Strelka Videos

"Smarthistory.org is a free, not-for-profit, multi-media web-book designed as a dynamic enhancement (or even substitute) for the traditional art history textbook. Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker began smARThistory in 2005 by creating a blog featuring free audio guides in the form of podcasts for use in The Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Soon after, we embedded the audio files in our online survey courses. The response from our students was so positive that we decided to create a multi-media survey of art history web-book. We created audios and videos about works of art found in standard art history survey texts, organized the files stylistically and chronologically, and added text and still images.

We are interested in delivering the narratives of art history using the read-write web's interactivity and capacity for authoring and remixing. Publishers are adding multimedia to their textbooks, but unfortunately they are doing so in proprietary, password-protected adjunct websites. These are weak because they maintain an old model of closed and protected content, eliminating Web 2.0 possibilities for the open collaboration and open communities that our students now use and expect."

Thinking about one’s thinking is not easy. Considering that many of the majors in the social sciences and humanities might be viewed by some as less direct-to-workforce majors, compared to fields such as engineering or business, isn’t it imperative that instructors in the social sciences and humanities work with students to identify and discuss the critical thinking skills they are (one hopes) acquiring? And to discuss how these vital skills might transfer to jobs or other opportunities?

Maybe some instructors assume that students recognize these skills already, as one presumes the faculty member is able to do for herself. And many students probably do recognize their critical thinking skills. But for the students who have trouble realizing these skills (or who statistically have not developed them), the cover letter, resume, or job interview might be the first time they have to acknowledge and apply these skills.

The opportunity that Mr. Powers had in Germany to merge artistic practice with doctoral-level scholarship is something that increasing numbers of artists in academe want to see duplicated in the United States, where the master of fine arts has long reigned as the discipline's terminal degree.

Many leaders of schools of art and design and of arts programs at universities describe the spread of visual-arts doctorates—whether practice-based, scholarly, or some combination—as being "inevitable" in the United States. The doctorate, they say, will very likely displace the M.F.A. They cite as evidence a growing body of scholarship on the subject, developments abroad, and recent sessions exploring the visual-arts doctorate at scholarly associations and at colleges.

Meanwhile, critics of arts doctorates raise economic, philosophical, and ethical concerns about the degree. Many of the concerns are similar to those raised in other academic fields: Is it acceptable to enroll students in graduate programs with uncertain futures and employment prospects? What is the real value of a doctorate? What is the nature of advanced study in a practical discipline? And how wise is it for American universities to duplicate the programs of foreign universities, which operate under different economic models?...

About 40 doctoral programs in studio art are available abroad, most of them in Britain, Europe, and New Zealand, says George E. Smith, president of the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts. In 2007 the institute, in , in Portland, Me., admitted its first cohort of visual artists seeking Ph.D.'s in philosophy and art theory, and they are finishing their dissertations. A handful of programs in the United States offer studio-based, practical doctorates, more scholarly focused Ph.D.'s, or some combination....

The intensity of the debate and the level of scholarly attention to the arts doctorate have continued to rise: 2011 marked the first year that it became impossible for one person to read all the scholarship on visual-arts doctorates, says Mr. Elkins, of Chicago.

In recent months, the College Art Association, the chief disciplinary society dedicated to the scholarship and teaching of the visual arts and art history, hosted a two-part workshop, "Ph.D. for Artists: Sense or Nonsense?" The School of Visual Arts, in New York City, sponsored a panel discussion last year that was titled, "The Reluctant Doctorate: Ph.D. Programs for Artists?"

Making the M.F.A. Useless?...

Leaving the production of knowledge and the interpretation of works to historians of the discipline, as has traditionally been the case in the visual arts, is no longer satisfactory, says Joel E. Towers, executive dean of Parsons the New School for Design. A committee there is exploring starting doctoral programs in the visual arts and design.

"It would be kind of a crime if we were to get caught in a traditional mode of production of a Ph.D. and say, 'The only way it'll work is if you give me 500 pages,'" he says.... Elevating the profile of the visual arts in academe may have other benefits, says Lisa H. Grocott, dean of academic initiatives at Parsons. Artistic and design processes and thinking may exert some influence over more empirical disciplines, such as the natural sciences.

Research does not always need to be methodical and purposeful, Ms. Grocott says. Artists and, particularly, designers use a different method, in which truth and empirical knowledge are not the ultimate goal; instead, the aim of design is to find the solution that offers the most appropriate remedy to a problem. "It'll change the way we might think about research and the way research presents itself," she says.

"On April 12, Triple Canopy organized All A Are Not B a conversation about diagrams with David Joselit, Susanne Leeb, Prudence Peiffer, and Amy Sillman. This is a recording of that event, held on the occasion of the publication of Materialität der Diagramme: Kunst und Theorie (On the Materiality of Diagrams: Art and Theory), published by PoLYpeN (Berlin) and edited by Susanne Leeb, with contributions by Ricardo Basbaum, Benjamin Buchloh, Bureau d’études, Bracha L. Ettinger with Birgit M. Kaiser & Kathrin Thiele, and Astrit Schmidt-Burkhardt, as well as Joselit, Peiffer, and Sillman.

Participants discussed how the diagram can break down conventional systems of signification and provide us with different ways of thinking about and acting in the world, and of making art. They may consider the role of transitiveness in contemporary painting; the humorous, mimetic diagrams of Ad Reinhardt; how chance operates in the work of Marcel Duchamp; how the circulation and disposition of images affects the way we relate to them; and how diagrams can draw a line between the body and the machine."

Ad Reinhardt: Diagram as delineation (rather than expression), as movement (process/praxis rather than meaning -- diagram as efficiency of movement), as didactic (e.g., "how to look at art")

Although no one app or service swept the show this year, some of the buzzworthy tools, ideas, and trends at South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive were

*Big data and data visualization: Visual.ly, Splunk, Show
*Intimate social networking: Highlight, GroupMe, Wendr, GonnaBe, Banjo, Sonar
*Hacktivism: Code for America, hackathons, self-hacking
*Curation: Brain Pickings, Percolate, FeedMagnet
*Retro technology: analog tele-phonographer, Please Shoot Yourself, Motorblade
*3D printing: MakerBot, RepRat
*Journalism and publishing: Storify (read previous ProfHacker posts), The Atavist, Rhizome, Wowio

Generations of school kids learned penmanship from blackboards and workbooks. Whether future generations will learn to write their A-B-C's by hand at all is very much in doubt. Tracy Smith reports.

