2019 Digital Scholarship Fellows Program: Call for Proposals

Have you ever wanted to create a digital companion for a book project? Do you have collections of research materials collecting dust or physically degrading in your office, or large datasets you’d like to develop into maps or visualizations to accompany your written scholarship? Would you like your students to actively engage with Special Collections & Archives materials or your own research? Are you interested in engaging directly with new communities through crowdsourcing and public scholarship?

If any of these questions resonate with you, and you would like to involve students in the processes of digitization, analysis, and online publishing, please see the Call for Proposals and consider applying to participate in the Digital Scholarship Fellows Program. As a 2019 Digital Scholarship Fellow, you would have the opportunity to work with Information Services staff members and other faculty fellows to 1) gain new technological skills to support the production and broad dissemination of your research; 2) scaffold research projects involving digital technologies and collaboration with students and other partners; and 3) present the results of your participation in the program at speaking engagements at both Connecticut College and other institutions engaging in creative digital scholarship.

Digital scholarship offers liberal arts colleges opportunities to leverage the close working relationship between students and faculty and develop students’ research and technology skill sets through experiential learning. Digital scholarship tools and methodologies reflect a changing landscape in both teaching and scholarship, including innovations in instructional technology, content management platforms, humanities computing, and open-access publishing. The Digital Scholarship Fellows Program invests resources in faculty who want to both model these changes and help build a foundation of best practices for the campus. In support of the College’s commitment to enhancing academic distinction, the DSF Program will promote the research objectives outlined in the College’s Strategic Plan.

Not sure if your project ideas are a good fit for the Digital Scholarship Fellows Program? Contact the Assistant Director for Digital Scholarship, Lyndsay Bratton (lbratton@conncoll.edu, x2729), to talk about your ideas and hear more about the program.

To learn more about developments in digital scholarship at Connecticut College and other Connecticut institutions, you’re encouraged to attend the inaugural Digital Scholarship and Pedagogy in the Liberal Arts Symposium, November 12. Hear from the first cohort of Digital Scholarship Fellows and see the products of their year in the program.

Digital Scholarship and Pedagogy in the Liberal Arts Symposium, November 12

On Monday, November 12, join Information Services and the Office of the Dean of Faculty for the inaugural Digital Scholarship and Pedagogy in the Liberal Arts Symposium at Connecticut College. You can see the full schedule and details here.

The symposium is the culminating event of the first year of the Digital Scholarship Fellows Program, funded by the Office of the Dean of Faculty and supported by staff members across Information Services. This all-day event features presentations by faculty, technologists, and librarians on methods and outcomes of collaborative digital scholarship in the liberal arts. Learn about the possibilities of using digitization, mapping, crowdsourcing, and online publishing to conduct and share your research in exciting new ways. Hear about initiatives at Trinity College and UConn’s Greenhouse Studios, in addition to developments here at home.

We are pleased to present keynote speaker Nicholas Bauch from the University of Minnesota at 4:30pm in Olin 014:

The symposium is generously co-sponsored by the Ammerman Center for Arts and Technology, the Goodwin-Niering Center for the Environment, the Environmental Studies program, and the departments of Anthropology, Biology, and Religious Studies.

After the symposium, consider applying for the 2019 Digital Scholarship Fellows Program! Contact Lyndsay Bratton, if you’d like to discuss proposal ideas or questions. Proposals are due by Sunday, December 2.

Don’t Forget: Tempel Summer Institute Proposals Due Friday!

Tempel Summer Institute Participants and Instructors, 2017

Were you thinking about attending Tempel Summer Institute this summer? If so, don’t forget that proposals are due on Friday!

What is Tempel Summer Institute? It is an annual, one-week immersion program for faculty started in 2000 by a generous gift from Jean C. Tempel ’65. The Institute provides a pedagogical approach to the integration of new technologies into the curriculum, and is led by Information Services staff and two faculty leaders.

