Using DH in the Classroom (10-11 AM in Room 134)

• Podcast assignment in Norah's classroom and experiment. Interesting, but how to grade? Got students thinking differently. Graded lineally. Peer evaluation made a student work harder. Grateful for feedback from students.
• Chris is thinking about assigning wikis in the class. Create a class wiki and add articles. Students contribute to articles collaboratively throughout the semester for Intro to Civ class. Easy to check in and see who is making the edits. Or use Google Docs?
• There is a textbook being created like this--Boundless Learning. Found it a really interesting way to learn. Even if just copying/pasting, it's interesting to see what people edit.
• How is this different than Blackboard?
• Is it possible that one student would take over? How do you regulate student use of the forum? Or what about students that don't contribute much?
• Assign different prompts to each students.
• Wants students to edit each other's work.
• Assign a few common readings but then each student gets an individual reading as well.
• Chad: Public or private blog? Consider FERPA implications. Use a pseudonym to give a level of protection. Opens up discussion of digital citizenship and what you put up on the internet can come back to haunt you. Respect in a digital forum.
• It gives students experience actually using WordPress.
• No framework for grading this type of project. Continue or depart from classroom mentality? Vectors Magazine discusses this issue more broadly. Can be helpful.
• Resources that Ada uses are through the JHU library. Other universities probably also offer these.

• Elizabeth Rodini's Intro to Museums course uses mapping tool. An alternative to writing a paper. Students analyze objects in a specific museum. How you interact with a project is up to you since you can move through the museum. It is challenging to grade.
• She has also used Omeka, both an archiving database and an exhibit-making tool. Class looked at how modernity was displayed at World's Fairs. Applied for a grant to make a class exhibit. Got to teach students how to use cataloging tools, fair and free use, how to use Special Collections. Getting students to think critically about what to put on a website. How to collaborate across campus. Easier to grade because it was more linear. Students found it difficult. Hard to tell students how much work they should be putting into it--hard to make expectations clear from the beginning. Emphasizing having a bibliography of images, including Special Collections. Students shouldn't wait until the last minute. This should have an original argument, not just a collection of pretty pictures. One of the obstacles was that these were mostly engineering students--how to get them to think creatively. Involved workshops with librarians.
• Could put up videos, images, etc. on Omeka. All of the datasets are in there, so you can use the search function across projects. Used Library of Congress subject headings to make efficient use of the data. Different from blog posts.