There’s something bothering me about the interesting project pulled together by Jeff Young at The Chronicle, intended to demonstrate that today’s college students are bored with yesterday’s lecturing tactics. In January, Jeff asked students to video their thoughts on the traditional lecture experience... We don’t set out to bore, or to drone, and we’re not indifferent to the passing of time... But the real issue is that we’re not television performers: there’s no autocue, no rehearsal, no script, and no production crew making sure that we have nothing to do except face front and read aloud. None of us had a hand in choosing either the timeslot, the traditional running time, the technology mix, or the shape of the room for the standard university lecture, and while most of us do what we can to hack this infrastructure, the big invisible to our students (and, apparently, to The Chronicle) is the way in which traditional lectures plug in to the conventional measures of academic labour. That is, we keep on lecturing because—as a colleague reminded me this week—when we don’t, we’re often assumed by either administrators or students to be reneging on the deal that trades student college costs for academic face-time. The delivery of most courses assumes that the lecture represents an ideal mode, mixing prestige delivery with financial efficiency, and to that end some universities are even increasing the time spent in lectures rather than seminars or tutorials, because the one-to-many model is an obvious way to handle increased enrollments without a matching increase in delivery cost.

I feel that perhaps The Chronicle should be doing more than simply stirring up antagonism to the traditional lecture format. We know this stuff. What we know less about is how to move from where we are.

What would help is an invitation for students to contribute ideas on the basis of what they like, not simply what irritates them. What kinds of participatory models that are manageable for large classes, using available infrastructure, would work best? How can we provide appropriate levels of professional development, peer support and time to academics so that they can learn new technologies without doing yet more work in the evenings and on weekends? How best can we build a partnership that encourages creativity and risk in teaching, when we are already over-surveying everything teachers do, and in many cases using the results punitively?

And how can we encourage administrators to join the conversation about the future of the college lecture so that the evangelistic fervour of flipped-class advocates is continually tempered with the practicalities of cost, load and labour management in a highly casualised profession?

...A musician who’s been interviewed on Charlie Rose, where she compared her working methods to those of a librarian. ...demonstrating how different musical scales intersect like numbers on multiplication tables; describing digital sound-editing as a kind of sonic needlework...

Andrew P. Martin loves it when his lectures break out in chaos. It happens frequently, when he asks the 80 students in his evolutionary-biology class at the University of Colorado at Boulder to work in small groups to solve a problem, or when he asks them to persuade one another that the answer they arrived at before class is correct. When they start working together, his students rarely stay in their seats, which are bolted to the floor. Instead they gather in the hallway or in the aisles, or spill toward the front of the room, where the professor typically stands....

Such moments of chaos are embraced by advocates of a teaching technique called "flipping." As its name suggests, flipping describes the inversion of expectations in the traditional college lecture. It takes many forms, including interactive engagement, just-in-time teaching (in which students respond to Web-based questions before class, and the professor uses this feedback to inform his or her teaching), and peer instruction. But the techniques all share the same underlying imperative: Students cannot passively receive material in class, which is one reason some students dislike flipping. Instead they gather the information largely outside of class, by reading, watching recorded lectures, or listening to podcasts. And when they are in class, students do what is typically thought to be homework, solving problems with their professors or peers, and applying what they learn to new contexts. They continue this process on their own outside class. The immediacy of teaching in this way enables students' misconceptions to be corrected well before they emerge on a midterm or final exam. The result, according to a growing body of research, is more learning...

The recent interest is driven by the convergence of several trends. The first is technological innovation, which has made it easier to distribute lectures by the world's leading instructors. Some faculty members wonder whether it still makes sense to deliver a lecture when students can see the same material covered more authoritatively and engagingly—and at their own pace and on their own schedule.... At the same time, policy makers, scholars, advocacy groups, and others who seek to improve higher education want to see more evidence that students are truly learning in college... Adding to these forces is economic reality. Strained budgets make it difficult for colleges to decrease class sizes and create more seminars in which low student-to-professor ratios allow a high degree of personal attention. Even advocates for new approaches to teaching concede that the lecture is not going away...

As both Mr. Mazur's and Mr. Martin's classes indicate, the cognitive strain that flipping imposes on students accounts for much of its success—and the resistance it engenders. Ultimately that strain is what is most important, not whether the course is flipped, says Carl E. Wieman, associate director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.... "It's a whole different paradigm of teaching," says Mr. Wieman, likening the professor's role to that of a cognitive coach. "A good coach figures out what makes a great athlete and what practice helps you achieve that. They motivate the learner to put out intense effort, and they provide expert feedback that's very timely."

The technology of reading response  has changed in each of my three rounds of postsecondary education, as each round has been separated by at least a couple of years. In undergrad (1998-2002), I often did response papers for readings; blogs had barely been invented, and had not taken off yet. Although they had taken off by the time of my M.A. program (2004-2006), I suppose they weren’t used in the classroom much, at least at GWU; I still did the traditional response papers to readings in my history classes.

But then in my Ph.D. program (2011-[good question]), I’ve used blogs instead of the traditional response paper for my classes. This has been much more effective...

A blog, by contrast, forces us to write for more than just the professor–indeed, more than just our classmates. Anyone could come across the blog, even if you don’t take my self-promotional step of posting links on Facebook and Twitter. The exercise in conveying the substance of the week’s readings or activities to an outsider helps me crystallize said readings or activities in my own mind. Thus, I’ve gotten a lot more out of the exercise than I did in writing for the professor.

Because blogging is meant to be personal, I’ve found it easier to write in a reflective style, to record my reactions to the readings... Perhaps most importantly, blogging every week for class meant that I started to build a record of my own writing in a public forum.

How did you decide that mapping was going to be a topic you wanted to address in the courses you offer?
Mapping’s increasing prevalence in our lives is not exclusively because of technological advances such as GIS or handheld devices. Geography and related work in the social sciences speak to me in meaningful ways. I was really drawn to the writing of Graham Burnett, Denis Cosgrove, Mark Monmonier and others.... Simply showing students the decisions that mappers made demonstrates how much information we accept uncritically, and how much images participate in forming our understanding of the world. How do we make sense of information and for what purposes? How do we promote or suppress ideas through representation?.... n the design world, we are so used to image production: plans, sections, elevations, aerial photographs. And yet we assume the neutrality of maps. I want students to understand what biases go into the production of an image, what is privileged, limited or excluded.... These days, it’s become sexy to talk about landscape. What I find positive about that change is the fact that architecture has opened itself up to larger and larger scales. I think the emphasis on landscape and transportation and systems is, again, a very positive development in architectural education... So is it important or irrelevant to you to draw a distinction between a map and a diagram? Is the visual language of architecture – plans, sections, axonometrics – something different than the kind of mapping you are talking about? I think that diagrams – which powerfully distill information – reside within our maps. Maps, for me, are a more inclusive category, a larger field of information. And I think maps make evident their own subjectivity.

