynamics) might help realize my goal of role-playing as a way of teaching the history of Christianity. And I’d love to hear your thoughts as well! For instance, what creative and experiential activities were most influential in your own education? Have you tried anything like this in your own classes, and how did it go? Which digital tools have you used or think might work?

*This post has been also cross-posted at hastac.org.

 

From Public Course Blogs to Grand, Aggregated Experiments

SAVE THE DATE!

10/23 FGSDH Meeting, Walsh Library Computer Lab 047
>>”Markup Basics: Build an Online CV in 45 Minutes” A workshop on HTML led by Patrick Burns.
>>Group members who attended THATCampNY will briefly share their experiences.
>>”Brainstorming an Appeal for More DH at Fordham for Graduate Students in 45 Minutes” The group will begin research and collaboration to create a document to be presented to Fordham University requesting that a program for basic digital literacy be implemented for graduate students. The appeal will also outline what such a program would entail.

Here is Will Fenton‘s Prezi from Tuesday’s meeting on digital pedagogy.

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Notes on Paperless Teaching

Patrick Burns
Thanks for all the insightful comments and positive feedback on my talk at Tuesday’s meeting, Eliminating the Handout: Paperless Teaching and the Less-Paper Reality. One things that came through is that we’re in a transitional period and eliminating the handout probably isn’t entirely practical yet. But five years from now—perhaps sooner!—the volume of paper that many of us still deal with on a regular basis will seem extremely old-fashioned. As we embrace this transition, here are a few things worth keeping in mind:

Will having a paperless classroom make your life more difficult?
Paper is a tool and often a very useful one. While I might cringe a bit if an instructor regularly passed out stapled, 30-page, one-sided readings, the occasional handout is not going to hurt anyone. For me, it was a matter of making my teaching style fit better with the rest of my workflow and that meant avoiding paper wherever possible. It also meant that I had many other parts of a rock-solid paperless system already in place. Accordingly, wholesale change might not be practical when you have all of your other teaching responsibilities to take care of. For now, perhaps it would be best to simply become more conscious of your paper needs by asking yourself before heading over to the copier: why do my students need this and why do they need a paper copy?

Are you ready to make your classroom computer friendly?
Based on several conversations I’ve had recently, laptops and tablets are for the most part still an unwelcome guest in class. The main reason given is that they are distracting. It is hard to argue that a student who spends class time on Facebook, or texting, or playing games, or [fill-in-the-blank] is not going to be distracted, or worse, distract other students. That said, I have found that making the laptop or tablet a focal point for in-class work seems to reduce these temptations. (I’m not delusional—I said reduce, not eliminate.) Of course, if the technology makes you uncomfortable, the benefits of a paperless classroom are never going to outweigh the negative impact on your teaching style. Paperless teaching is not a goal in itself, but a strategy for making the best use of your time, energy and resources as a teacher. Make no concessions that do not serve the main goal.

Are your students ready for a computer-friendly classroom?
Of course they are, or so I thought heading into this semester. This one surprised me. I can’t imagine doing seriously work without my laptop and I assumed my students felt the same way. As it turns out, they are in a transitional period too. We are starting to see a handful of students in each class fully committed to taking notes on their laptops and reading articles on their tables, but there many more who instinctively reach for pen and paper. It appears that many of them are open to computer-centric study habits, but for whatever reason—perhaps the no-device policies of other instructors or anxiety about experimenting with a new workflow mid-semester—are slow to adopt them. I have no doubt that this will change and perhaps change quickly. In the meantime, be aware that despite your best efforts at keeping paper to a minimum, you may need to deal with some resistance.

Are you comfortable with online assessment?
With my intro and intermediate language classes, quizzes are the biggest paper burden and finding some other way for regular assessment and feedback is very appealing. I’ll be honest though—I’m not there yet on this one. Still I am willing to experiment. This semester, I’ve begun to administer quizzes through Blackboard. It is too early to report the results of this experiment, but I can say that so far I’ve been happy with two things specifically: 1. quizzes no longer take up valuable class time and 2. I no longer have to manage the non-stop administer-collect-grade-return cycle. I will jettison this experiment in a second if I think that my students are learning less Latin. Again, too early to tell. Look for a future post about what I discover.

I aspire to a paperless lifestyle outside of the classroom. Moreover, I’m at the point where my laptop and my phone are with me at all times. That’s where I do my much of my reading and where I jot down all of my notes. It would feel disingenuous to run my classroom with different priorities. My experiments are going well on the whole and I’m dealing with setbacks in turn. I think it is important for all of us to maintain an open discussion of successes and failures as we adopt the tools and strategies of digital pedagogy. Keep me posted on your own paperless progress in the comments.

—Patrick J. Burns

Digital Pedagogy: What Is It? How Do You Do It?

A Discussion and Workshop led by the Fordham Graduate Student Digital Humanities Group

~ ALL ARE INVITED TO ATTEND ~

September 25
3:00-5:00
Walsh Library Computer Lab 047

Eliminating the Handout: Paperless Teaching and the Less-Paper Reality
Patrick Burns will lead a conversation with the group on best practices and reasonable strategies for eliminating handouts and adopting eBooks in the classroom. He will share his experiences of the ups and downs he’s encountered this semester in his Intermediate Latin class of going paperless and using online material. During discussion, the group will share their own experiences and similar experiments with paperless teaching and computing in the classroom. In addition to instructors using online textbooks, this discussion may be of special interest to language teachers using online dictionaries and grammars, as well as for any teacher using out-of-print and out-of-copyright material mainly available online.

Five Easy Ways to Incorporate Digital Tools into the College Classroom
Elizabeth Cornell offers a hands-on workshop on easy ways to bring digital tools into your classroom. Use of these tools require little preparation on the teachers’ part except general knowledge of them. This approach not only develops students’ versatility with a variety of digital tools, it encourages them to become better communicators and collaborators.

Digital Pedagogy: From Public Course Blogs to Grand, Aggregated Experiments?
Will Fenton discusses aspects of the graduate-level course in digital humanities that he currently is taking at the CUNY-Graduate Center.

For more information about the interdisciplinary FGSDH,
check out our website, http://fordhamgsdh.wordpress.com/, and like us on Facebook.