Posts in category "Technology"

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Mid-Semester Round-up

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Though it may or may not technically be mid-semester where you are, here in the Valley we've just sailed through Fall Break, have had mid-semester reports requested, stared down a few stacks of papers, and the leaves are still pondering a color change. We thought it might be try a new format, a few recent posts on technology, pedagogy, and the classroom from around the interwebs. If you have another favorite post or site from the past month or so, please do pass it along.

Mark Sample on reading Frankenstein aloud. A practical guide and reflection on how reading prose aloud might help enhance classroom discussion and analysis.

Barry Mills in Inside Higher Ed on "The Challenge of Technology." His comments are very apropos of Roger Whitsun's recent post here on teaching in a library and the information deluge we face as teachers and as students.

As many of you probably saw, Diane Hoeveler's NASSR-l request for suggestions on a Romanticism and Religion graduate course initiated a bevy of responses, and she kindly compiled the suggestions in a Word doc, which I've re-posted here as well.

Bridge Draxler talks about Using Twitter to help with thesis statements over at HASTAC.

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Scribd, the Collaborative Classroom, and the Paperless Blake Class

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Like Kate Singer, I too have been thinking about the rise of the Digital Humanities at MLA 2011. I agree, largely, that making should be a hallmark of identifying as a digital humanist but - like Kate - I wonder if making is limited to coding. Building or making may refer to the construction of scholarly and student communities.  Matt Kirschenbaum in "What is Digital Humanities and What's it Doing in English Departments?" makes the following claim:

Whatever else it might be then, the digital humanities today is about a scholarship (and a pedagogy) that is publicly visible in ways to which we are generally unaccustomed, a scholarship and pedagogy that are bound up with infrastructure in ways that are deeper and more explicit than we are generally accustomed to, a scholarship and pedagogy that are collaborative and depend upon networks of people and that live an active 24/7 life online. Isn't that something you want in your English Department?

One way I try to engage in the collaborative infrastructure that Kirschenbaum imagines here is by publishing my syllabi on Scribd. Scribd is a website that allows you to upload, share, and embed .pdf files. Here is a copy of my syllabus:
[scribd id=46615462 key=key-1ila71b42dcxy3sh8q5p]

Scribd reformats your documents to allow them to be read on smartphones and tablets like the iPad, and any document type may be uploaded (.doc, .docx, .pdf, .ppx (for PowerPoint), xml, OpenOffice). Readers can, furthermore, share whatever documents they find on Scribd by "readcasting" them. Readcasting generates Facebook updates and Tweets with links to the document being read. Readcasting can, for example, be a useful way to have students engage in peer review and collaborative research.

Of course, copyright does become a problem with Scribd. Users have in the past violated copyright by placing protected documents on the server. However, I do feel that Scribd opens up some really interesting possibilities - especially for classrooms that wish to do away with paper.

I say this in response to a recent post on the NASSR listserv by Adam Komisaruk:

I'm slated to teach a graduate "readings" course in Blake this summer, and book orders are due soon.  As I contemplate and reject several alternatives (the Dover facsimiles are too sporadic, the Princeton facsimiles are too expensive, the Erdman/Bloom lacks illustrations, etc.), I'm wondering about the viability of "going paperless."  I've already requested a fully wired classroom--i.e., with individual iMac terminals, overhead projection, and a high-speed Internet connection--so, assuming my students have similar equipment at home, I could conceivably use the Blake Archive and eE as my texts.

The majority of respondents mentioned using the Johnson/Grant Norton edition in conjunction with The Blake Archive. While I largely agree that this is a great way to go (I'm currently using the Johnson/Grant edition in my Blake class), I feel that the current generation of students is too savvy with the internet and social media to passively accept the edition we order in the bookstore. For example, I ordered the Johnson/Grant edition, but I know that many of my students use the free Erdman edition of Blake on the Blake Digital Text Project, supplementing it with the Archive and tagging websites and .pdfs using Diigo or A.nnotate. I initially resisted this development in my class but inspired by Komisaruk's comment, an article by Leeann Hunter, and a revealing expose on the textbook industry by Anya Kamentz, I've decided to encourage the digital revolution percolating in my students.

Instead of assigning individual papers, I maintain a Wordpress site called William Blake and Media as a hub for my collaborative classroom. On the site, you can find my Scribd syllabus, a description of the first and second projects, a group blog maintained by my students, and a Twitter feed. I use these, in conjunction with papers distributed by Scribd, as a way to reduce (if not currently eliminate) paper in my Blake class. Check out the site and give me some suggestions.