“The X just means we don’t know what’s going to happen,” he adds. This is the spirit of experimentation behind Studio-X, an ambitious global educational initiative currently underway at GSAPP. Equal parts learning space, public forum, and international think tank, Studio-X “affords an enormous bandwidth for thinking about the future of cities,” Wigley says—a mandate that he cites as the core mission of the program, and the reason he first proposed it four years ago... With sister offices now open in Mumbai, Amman, Beijing, and Rio de Janeiro, and more in the offing in South Africa and Japan, Studio-X New York is one spoke in a wheel of architectural activity that is at once international and intensely localized. The overseas branches aren’t intended to be subordinate to either Columbia or the Manhattan pilot office—“not like Starbucks selling some sort of wisdom from New York,” as Wigley puts it. They’re idea incubators in their own right, feeding new knowledge about how cities live and change into a greater community of thought... “It’s about expanding the notion of the university beyond the institution itself,” explains Jeffrey Johnson, the director of the New York–based China Megacities Lab, who has led groups of students on semiannual visits to Studio-X Beijing since it opened in 2009... Situated, like the New York studio, in the very heart of their respective downtowns, each Studio-X satellite operates as a discrete unit, with local directors setting a specific agenda. Yet all of the outposts, following the program’s mission, look to reinvigorate the urban conversation in their particular cities by engaging not just designers but culturally omnivrous thinkers from diverse backgrounds... Gavin Browning, who preceded Twilley and Manaugh at Studio-X New York, admits that the two halves of the Studio-X population are often “operating in separate spheres.”... The space’s social character is part of its appeal. “The potential for the contact there to be informal allows for discussions to take place that don’t take place in a more official setting,” says Jeffrey Inaba, the head of C-Lab, another fixture of Studio-X New York... And then there is the question of how the overseas locales are meant to work in concert with one another, as well as with the university. When they’re not being visited by one of the American student groups (which is to say, the majority of the year), the far-flung outposts operate entirely independently of Columbia. Although that gives them considerable leeway to chart their own course, it reduces the overall coherence of the program. “We all have access to each others’ planning calendars,” says Twilley, referring to her fellow Studio-X directors, “and I check what they’re up to.
But we haven’t translated that information into a coordinated series.”... Some of Studio-X’s satellites are located in places where certain political issues, the kind of things that might be spoken about freely on the campus of Columbia University, simply cannot be addressed. Wigley, who also sees the program as a vehicle for bringing corporate figures into architectural conversations, believes there’s room for healthy debate, but he tends to downplay the potential for outright conflict.

DHers have not created an effective critical discourse around their work.... To achieve more effective criticism, we need more rubrics for evaluating DH work.... DH work requires a different kind of peer review to produce effective criticism.

Criticism selects and propagates projects that deserve merit and to serve as models. To continue with the previous example, we need criticism that praises technological achievement of visualizing, while condemning poor design practices; we need criticism that lauds the interpretive potential while critiquing the extent to which anyone can use the methodology. Again, the point of such criticism isn’t to ridicule or minimize difficult work, but to advance the field. (1) Transparency: "Can we really understand what’s going on? If not, it’s not good scholarship." (2) Reusability: "Can people take away what you’ve done and apply it to existing or future projects? " (3) Data: "Needless to say, most if not all DH projects rely on data. It must be available! Not just for retesting, but for use in other places. Exactly how data should look is far from obvious. If nothing else, discussing a project’s use of data will encourages conversations about ownership, copyright, the limits of what can be shared, and so on." (4) Design: "...organizing principles. Why is a particular design strategy the best one or not? DH projects might be more explicit about such choices, but certainly our critique of such work must address these issues as well. Design is not only graphic in nature: it must also apply to the decisions behind database design, encoding, markup, code, etc."

As a way of fostering useful criticism, peer review needs be more collaborative than before. (1) More people to review individual projects. How many people can really critique various facets of a digital humanities project, when they range from graphic design, interface design, code, encoding standards, etc. (2)Collaborate to organize these reviews. Given the nature of complex publishing models of DH projects, why not move away from editor-mediated peer review, which minimizes the public effect of the critique? What is the code like? What is the data like? What conversations is it trying to join? What work does it enable at either methodological or interpretive levels?

We can benefit, i think, from considering an adaptation of a well-known diagram of criticism from M. H. Abrams. With DH work at the center, four proximal spheres of criticism might guide our approach. The formalist critique examines the form of the work, examining how well its structure, form, and design serve its purpose in the context of similar works; didactic criticism focuses on the ability for the work to reach, inform, and educate an audience; mimetic criticism might evaluate how well the DH work is truly humanist work or facilitates it (this replaces “universe” in the original diagram); expressive critique discuss how the work reflects the unique characteristics and style of the creator(s).

We just concluded class #2 of the Library Test Kitchen, our experimental seminar in the Graduate School of Design. The course is a collaboration between Jeffrey Schnapp (Professor of Romance Languages & Literature, Director of metaLab) Ann Whiteside (Director, Frances Loeb Library), Ben Brady (GSD) and me (Jeff Goldenson). It is the continuation of a seminar this past Fall entitled Bibliotheca, the Library Past/Present/Future. There are many other folks involved in the Test Kitchen — people from the Innovation Lab, the greater Harvard Library and metaLab, who are taking part, and we’re just at the beginning.

As described on www.librarytestkitchen.org, this is a seminar about making. A prototyping lab for libraries. Our goal is to create products, services & experiences, broadly defined, for the Harvard Library community. Generous funding to realize these projects is provided by Prof. Robert Darnton and the Harvard Library Lab. Projects will be deployed in «Test Kitchens» — partner libraries, such as the Loeb and Widener Libraries, that allocate portions of their public space to these experiments.

Annotating involves highlighting, underlining, and making marginal notes while reading a document. Some students have little experience annotating, or focus solely on reading comprehension. In such cases, explicit prompts to consider the source's author, perspective, and historical context can lead to better historical understanding. This may be done through teacher modeling followed by guided and independent practice.

