Draft Essay: McGrail A New Boundary Object DH at 2 Year and 4 Year Colleges

Published in ADE Bulletin Fall 2020 (paywall)

ADE Summer Institute Midwest Presentation June 21, 2019

ADE Presentation Writing CC Students into the Digital Landscape

Slides are Here

ASSIGNMENT SAMPLES LINKED TO “WHOLE GAME” AND EQUITY APPROACHES:

Play the Whole Game: Using Voyant Tools

Make the Game Worth Playing : Critical Language for Understanding New Media Rhetorics

Work on the Hard Parts: Rhetorical Element Inventories

Play Out of Town: Mapping Emotions in America

Play the Hidden Game: Scientific Controversy and “Alternative Facts”

Learn from the Team: Collaborative Annotations

Learn the Game of Learning: Metacognitive Confidence Self-Checks:

Prechecks Postchecks

How do you feel about  the term “learning designer”? Does it make you a little bit queasy? The language of “learning design” makes me a bit uncomfortable, but luckily at our college we have some colleagues who have earned our respect before they got their new titles. I joked with one of our learning designers that I thought it was funny that the email address for these colleagues was “idservices” which seemed anonymous to me (that is, there was no “ID” provided when we asked a question of “ID” services. Get it? Well, neither did they.) I am working hard to cross the learning design divide after years of comprehensive learning environment responsibility (CLER for short–yes, I just made that up). I am an educator who came to higher ed in the era before learning widgets. 

So, how do I inhabit a widget-world of teaching and learning environments? So far, I’ve been trying to embrace it. This past year I have made more than a dozen instructional videos and posted them to You Tube. I used to use Jing and Flash, but now that I see that these don’t support Universal Design, I’m happy to move to a close-caption-friendly platform. Yes, it’s many, many hours of work, but I’m slowly letting go of some of my control of the LMS. No longer seeing CLER-ly. 

Lane has taken a positive step in hiring a Learning Designer as a faculty member. We have had a smart and talented staff member in this role for years, but being staff rather than faculty limited him. 

I worked with Kevin this spring to plan for streamlining and clarifying the interface for my online course. I had mapped all of my assignments to course outcomes, but previously I’d only done this assignment by assignment. Kevin advised a single snapshot and so I created Curriculum Map ENG 217 Course Outcomes with Activities. 

Using Voyant to “not read” Dracula

The first time I introduced students to distant reading methods, I provided them with Franco Moretti’s “Conjectures on World Literature” and “Slaughterhouse of Literature,” two key essays that explain his purpose.  For the most curious students with some English courses behind them, these essays are a revelation. But for many students I found that the essays were too dense. So this year, I have provided a 15-minute online lecture that summarizes and paraphrases Moretti’s purpose in these two essays.

This video lecture provides the context for students’ work this week: Working with Voyant tools to learn how to (in Paul Fyfe’s phrasing) “Not Read a Victorian Novel.”

After #METOO. Lauren Klein’s blog entry became part of our course this year. This was one of those times when teaching online and in a community college course is highly challenging, because there was so much complex background to discuss. But I linked to Klein’s blog for those who could make sense of the conversation, and in some ways Klein’s piece became a bookmark for next year’s curriculum update.

Step by step instructions for this week’s work with Voyant tools are here and here. 

It’s already Week 4 of my second time offering a DH@CC course: “Reading, Writing, and Digital Culture.” It took 2 years to get the name changed in the catalog from “Introduction to Digital Humanities,” which no one on my campus understood!

The very first things students do in my class is to create a course-dedicated blog (or at least a course-dedicated page on an extant blog) and to introduce themselves on it, and so I did the same thing here. I walk everyone through the weeks as I see them unfolding, hoping I can stick somewhat to the plan. Although I couldn’t fit it in last year, I am working really hard to put together a modified/right-sized instructional demo for students to create a digital edition using smart phones and cheap apps. This idea and some of the scaffolding is totally indebted to Shawna Ross at Texas A&M, who provided a comprehensive introduction to this work in a webinar on programming for humanists. Her book with Claire Battershill, Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom, is out this year from Bloomsbury Academic.

If I do manage to teach my online students how to create a digital edition–of a menu, or a letter, of a book chapter–then it will be as part of their larger Omeka archive project, which makes up the heart of the second half of the term. Last year’s students struggled for the first couple weeks trying to figure it all out, but the feedback I got by the end of the term was that it was incredibly meaningful for students to be able to curate their own digital collection.

Next week, I’m working with Annemarie Hamlin at Central Oregon CC in a collaborative assignment with her students. Both classes will share their work in a Google doc and use the comments feature to talk to one another about their discoveries. Tune in in a couple weeks and I’ll let you know how it goes!

Survey results from a follow-up to the 2013 National Survey of Digital Humanities in Community Colleges are in.

This week’s featured question: Which of the following do you use regularly in your humanities courses? (“Regularly”= at least once a week in all your classes)

You can view them here.

In Week 7, I realized that less was more at this point and gave my students a second week to develop their Omeka sites. I often feel that I’m not doing my job if I don’t create new assignments and activities each week, but I have learned slowly that students miss the satisfaction of really developing something that they’ve learned. With Omeka especially this was true, and so I took my foot off of the activity pedal so students could build their archives to their satisfaction.

Now, in Week 8, students are headed in yet another new direction: taking “synthetic selfies.” I got this idea originally from Jena Osman, whose book and presentation, Public Figures, explore the non-human gaze of public monuments. 

Rosa Parks Statue, Eugene. Source: Wikipedia

Since the weather is finally nice, I’m asking my students to watch Osman’s chapters and then go outside and find a public monument and explore the gaze and view of non-human subjects with a selfie-stick. Cyborgs, enhanced humans, and “beat box” singing all reveal an increasingly sophisticated popular familiarity with human/non-human relationships. Focusing on a pre-digital form, the statue, provides a literal brick-and-mortar experience of the non-human. I’m hoping that Osman’s anticipation of selfies and “photo bombs” through immobile statues will give students a defamiliarizing vantage point from which to examine their own experience of the non-human.

I got the idea for this assignment from Kaia Sand’s assignment here. 

Here are my assignment instructions, based on Sand’s: 
Take a Synthetic Selfie