During the Institute, you will participate in group discussions on pedagogical challenges and teaching and learning goals, and learn about instructional technologies that can be used to address those challenges and goals. Many sessions are hands-on, allowing you to get a better understanding of the technology. Time for course development is built into the Institute, enabling you to make significant progress on redesigning courses and creating course materials with the assistance of faculty and staff.

Sound interesting? More information and the full Call for Proposals can be found on this page.

TSI 2014 Mascot, By Orizatriz (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

How is your class going? Tools for mid-semester feedback

Join Diane Creede and me on Thursday for a new workshop, Tools for Mid-Semester Feedback.  In this hour-long workshop, we will discuss the purpose and goals for collecting mid-semester feedback, demonstrate and teach several tools you can use, and help participants select the right tool too meet their goals. Details are below. We look forward to seeing you!

Tools for Mid-Semester Feedback – Register (or just drop-in!)
Thursday, February 22, 3:00 – 4:00 PM| Advanced Technology Lab
How is the semester going so far? Join us as we discuss technology tools including Moodle Questionnaire and Google Forms, that can provide information on students’ progress in your course and give you valuable insight to guide your teaching through the rest of the semester. This workshop will include hands-on practice and discussion.

Using Google Drive for Peer Review

In ANT 320 Anthropology of Sexuality and Gender, students work in pairs to compose posters that address an issue on campus or in a workplace related to sexualty and/or gender. For example, one pair of students is writing about intimate partner violence and bystander intervention. Another pair is writing about the erasure of queer people through daily microaggressions. A core component of the assignment is peer review. Each student will review other students’ posters and provide feedback. In the assignment instructions, I have included why peer review is critical to the project, including bringing new information and perspectives, ensuring high-quality work, improving critical thinking skills, and the opportunity to practice providing critical, meaningful, and constructive feedback.

To facilitate collaboration and the peer review process, I am using Google Docs for the poster project and the peer review. Each pair of students creating a poster has a Google Folder that I created for them. It looks like this. In the folder is a template of a Google Slide using the correct dimensions for printing. Also located in each folder is a Google Form with the questions for the peer review. When students are ready to engage in the peer review, they simply share their poster via the sharing settings in Google Slides. They then send the form to their designated peer reviewers, which I have chosen for them and noted in the assignment instructions.

A student who is conducting the peer review will receive a link to the form in their inbox. The form includes guiding questions for students to consider as they work through the poster. When a student completes a peer review, the results are logged under “responses” in the Google Form. This way, each pair of students only sees the feedback related to their poster, it is accessible anywhere there is internet, and both authors of the poster can see the feedback.

Prior to using Google Docs for the peer review of posters, I found peer review difficult because I did not want students to waste paper by printing the first draft of their poster.. That made sharing the poster difficult. Using Google Drive for this endeavor has eliminated the seemingly endless paper shuffle that my old peer review process used to ential. Furthermore, students can leave specific feedback on the poster using the “suggesting” mode in Slides.

If you are considering doing peer review for a project in your class, here are some important tips:

• Schedule the peer review during class time. That way you are there to address any technology concerns and where things are or how to do them.
• Use a technology lab on campus, such as the Advanced Technology Lab at Connecticut College. The monitors are much bigger than students’ laptops, which enables them to see the poster better.  
• Make sure to include in your instructions that students must read the poster once, read it a second time, fill out the peer review, and then read the poster a third time to make sure they provided quality feedback. Otherwise, they will rush through the assignment.
• Also be sure to include instructions on how to handle the peer review feedback. This semester, I am asking students to make their revisions and then write a few short paragraphs addressing why the feedback and changes they made. This reinforces the critical thinking component, and it provides valuable experience in how to professionally handle criticism.