"So outside ears, and eyes, are important for concert-calibre musicians and Olympic-level athletes. What about regular professionals, who just want to do what they do as well as they can?...Workshops led teachers to use new skills in the classroom only ten per cent of the time. Even when a practice session with demonstrations and personal feedback was added, fewer than twenty per cent made the change. But when coaching was introduced—when a colleague watched them try the new skills in their own classroom and provided suggestions—adoption rates passed ninety per cent. A spate of small randomized trials confirmed the effect. Coached teachers were more effective, and their students did better on tests... Good coaches know how to break down performance into its critical individual components... Élite performers, researchers say, must engage in “deliberate practice”—sustained, mindful efforts to develop the full range of abilities that success requires. You have to work at what you’re not good at. In theory, people can do this themselves. But most people do not know where to start or how to proceed. Expertise, as the formula goes, requires going from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence to conscious competence and finally to unconscious competence. The coach provides the outside eyes and ears, and makes you aware of where you’re falling short. This is tricky. Human beings resist exposure and critique; our brains are well defended. So coaches use a variety of approaches—showing what other, respected colleagues do, for instance, or reviewing videos of the subject’s performance. The most common, however, is just conversation... Self-improvement has always found a ready market, and most of what’s on offer is simply one-on-one instruction to get amateurs through the essentials. It’s teaching with a trendier name. Coaching aimed at improving the performance of people who are already professionals is less usual. It’s also riskier: bad coaching can make people worse... The sort of coaching that fosters effective innovation and judgment, not merely the replication of technique, may not be so easy to cultivate. Yet modern society increasingly depends on ordinary people taking responsibility for doing extraordinary things: operating inside people’s bodies, teaching eighth graders algebraic concepts that Euclid would have struggled with, building a highway through a mountain, constructing a wireless computer network across a state, running a factory, reducing a city’s crime rate. In the absence of guidance, how many people can do such complex tasks at the level we require?...For society, too, there are uncomfortable difficulties: we may not be ready to accept—or pay for—a cadre of people who identify the flaws in the professionals upon whom we rely, and yet hold in confidence what they see. Coaching done well may be the most effective intervention designed for human performance. Yet the allegiance of coaches is to the people they work with; their success depends on it. And the existence of a coach requires an acknowledgment that even expert practitioners have significant room for improvement."

The next year, I asked several students to take responsibility each week for conveying the main points of the texts and helping me to engage others in classroom discussions about the readings. The experiment was well received, but we all agreed by the end of the semester that student presentations sometimes devolved into book reports with a few questions tacked on, lacking sufficient interconnection between that week's different presentations. So the year after that, I started asking students to form "co-teaching" teams who would work with me to focus on key points from the readings and to organize activities that would engage students in directing their own inquiry into our topic of virtual community and social media. When co-teaching teams started using PowerPoint to present their key points, one student asked: "If we are going to study social media, don't presentation media qualify?" That question led me to develop a list of more than one hundred not-PowerPoint presentation media for project presentations.

...It didn't take long to discover the rich and growing proliferation -- a Cambrian explosion of p2p learning platforms seems to be in progress. I collect links to p2p learning platforms. P2PU, which has been blogged here at dmlcentral, is one of the leaders. I'm particularly interested in Anya Kamenetz's P2PU course on "Getting Started With Self-Learning." There are, I found, many others: Stack Exchange ("a network of question and answer sites on diverse topics"), Open Study ("make the world your study group"), Quora ("a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it"), BetterAt ("learning from other people and teaching others is the best way to learn"), World University ("which anyone can add to or edit"), Skillshare ("classes to learn anything from anyone"), School of Everything ("Nobody likes to be told what to do. School of Everything is here to organize your education however you please") -- the list grows every day.

The term “The Serving Library” came out of a conversation with Nick Relph in Los Angeles. I was talking about my interest in establishing something along the lines of what I suppose I think of as the classically English, typically Soho-based, explicitly elitist and implicitly chauvinistic men’s club. I’m interested less in the chauvinism and elitism, obviously, and more in the idea of a cellar-like hangout, open during the daytime in order to escape the sun and traffic; equal parts intellectual and social—or literate and drunk. I’m also attracted to the perversity of the idea of such an institution being situated in Los Angeles, which would seem to be about as antithetical a location as possible for such an establishment... I think that the emphasis on the “institutionality” of The Serving Library may be misplaced, or at least overemphasized. Setting up The Serving Library as a larger organization with more people involved, with an explicit mission statement, a board of directors, yearly tax audits, and all the rest of the accompanying furniture adds up to something that is an institution, not a critique of institutions, nor a model of an alternative institution. Whereas perhaps with Dexter Sinister we were attempting to model an approach, I think that here we’re trying to make it concrete. Our model has been taught us, now it is time to build the real thing... It seems that there’s a lazy tendency to file many of our projects under Institutional Critique. I’m pretty sure that’s wrong in terms of intentions and results, but most importantly in terms of spirit. In fact, Institutional Affirmation would be much more accurate. For example, projects like the True Mirror project at the 2008 Whitney Biennial, Dot Dot Dot 15 produced on location at the Contemporary Art Centre in Geneva, or True Mirror Microfiche at the ICA [Institute of Contemporary Arts] in London would be impossible without close coordination, consent, and trust on behalf of the commissioning institutions.

"What should graduate teaching look like when it aims to prepare students for a range of careers? That's a welcome question, but it's not an easy one, because we're still inside the box that we want to teach outside of... To move students away from thinking about their possible futures in purely professorial terms, Auslander suggests that graduate-seminar leaders "teach from unconventional stuff." She particularly stresses the need to get beyond books to other media, which she has been doing in her courses, but she also admits that teaching to a new set of goals involves "things I can't think about yet." Edward Balleisen, an associate professor of history at Duke University, has been thinking about those things, and in practical terms. His ideas aim to reconceive the boundaries defining discipline and authorship. He suggested in an e-mail that we "imagine interdisciplinary seminars around a given theme," in which history graduate students would work "with grad students from other disciplines, as well as professional students."... Balleisen wants graduate students to collaborate on projects: "perhaps a global history syllabus or a Web site of some kind, which would cultivate technical skills as well as historical analysis and innovative presentation," he suggests, "with some consideration of how to reach out to nonscholarly audiences."... Elliott departed from the traditional seminar-paper requirement and instead assigned collaborative projects to be performed by student groups on a historical site.

"I formed the groups from their stated interests," Elliott recalled in an e-mail, "and allowed them to come up with the format." The results were wide-ranging: "One group produced a Web site on the World of Coke; another produced a curriculum for high-school teachers on using a historical cemetery as a teaching school; a third worked on an article together; another wrote a series of short papers that could have been a conference panel."

Commenter: "Historians are thinking about how to broaden their curriculum to encompass non-professorial outcomes without first asking what potential companies might hire PhDs in history and interviewing those companies. If you don't really start seriously looking at how to make your students marketable to non-academic employers, who do not understand the value of doctoral training in general, then you are merely rearranging napkins on the tea table while your students head to a life of adjunct hell."

I remind them that unlearning discrimination and prejudice will be difficult and uncomfortable. I encourage them to be open and open-minded and to trust the process. I tell them I am not their homegirl and therefore not invested in them “liking” me (so I will not be moved or persuaded against pushing them to fully engage the material, whether they like it/or me/or not)...In the classroom, I expect silence, discontent, frustration, rolled eyes, elevated voices, misunderstandings, anger, sarcasm, disrespect, and distance as we discuss taboo topics of class(ism), racism, sexism, homophobia, sexuality, ability and the various intersections between them.