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Teaching Playfulness in Romanticism

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These posts on Teaching Romanticism have been intriguing and thoughtful. Thank you for putting this together!

I always find that Romanticism and textual studies are good segue into Digital Humanities for teaching and research.  I began teaching at San Jose State University 5 years ago and opened with a very traditional Romantic-era survey of Romanticism.  We followed the timeline, began with Blake and ended with Mary Shelley. We ranged over the slavery issue and working class poets, though there were very few of those poets being printed.  The Mellor & Matlak anthology was my guide because it offered thematic arrangement of materials while still including the women poets who, I felt, were integral to the understanding of collaborative creative moments among our canonical Big 6.  But, the course wasn't satisfying. The only assignment where students actually engaged with the material at some depth was the recitation, and even then they were fearful instead of fearless and playful.  Considering who I have become as a researcher and how involved I am in Digital Humanities work, I wanted to bring a sense of passion and engagement to my teaching.  Textual studies and Digital Humanities seems to do that for me, allowing me time to play with the material, see patterns, extrapolate theses that haven't been otherwise contemplated in the field.  In constructing this type of course, I had to first determine what would be considered playful by my students.

In Digital Humanities circles, we often talk about collaboration between disciplines, among scholars, and with technologists. While progress in the field is nurtured certainly by this type of research, what of our students? How are we shepherding Digital Humanities to those undergraduates who could most benefit from exposure to collaborative tools or humanities computing strategies? Happily, HASTAC has been addressing pedagogy, most specifically with Cathy Davidson's post "Research is Teaching" and the wildly successful forum "Teaching with Technology and Curiosity."

Collaboration, shared knowledge, open access, extra-disciplinarity. These are the major tenets of Digital Humanities. However, what is missing in this list is something required of all digital projects: play. Roger Caillois qualifies this type of unstructured activity as “an occasion of pure waste: waste of time, energy, ingenuity, skill” (Man, Play and Games 2001; 6). This lack of structure, leads to exploration, discovery, and production of knowledge in ways that were only imagined twenty years ago. Typically though we don't allow our students this sense of play in their traditional studies. Especially in literary studies, we supply students with the end-product but don't expose them to the theories and the methodologies always.  We separate those kinds of issues into other courses (e.g., Introduction to Literary Criticism or Introduction to Research Methods). When faculty bring a particular perspective, for example textual studies or feminist theory, to a classroom setting, the methods for exploring and discovering aren't exposed to students. Instead, we're offering them the one big major tool, close reading, for their arsenal.  Students then live with some anxiety that there's one way to read a text and, more often, ask "how does the professor want me to read this?"  It becomes a guessing “game” instead of an exploration and discovery of the literature. In the final essay, we expect students to offer a discovery, a research paper, or an analysis.  But, if we haven't exposed them to the methodology and the theory, how can they adequately achieve a true exploration of the literature? In this way, the course becomes a game with an outcome, consequences, and rigid rules. Using Digital Humanities strategies, I want to instill a sense, even if it's artificial, that literary studies are a “free and voluntary activity, a source of joy and amusement” as Caillois defines “play” (6).

To this end, I combined textual editing with technology in my Romantic Literature Survey course. We had the use of a spectacular room, filled with hardware and software everywhere:

TechnoRomanticism: We created our own digital edition of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Along the way, we created a collaborative timeline using MIT's SIMILE & Timeline script. We didn't even begin to create a website until some of the preliminary assignments are done -- assignments that look at the construction of this novel, both linguistically and bibliographically. Every 2 weeks, we held a workshop on some digital assignment and acquired 1 new skill, not even necessarily a new tool, but a skill. We practiced radial and ergodic reading by taking on only 2 chapters of Frankenstein each week.  However, we read other literature into the novel.  For instance, at one point "... Tintern Abbey" is quoted in the novel, but if students haven't had a chance to read or study this particular poem, they would have a difficult time understanding its interruption of the narrative.  So, we studied the poem as we were studying that very chapter. By not overloading undergraduate students with readings, we were really able to spend an entire class meeting on both the poem and the novel's page.

That strategy gave way to self-interruptions in constructing their digital editions -- what did it mean to provide a hyperlink in the middle of a paragraph? How does it interrupt the musings on Nature, the soul and science?  All of it, all of it went back to Romanticism's major ideas.

Is anyone else performing these kinds of interruptions and collaborations in their own courses?

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