• Nice to see how students access two types of technology: Special Collections documents as well as online technology.
• The students could prepare a two-page paper or proposal to outline their argument before putting it on a website.
• Even for classes not related to museums or public or digital humanities, it's a good way to build skills. Class listing didn't emphasize that it would have a digital focus. Gave a specific rubric with number of words per page. Didn't emphasize stages enough--will include in the future. Students will submit an original version, then present to class, then have two weeks to revise before grading. Examples on Blackboard and in class.
• Older faculty assume that all students know how to use all technology. "Digital Natives" may know how to use online tools, but not how to produce content. All these platforms have an underlying ontology. How content connects to other content on a site is a mystery. A wiki is collaborative by its nature. Blogs are different. Commenting is not the same thing as producing the actual content. Omeka is metadata-heavy, out of the museum world. Those three things are really, really different approaches.
• Chad's "best" digital project was a choose your own adventure game about the conquest to think about contigency in history (chadblack.net/moctezuma.html). How individual moments influence future possibilities. Think about the technical hurdle of how do you actually interact with the platform, and how that platform interacts with what it is we're trying to teach in a larger conception of knowledge. Students didn't know about text-based games of the '70s and '80s. They authored the story as a group. There are no citations on the site, but they provided them separately.
• How do other faculty feel about this? Be known as the person in the department who can answer computer questions. Do they think you are just playing games? Put specific pedagogical justifications outside of history.
• Ada emphasizes skill building for the students.
• Chad: it doesn't always go well. Sometimes comes across as gimmicky to students if not explained well. Trying to do a wiki project in a Latin American history through film class. Assignment for groups to build a site about the film on a group wiki. It was a complete failure. Students had a hard time to figure out how to use it and weren't willing to come to sessions on how to use it. Their expectations for a semester worth of work didn't match his. Didn't communicate about significance of the project.
• Norah tried a strategy for group work--early on, gave a 1-4 evaluation of how comfortable they felt using technology. Tried to assign one technology leader per group.
• Students could kick each other out of groups, then that student would have to do their own project graded on same level. If they had problems with each other, he asked them to CC him on communication. Paper trail of non-participation.
• Surprised that people are not receptive to digital pedagogy. Why are people against teaching students in a variety of ways? Not a DH expert, but students seem to like to learn in different ways. Thought that was obvious.
• There is a specific guideline that every student is supposed to write 30 pages in a semester, so there is that kind of concern.
• That's not that hard to get around. Have word requirements for blog posts. Move from page count to word count.
• Students weren't sure how their projects were going to be evaluated. Hard to answer when it was an experiment. It's not the same as a paper. Some push against it is comparing it to more traditional methods.
• Grading papers is not objective either.
• Has anyone gotten pushback about being graded about technological skills? How to get around that?
• Require them to go to a workshop in the library.
• Some students have bad grammar, but they are graded on that.
• Most people don't associate history courses with technology.
• A lot of faculty assume it's gimmicky. It is a goal, not a means to an end. Hybrid Pedagogy is a pretty good website for people in academia making arguments for this. Not just an aesthetic.
• There is some justifiable skepticism by a lot of faculty in the current environment of higher ed that online technology is being used as a club by some administration to find efficiencies. Anything that connects to that is a threat. For historians, the idea of the flipped classroom (watch lectures at home, discuss in class). Where is the reading? Guilt by association.
• It would be interesting to evaluate a digital student project here. Sometimes they look great but don't make a good argument.
• Emily Thompson's history of sound website The Roaring Twenties: three interfaces (space, time, sound). Cataloging sound complaints. Video and audio from newsreels in film archives. Map built on Google Maps.
• "Catherine's Russia" Omeka student site from Harvard a good example. Not sure why it's public. Each student created an exhibit with images. Text is taken from essays that students had written. Norah wants her students to think about presenting this information to general public or friends/family, not only an academic audience--so no footnotes. Easy to understand how the students made the site, and therefore how to evaluate. Points for tagging items and metadata. Students can design it however they want as long as they adhere to Omeka standards.
• How do you make sure the students don't plagiarize? Is there a way to get around that?
• If written work was really sophisticated in an intro-level course, it might be worth looking into. Just Google phrases. No easy or good way to deal with that. If language sounded strange, they'd start looking.
• Perhaps the public audience would discourage plagiarism. If it was just for a professor, it might not be caught.
• Do you just evaluate the content, or include aesthetics in the grade too? Ease of access? How do you turn that to concrete goals for the students? Not sure.
• Omeka lends itself to easier grading because you can indicate which fields of metadata to complete. Norah has two parts to project: argument and mechanical functions of Omeka. A small number of points for the look. Grading more for content. Omeka seemed easier than WordPress.
• Any instruction about hypertext versus regular text? Had someone from Museums in Society come to talk to class.
• Ada says that when you have a good paper, you know it and grade based on that standard. Same with exhibits. Would like to develop more concrete standards, but that's how it happened the first time around. It was uncomfortable to grade.
• George Mason had a course in historical hoaxes. Students came up with a few different fake historical events and people. They created pages for these fake things on Wikipedia. The whole exercise was how to think about history in the process of pulling off a giant hoax on the web. Caused a national controversy. They pulled it off for about six months. Digital projects are the place to think about the most adventuresome and outrageous assignments that get at good historical thinking.

Race in DH (11-12 AM in 132) -- Kim Gallon

• Introductions