The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study is hosting a series of activities related to book history (specifically to the theme of note-taking) between Fall 2011 and Fall 2012. Our first event will be a half-day workshop, which will bring together faculty, students, and colleagues in Academic Technology, pedagogical support services, and the University Libraries to reflect on the changing annotation practices of students and other scholars. We have closed registration, as we have reached workshop capacity.

The workshop forms part of a larger project we are organizing at the Institute, which will include an online exhibit of note-like materials in Harvard museum and library collections (everything from lab notebooks to field notes to sketchbooks to student lecture notes to shorthand notes for sermons in the early days of the College) and a conference, titled “Take Note,” in fall 2012.

"The CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative is pleased to release video from our October 18, 2011 event on Digital Humanities in the Classroom with Mark Sample and Shannon Mattern. Please read our original announcement for more details on their talks. We’re very grateful to them for sharing their work with us!"

McLuhan foresaw that expanding digital media would reshape the very fabric of society. His vision was cultural, not technological; his methods, to look askance, and ask probing questions. In his honour, we aim not at the (so-often fetishized) technologies, digital and social media, patterns of communication, and effects of information on society. Rather, the aim of the Monday night seminars will be at a higher level. How will we fashion discourse, community, culture, authority & expertise? What will be the cartographies of learning, responsibility, and compassion in this digitally mediated landscape? What will happen to learning, to inquiry, to critical intellectual debate? What will be the role of the university—and what will such a university be like?
We will set aside a priori commitment to institutional form, and imagine where intellectuals, (re)searchers, artists, practitioners and cultural activists can convene to explore the possibilities of inquiry, investigation, and debate. What would it be to recognize the far-flung forms of intense intellectual dialogues—from edgy seminars to off-beat journals to intense conversations in coffee-houses and parks? How can we exploit our familiarity with digital media and harness the technologies of change to unleash a vibrant future for profound, discontinuous, soul-redefining encounters?

"There were few textbooks available to young students in the 18th and 19th centuries. Instead, students would use blank books, more commonly referred to as copybooks, to copy their teacher's lessons entirely by hand. Many of these early books were made by hand, until the local stationers eventually began supplying ruled and plain copybooks, often with advertisements on their wrappers.
My photos of the penmanship copybook shown above are from a 2008 exhibit, 350 Years of Books for Children at the University of Washington's Suzallo Library. Penmanship exercises were a common form of copybooks."

TECHNE: "As sound-related concepts travel through the university, how can we use them to develop new pedagogies, practices, research questions, and methodologies? As we move more and more of our lives online, using various compression techniques for various reasons, we might ask, "What data are we filtering out?" and "How hi-fi do our archives need to be?" In an age when anyone can record anyone, how do we adapt and create audio recording genres that serve the interests of learning? How might we develop audile techniques so we can read + write with sound in a way that exceeds language? EPISTEME: What possibilities are opened up when we resist ocularcentrism + learn to read and write with more than just our eyes? How can we use sound to remix multiculturalism? How are our listening practices informed by racialized discourse (and vice versa)? Is sound sexualized? How does...more complete audio recording complicate memory? How do you preserve sound?"

"Gyure’s suggests that the turning point in the architecture of university libraries was when in 1882 the Harvard Board of Overseers changed the university’s motto from Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae to Veritas. It is this moment when seeking rather than repeating becomes the dominant mode of learning. Expressed in architectural terms, Gyure says, from this date university libraries become central to campus planning, and finally, some years after Jefferson’s death, began to live up to his vision of learning by giving libraries central or dominating positions within campus plans.

Replacing chapels and central administration as the heart of the university, the library was elevated to a quasi-religious status. Today, in an era when the institutional parameters of a lending library are being questioned, this has a charge. Here is the library as temple, the library as a closed institution containing knowledge."

"Operating within the Trojan horse of professional accreditation, schools of architecture can be free to experiment in what might be the last viable context for a liberal arts education. While the design studio is the central site for the synthesizing activities of the disciplinary generalist, the projects that result from that environment are only possible by parallel coursework in advanced technology and theory... [A] key function of theory is to demonstrate that what we take to be “reality” is much more plastic and open to transformation than historical or current agencies allow. In tandem, technology and theory respectively establish the opportunity and motive for architecture. One could say that the School’s ambition is to produce a context for synthetic discipline, [as contrasted with the] buzzword of “integrated practice." Without risk there is simply no possibility for a cultural practice; failure has to be an option for architecture to act as an agent of cultural change.""

"Larson objected that drawing an artificial distinction between “research papers” and other kinds of writing suggests other kind of writing needn’t draw on evidence from sources and that the “research paper” – which actually does not involve students in any research design, research method, or proposal of an original hypothesis, is a misrepresentation of research as an activity by defining it as reporting what other people have said. Essentially, he argues “the research paper” should not be taught in writing courses as if it’s a genre unto itself, but that students should be encouraged to incorporate sources into their writing and to learn how to conduct research in the disciplines."

"Digital revolution has struck the South Korean education industry - according to the country’s Ministry of Education, students will be equipped with e-books and tablets instead of paperback books by 2015.

The government has already agreed to invest $2 billion to make the move successful, and if everything falls into their respective places according to the plan, contents of ordinary textbooks will be made available to the students in digital form, along with various other multimedia resources.

The students will also be provided with free tablet devices, and they will be able to access textbooks exactly the same way as downloading eBooks from online retailers such as Amazon"

Course Design Resources: Interactive Bloom’s Taxonomy; Model Courses – Science Education for New Civic Engagements & Responsibilities; Designing Effective and Innovative Courses - On the Cutting Edge; MERLOT - peer-reviewed learning materials

Active Learning Pedagogies: Active Learning: Creating Excitement in the Classroom - National Teaching & Learning Forum; Case Study Collection - The National Center for Case Study Teaching in Science; Problem Based Learning Clearing House

"Technology creates the future. But it is not enough to create the future. We also need to organize it, as the social sciences enable us to do. We need to make sense of it, as the humanities enable us to do. A system of higher education that ignores the liberal arts..is what they have in China, where they don’t want people to think about other ways to arrange society... A scientific education creates technologists. A liberal arts education creates citizens: people who can think broadly and critically about themselves and the world.

...Education, it is said, is lighting a fire, not filling a bucket. The word comes from the Latin for “educe,” lead forth. Learning isn’t about downloading a certain quantity of information into your brain, as the proponents of online instruction seem to think. It is about the kind of interchange and incitement—the leading forth of new ideas and powers—that can happen only in a seminar... It is labor-intensive; it is face-to-face; it is one-at-a-time."