Teaching with Wikipedia, the Fall 2017 Edition

Image from the Eli Coppola Wikipedia article created in Fall 2016 ; Polaroid photo of Eli in 1992, captioned by Eli

This fall I am again working with Wikipedia in my Feminist Theory course (check out: Why You And Your Students Should Work To Improve Wikipedia, Feminist Praxis and Wikipedia in the Classroom, and Adding Voices to Scholarship: Wikipedia Editing). It’s the second time that I’m mixing the Wiki Education Foundation’s online dashboard with our Linda Lear Center’s archives. This Wikipedia-based assignment continues to be a uniquely engaging for students because they are not only able to contribute to public knowledge, they become Wikipedia editors. They shift from being passive visitors to the Wikipedia site to editors with a working knowledge of the principles and culture of Wikipedia and an ability to add and edit Wikipedia pages.

In this blog post, I want to offer up a few key reasons to consider using Wikipedia in your class:

Ubiquity

As of As of Friday, November 10, English Wikipedia had 5,491,385 articles and is estimated to be the seventh most popular site in the United States, and the fifth most popular in the world. I have yet to teach a student who has not visited Wikipedia. While there is a longstanding skepticism of the reliability of Wikipedia, students are often unclear about how the encyclopedia works and yet often use it for information. Through a Wikipedia-engaged assignment, faculty can assist students in learning when Wikipedia could be useful and when it is not an appropriate source.

You can do it!

Thanks to the Wiki Education Foundation’s development of an online dashboard, there is an increasingly easy to use and nicely scaffolded way to plan out an assignment. My dashboard allows me to draw on the trainings provided by Wiki Education to help students learn the basics to Wikipedia as a community, as well as how to edit, conduct research, write an article, and provide substantive feedback to their peers. It also harnesses the transparency of Wikipedia to make it easy to track students work throughout a project. Plus, each class gets connected to a Wikipedia content expert who can provide additional support to students. I have asked my content editors to video chat with students the past two years and that has been helpful for establishing rapport. All in all, while I don’t ever feel like I’m an uber-Wikipedian, I know that I have the basic knowledge needed and when I hit a roadblock, I have the support I need.

Built-in Motivation

Students respond well to the challenge of a Wikipedia assignment because it engages with a public-facing platform. In this case, it’s a site that possibly everyone they know has visited at some point. As a result, they care more about doing high quality work because they have a sense of responsibility towards a public audience. They also look forward to sharing their work with friends and family. Finally, I already have had a student be asked to do Wikipedia work during a junior year internship, and she surprised her placement supervisor by already having this experience.

Student Feedback & Assessment

This fall in their reflection essays, students noted that this assignment allows them to engage with a mainstream audience.

As a student argued:

In 2017, in a climate of extreme political polarization and turmoil, as well as an increasing sense of distrust in news and credible sources, assignments such as the Wikipedia Project are exceptionally valuable, in terms of the content they produce, as well as the online communities they form and support.

Another observed:

Student created content creates a sense of accountability and agency within learning. Producing knowledge is empowering. It gives students a sense of greater purpose within the classroom, creating a conversation in which students can be critical of information and its production. Instead of simply reading about theories about voices being left out and that there is not enough content written by women, I was able to learn transferable skills and add to the voices on Wikipedia that are written about and by women.

Overall, while they noted some limitations of both Wikipedia (an important element to the assignment to develop their understanding of concepts like positivism, objectivity, situated knowledges, and standpoint epistemology) and working with materials from the archives, students reported that this was a particularly compelling assignment unlike a standard research paper.

In regards to assessment, Wiki Education provides suggestions and an assessment rubric that can be repurposed for your own needs.

Interested, but not sure about all this? Drop me a line and I will be happy to meet up to look through the dashboard with you.

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Design A Better Assignment – Workshop It!

Where do I position the camera? Why do I have to do a voiceover? What is line 2 of the instructions asking me to do? Is time lapse video really the best choice here? These were a few of the practical and didactic questions I received from colleagues as they worked through the activity that I designed as part of Technology Fellows Program. The workshop experience is one of the invaluable opportunities that this program offers. Colleagues encouraged me to push my thinking about this specific assignment and my approach to course design more generally. The Technology Fellows Program focuses on the use of technology for teaching, but it is also a place to hone one’s teaching skills.