"Last month, I co-taught...entitled ”Applications of Technology for Peacebuilding.” My organization, TechChange assisted in the development of the course and our goal was to create a truly dynamic model for blended learning... Prior to the course, we created an online social learning community in Drupal with a number of innovative features. We experimented with a variety of open source Learning Management Systems (LMS) and Content Management Systems such as Moodle, Sakai, WordPress, Joomla, and Plone...We decided to team up with a company called GoingOn, which creates a custom social learning layer on top of Drupal. The tools we discuss below can be embedded into any open source LMS and down the road we plan to revisit other platforms... Tools: Self-Guided Pre-Course Assessments; Visual Maps of Readings and Other Multimedia; Community Links and Bookmarks; Shared Whiteboarding and Mindmapping"

"
The TED-Ed Brain Trust is a private online forum created to shape & accelerate TED's push into the realm of Education. We aim to assemble a new archive of remarkable educational videos designed to catalyze learning around the globe. "

"Fish interjected: "You do this kind of work simply because it's the kind of work that you like to do, and the moment you think you're doing it to make either people or the world better, you've made a huge mistake. There's no justification whatsoever for what we do except the pleasure of doing it and the possibility of introducing others to that pleasure. That's it!""

"The idea that summarizing should be the goal of most citations may have held in a different era, said Jamieson, “before the Internet culture of Tweeting and sampling, in which all the rules have changed -- aside from ours.”

“Whatever else the Internet has done," Jamieson continued, "it has made it easier to find sources and harder to tell what's junk.”

Some in the audience said the findings point to the need to place greater emphasis on teaching students how to select proper sources. “It's probably not far off to say that their sources are the first hits on Google,” one audience member observed."

"The GRumbler allows you to define up to five variables in addition to gender that can be used to map conflicts in sorting students into groups. It then calculates the best ways to sort the students according to number desired in each group; whether you want gender to be balanced, clustered, or random; and the additional variables you’ve defined. It creates a sorted list of students for each iteration you require. You can also identify conflicts at the individual level to prevent specific students from being grouped together."

"Is preserving and reviving cursive handwriting retro sentimentality or neo-Luddism? No, it's good teaching and good neuroscience. (I see this as one whose own notes would be the ultimate test of character recognition software.) The New York Times doesn't go far enough on this. The close connections between hand and brain, whether in music or in writing, have strong support in research... In the 19th century, handwriting was a fetish, excessively drilled in the schools. Now it's equally dismissed. We are truly "Immoderation Nation." Instead of dismissing cursive reflexively, administrators should take advantage of many innovative cursive programs that can bring the benefits of this skill to new (and older) generations."

# Lectures, Classrooms, and the Curriculum
# Educational Technology
# Scholarly Societies and Conferences
# Scholarship and Scholarly Communication
# Academic Employment, Tenure, and Scholarly Identity
# Departments and Disciplines
# Libraries
# More Hacking

"Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship.” This website... was released in 2011 to serve as a community-driven resource for the spatial humanities. The Institute brought cultural heritage workers, software developers, and scholars to the Scholars’ Lab in three tracks for intensive training, conversation, and collaborative work in GIS and spatial technologies for the humanities. This Spatial Humanities website is a contribution of the Scholars’ Lab to the broad community interested in GIS for humanities inquiry and in place-based digital scholarship. It includes: a set of framing essays on the spatial turn across the disciplines by Institute fellow Dr. Jo Guldi; an evolving, crowdsourced catalog of research resources and featured projects and organizations; related feeds from Q&A sites and social media; and a peer-reviewed, occasional publication for “step-by-step” helpsheets and tutorials in humanities GIS."

"Openstreetmap.org and Wikimapia.org are two wiki-enabled collaborative mapping applications that support web user defined geographic content anchored to a common global geo-coordinate system."

"Continuing the collaborative mapping thread, I’d like to think a bit about tools to make this happen. Do a bit of dreaming, and maybe think through how we can get there. Definitely as soon as I start to talk about this people want to do all kinds of crazy synchronization and distributed editing of features. I do think we’ll get there, but I fear going for too much too soon, getting loaded down by over-designing and not addressing the immediate problems. Indeed Open Street Map has proven that if the energy is there the tools just need to do the very basics. I have been putting my energy in to getting a standards based implementation, on top of WFS-T, but that’s more because I know it and I like standards. I don’t think it’s the best way to do things, and I don’t even think it should be the default way to do things – at this point I’d prefer something more RESTful. "

"Goals for students: What do you want them to know and be able to do at the end of the semester? How will the course build on where students started and help them move through the rest of the curriculum? // Authentic assignments: What assignments will allow students to reach those goals and develop skills that are enduring? Provide opportunities for students to articulate and demonstrate how they think about the given topics. e.g.: incremental assignments, portfolios, reflective essays, final projects presented to a broader audience, group work, community-based projects. // Relevant course content: Once you have a clearer idea of the goals and assignments for the course, content choices becomes less about what you need to cover and more about what students need to develop a coherent understanding... // Feedback and assessment: How will you know that students have reached those goals? How can you incorporate feedback opportunities within the course beyond the usual mid-term or final?"

intend - define - explore - suggest - innovate -- goal-setting - know

"By applying the techniques of product design to education, they want to loosen the narrow, rigid process of traditional learning and show teachers how to tap into students' deep wells of creativity, encourage them to see nuanced problems from inside the very core of an issue, and make critical thinking essential to solving any problem.

The k12 Lab has distilled the design process down to the following steps: Understand, Observe, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test. All around their office in Stanford, California, the process is illustrated on whiteboards: A word circled in the center of the board indicates the subject at hand, while related ideas radiate out from the center, like branches on a family tree with many cousins. "

"Limited learning in the U.S. higher-education system cannot be defined as a crisis, because institutional and system-level organizational survival is not being threatened in any significant way. Parents...want colleges to provide a safe environment where their children can mature, gain independence, and attain a credential that will help them be successful as adults. Students in general seek to enjoy the benefits of a full collegiate experience that is focused as much on social life as on academic pursuits, while earning high marks in their courses with relatively little investment of effort. Professors are eager to find time to concentrate on their scholarship and professional interests. Administrators have been asked to focus largely on external institutional rankings and the financial bottom line....No actors in the system are primarily interested in undergraduates' academic growth, although many are interested in student retention and persistence. "

"# 45 percent of students "did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning" during the first two years of college.
# 36 percent of students "did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning" over four years of college....The main culprit for lack of academic progress of students, according to the authors, is a lack of rigor. They review data from student surveys to show, for example, that 32 percent of students each semester do not take any courses with more than 40 pages of reading assigned a week, and that half don't take a single course in which they must write more than 20 pages over the course of a semester. Further, the authors note that students spend, on average, only about 12-14 hours a week studying, and that much of this time is studying in groups."

"For some people, getting quickly through programs that provide solid labor market credentials is by far the best strategy. But too often discussions of this goal seem to imply that longer, more in-depth, more abstract courses of study are a waste of time, represent pure extravagant consumption, or are an anachronism.

Understanding of the history of ideas, of the role of creativity in the progress of civilization, and of the contribution of intellectuals to improving life for all are deeply hidden in current public discourse."

"This introduction to qualitative methods focuses on communication but has broad application to other social sciences. The course will touch on archival methods used in history and on the problems with interpreting narratives and documents, areas familiar to most students, but will concentrate on a less familiar area: fieldwork. The course involves hands-on experience, with the theoretical literature on qualitative fieldwork in the background, because the only way to learn fieldwork is by doing it. "

"At November’s University of California Institute for Research in the Arts conference, the emphasis was on college courses that couldn’t be planned out according to set syllabi and fixed course objectives, because students were expected to be co-creators of the classes in which they often found themselves enrolled. "

"...read all of your posts and comments. As you reread them, take notes, critically reading your entries as if they were written by somebody else (or at the very least, recognizing that they were written by a different you at a different time). Compose a short analysis and reflection of your posts. This meta-post is open-ended and the exact content is up to you, although it should be thoughtful and directed. Feel free to quote briefly from your own posts or to refer to specific ideas from the readings we’ve studied so far....They proceed to an “expansion” stage: For this part of the audit, pick two of your posts or substantial comments and expand them into longer (but still short) essays ranging in length from 1000-1200 words. There are several ways to go about this. You can pick a post that in hindsight you are unhappy with and revise it upwards. Or you can pick a post that you think is fantastic but still contains ideas that can be fleshed out."

"We're building a community-based Q&A board for digital humanities questions that need (just a little) more than 140 character answers."

"The illustrated perspective treatise is a “genre” that originated in Italy in the fifteenth century in the guise of manuscripts that were circulated within relatively small scholarly and artistic circles. However, the first such book to be disseminated in printed form was Jean Pélerin’s De artificiali perspectiva (1505). Although many perspective treatises were in fact written as manuals for artists seeking practical skills, it bears mentioning that these books are intricately bound up with the history of modern geometry’s struggle to secure methods for depicting validity in 3-D, visual terms. What is striking about this type of treatise is the way in which text and image are juxtaposed in view of fostering–by means of images–various types of spatial experience that cannot be achieved merely by way of textual descriptions...images are the site where the “scientific” claims of such books are performed..here, images are both the means and the ends, the method and the proof."

"Types of Digital Scholarship: This section is a reprint of the MLA wiki on evaluating digital scholarship and lists of types of digital work with brief discussion of how it can be evaluated.

Short Guide to Evaluation of Digital Work: This short guide gathers a collection of questions evaluators can ask about a project, a check list of what to look for in a project, and some ideas about how to find experts in one place.

Stories: These stories are fictional cases of academics whose digital work is to be evaluated for tenure and promotion. The purpose of these stories is to discuss ways that evaluators could review the digital work and conversely how the candidates could best prepare their case.

Documenting a New Media Case: Here is a list of some of the types of materials you may want to keep in order to make your case:

"Elastic City is a company founded by Todd Shalom to commission artists to reshape our perception of New York through original walks, to turn new audiences into active participants in “an ongoing poetic exchange” with the environments we inhabit. Current Elastic City offerings include a theater artist’s “Monumental Walk” in which “participants will walk, dance and commune with the architecture of our public buildings and monuments,” an alternative World Trade Center walk led by a cultural anthropologist and psychotherapist, and Shalom’s own “Dirty Gay Soundwalk” (one of several of Shalom’s soundwalks) through the West Village that seeks out places where “gay history echo[es] in the present soundscape.”"

"set of alternate emergent terms that operate in the name of this ‘not-yet-known-knowledge’. Terms such as potentiality, actualisation, access and contemporaeinity...navigational vectors for a current pedagogy, a pedagogy at peace with its partiality, a pedagogy not preoccupied with succeeding but with trying...we need to learn to live in parallel rather than in conflictual economies;...engaging in numerous non-legitimated processes, producing the new subjects that we need for ourselves, always starting from right here and right now and forever searching for what might be important rather than useful, to know....criticality while building on critique wants nevertheless to inhabit culture in a relation other than one of critical analysis; other than one of illuminating flaws, locating elisions, allocating blames...What goes beyond the endless cataloguing of the hidden structures, the invisible powers and the numerous offences we have been preoccupied with for so long?"

"In May I sketched out my plan for assigning roles for the class blog: first responders, commentators, and synthesizers. And each week or so, the roles shift, so that one week 8-10 students are responsible for making the first posts, another group comments on those, and a third group synthesizes the online discussion a few days later. And you can have a group or two of students who have the week off. And the following week you shift roles. In the past I’ve allowed substantive comments as substitutes for original posts, but this will be my first rigorous attempt to build dialogue into the blog (rather than letting it happen organically)."

Class Blogging Options

"The Institute for Applied Aesthetics is a school for collaborative projects and research in Brooklyn. Our focus is on re-imagining education and the idea of "school" to encompass experience and creative practice. We make research publications and projects about learning. We have a physical space in Bushwick that serves as a community laboratory and research station for the everyday. We provide a community for artists, educators and people to share ideas and experiment with different ways to explore learning as a tool for engagement through art, design and interdisciplinary practice. We like to set out on nomadic adventures - researching our terrains, talking with people and looking for new ways to learn from each other, from our surroundings and the intentions for sincere community. We love drinking tea. We love research and learning. We love exploring the every day, especially with some company. We invite you to come research with us, drink tea and be a part of our community."

"With this text, we attempt to articulate, organize and, to some extent, inspire how multimedia scholarship – specifically, undergraduate multimedia scholarship – is practiced here at the University of Southern California. We wish to emphasize, however, that your MDA 140 practicum will be only an introduction to what is an emerging, and therefore exciting and innovative, field. Because we are limited to a single semester, and because multimedia scholarship involves several divergent skill sets (e.g., design skills, technology skills, writing skills, production skills), we have had to focus MDA 140 so that it is a more limited experience than, say, courses within the IML Honors Program. If you are interested in learning more about multimedia scholarship as a result of MDA 140 (and we hope that you will be), we encourage you to investigate the IML Honors Program, or to ask your instructors about other multimedia opportunities at USC."

"The MDA-140 practicum introduces multimedia as a critical and creative tool that functions to enhance traditional forms of academic work. In courses that unite General Education courses with multimedia lab sessions, students learn basic skills in multimedia authoring and complete the course having acquired proficiency in several core, media-based literacies described below. The precise nature of the multimedia work undertaken in this class will vary depending on the specific needs and content of the course to which it is linked."

Sending Students Audio Feedback: "Recording my often extensive comments about a student essay–instead of writing those comments–allows me to ask more questions, questions that might help a student think through her essay topic a little differently, and it allows me to offer oral praise for a student’s work. I still respond to student writing on the essay itself, but I limit those “red pen” marks by noting representative mechanical concerns. I spend most of my time recording, providing comments on the validity of the essay’s argument, its organization, its audience and focus, or other information a student might need about a particular assignment. Responding these comments also allows me to read certain passages of the writing back to the student, and this permit the student to “hear” the writing differently, in a different voice. This methods helps students understand the work differently, thereby, revising it differently."

"...students are often keen on audio feedback, which seems more personal than handwritten or typed notes. As an instructor of English and media studies, I have reached similar conclusions. Broadening the sensory modalities and types of media involved in feedback not only diversifies how learning happens; it also requires all participants to develop some basic—and handy—technical competencies (e.g., recording, storing, and accessing MP3s) all too rare in the humanities....How might students—and not just instructors—compose digital audio in their humanities courses? And what might they learn in so doing?...One of the easiest ways to integrate digital audio composition into a humanities course is to identify the kinds of compositions that might be possible and then find some examples. Below, I consider five kinds of digital audio compositions: recorded talks; audio essays; playlists; mashups; interviews. Each entails its own learning outcomes, technologies, and technical competencies."

"TRAILS -- the Teaching Resources and Innovations Library for Sociology Web site -- will be an archive for peer-reviewed classroom innovations, including syllabuses, class activities, individual assignments, bibliographies and Web sites -- all focused on teaching. A two-level peer-review process is being created to vet entries;...plenty will be rejected, or...sent back for revisions....The idea is that by adapting a rigorous peer review process, successful items on TRAILS will be granted the respect on a tenure dossier that good teaching evaluations or a portfolio might never garner....[S]ome disciplines and departments have made it possible for people to receive credit for teaching ideas in tenure and promotion by writing up scholarly articles about their teaching ideas...While the basis for those articles may be teaching, they are ultimately being evaluated as research...[With TRAILS], the emphasis is on rigorous evaluation of and "full credit for teaching as teaching."

"The Art School in The Art School (The AS in The AS) seeks to generate a creative and intellectual community through an open school / open source structure.Through activities such as classes, discussions, forming groups of interest, reading groups, critique groups, workshops, eating and drinking, publishing, and making, The AS in the AS seeks to create an experimental environment for shared inquiry. All events are FREE and open to the public.

The school exists in relation (opposition, subversion, supplement, mimicry) to Syracuse University’s School of Art and Design, which embodies typical US art school and university educational practices.

The AS in The AS is a platform for self-organization: its activities are generated through suggestions, proposals, conversations, and finding ways to make things happen."

"Google Earth and Maps are the most used Geographic applications in the world. They make producing and publishing data free and easy. From collecting data on mobile devices, to analyzing large data sets geographically, Google technologies can be used to share, visualize, and map your data. This talk will cover a variety of your options, including Open Data Kit, Google My Maps, and Google Fusion tables."

"Background/Context: Although doctoral education is an important component of research universities, few investigations of doctoral education exist. Furthermore, with the push in education and in other disciplines to help beginning researchers understand multiple paradigmatic, epistemological, and theoretical orientations that define fields of study, few reports explore the attempts and their effects.

Purpose: This study sought to understand the unusually strong student responses to a new doctoral core course that aimed to initiate them into the competing theoretical, epistemological, and paradigmatic complexity of contemporary educational research. This study developed from the authors’ experiences with the course in an attempt to understand students’ conflicted responses."

""Landscapes of Quarantine" is just one of a growing number of recent DIY/counterfeit education interventions created by artists and embraced by galleries and museums. A recent edition of ARTFORUM report that "a spate of artist collectives are reassessing how progressive pedagogical models can be employed as consciousness-raising tools. Joining related endeavors such as 16 Beaver, the Public School, e-flux’s Night School, and the Bruce High Quality Foundation University, artists William Powhida and Jennifer Dalton have created #class, a series of public workshops in a classroom setting that, in its eclectic sprawl, seeks to investigate the effects of the economic downturn on the field of art: on its production, reception, distribution, and consumption; on its educational institutions and its institutions of display."

"THATCamp is a user-generated “unconference” on digital humanities organized and hosted by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University"

"TEDxNYED, an all-day conference examining the role of new media and technology in shaping the future of education, will take place in New York City on Saturday, March 6, 2010 and will be webcast live here at tedxnyed.com, allowing viewers around the world to join and engage in these ideas worth spreading."

"We have also worked to meet the oft-stated second goal of liberal education: that of preparing students for the myriad careers that await them, including those that we cannot even envision. We wanted to offer programs that demonstrably produce autonomous learners and responsible adults. Thus the second all-college requirement: The faculty created the Independent Learning Experience to go with the "Common Intellectual Experience." The Independent Learning Experience was an expectation that every student would do significant undergraduate research, study abroad in certain programs, student-teach, or have an academically legitimate internship."

"How does mapping inform how scholars identify novel patterns in their own research and archives? What does mapping afford pedagogy and classroom learning, and how does it foster collaboration and media expansion? How do mapping projects by academics alter how they engage their community partners and publics, and vice versa?"

"I dont know any course, K through 20, that teaches you how to evaluate what counts as learning when you lack the specialized learning to make that evaluation. In other words, what is the process by which you think through credibility? On the Internet we know mobs are not always smart. Crowds are not always wise. How do you learn that? How do you teach kids that sense of Im skeptical here, or I want to get another point of view? And how do you teach it not so they discount the ideas of others but so they know what is trustworthy so they can collaborate with others?"

This whitepaper is a call to action and leadership at UCLA. UCLA has made great strides forward in the emerging fields that we define as Digital Humanities,
and can already lay claim to national and international prominence. With concentrated effort and resources, UCLA can lead the country and the world in creating, applying, and interpreting new digital and information technologies. Our faculty is poised for this, our students are eager, and Digital Humanities—interdisciplinary, collaborative, socially engaged, and global—is a great fit for the strength, position, and aspirations of UCLA as an institution. At a moment in which our entire relation to knowledge is changing, it is imperative that we respond in visionary and focused ways that move research and education forward in the twenty-first century.

The project brings together scholars working on projects at the intersection of geography and history using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in their research. While enthusiastic about GIS, which offers a common framework for this research, the Spatial History Project is gearing up to move beyond GIS, to create tools to harvest useful information from large heterogeneous datasets of maps, images, and texts, and create dynamic, interactive digital visualizations for analyzing and representing change over space and time.... The overarching goal of the Spatial History Project is to create dynamic, interactive tools that can be used across the spectrum represented by these research projects...and bring them all together to enable the creation of new knowledge and understanding of historical change in space and time and the possibilities for our present and future that may be found in the past.

attention, collaboration, participation, network awareness, design, storytelling, critical consumption of info, digital divides, ethics & advocacy, relearning