For my workshop, I proposed to try out an assignment that I am calling mise en place, after the culinary practice of preparing ingredients before cooking. This assignment will be part of my Food and the Senses course in the Spring semester. The objectives of the assignment are to have students explore concepts of embodied knowledge and apprenticeship through the activity of mise en place. The first step is to teach students to chop onions in a variety of ways (live demonstration, video and no instruction). Next, students chop onions in teams. They take turns chopping and recording. Initially, I believed that time lapse video would be the best technology for this job.  Outside of class time, students have time to view their videos and reflect on the experience through a voice over. Finally, students share their video documents in class or online.

Leading up to the big day of the workshop, I had a small group meeting with other Tech fellows and instructional designers. They read over the assignment, we discussed the objectives of the activity, they suggested a variety of technology options, and made concrete suggestions for how I could continue to develop the assignment to sharpen the connections between the activity and the learning objectives. Using these suggestions, I prepared the materials for the workshop, where the other Tech Fellows would have a chance to try out and critique my assignment.

The big day came, and, to my surprise, no one balked at the idea of using large knives and the possibility of crying over onions. My colleagues started setting up a variety of recording devices on all sorts of tripods. They immediately began asking important questions, “What part of the body should the recording capture? Just the hands?” This got me thinking about a series of theoretical issues connected with the disembodiment of knowledge and objectification of culinary skill. This is just one example of the sorts of feedback that led me sharpen my assignment and consider the utility of the data that my students would be collecting. Thanks to my colleagues, I began to see connections to visual anthropology and how I could use this assignment to engage with an additional set of methodological questions.

Although I had initially been concerned about finding the right technology for my assignment. The workshop experience helped me to think more deeply about learning objectives and how to bring more intention to the methods and technology I want to use. I like to try new techniques and activities in the classroom and, for the most part, I usually have to wing it. Being able to workshop an assignment that pushes into new pedagogical territory will certainly lead to a better thought out assignment and hopefully a better learning experience for my students.

Image credit: Cutting onions, https://www.flickr.com/photos/61508583@N02/13561876493

MIT OpenCourseware for Course Inspiration

During a recent consultation with a faculty member where we explored affordable online resources for a new Conn Course, I shared related course materials available through the MIT OpenCourseware website. If you are developing a new course, looking for inspiration to update an old one, or trying to incorporate different disciplinary approaches and content, MIT Open Courseware is well worth a visit.

MIT OpenCourseware shares materials from 2,340 courses taught at MIT. By sharing course content, MIT hopes to help educators improve courses, help students find additional information, and provide quality resources for independent students and self-learners. Courses include both undergraduate and graduate levels in all subjects taught at MIT. Many courses include a syllabus, reading material, assignments, and in some cases audio or video lectures, even online textbooks and supplemental material. 

Anthropology course available through MIT OpenCourseware

 

If you’re looking for new classroom activities, try exploring the related OCW Educator which allows you to browse instructional approaches and materials. For example, browse by Active Learning and find examples of case studies, discussion, flipped classrooms, teamwork and more. Other interesting topics include Critical Thinking, Diversity and Inclusion, Engaging Learners, Lecturing, and more. Some courses also include a section called “This Course at MIT” which explains how the course was developed and taught. 

Use the comments below to tell us if you find something interesting!

Camp Teach & Learn Workshops and Discussions

As always, the sessions at Camp Teach & Learn look to be exciting and inspiring. We (Instructional Technology) are helping to organize the following workshops and discussions. When not facilitating one of these, we will be attending other sessions. We look forward to seeing you there!

Improving Quality and Saving Time: Scaffolding Techniques for Digital Assignments from the Technology Fellows
Wednesday 25th May: 10:45 AM to 12:30 PM

Scaffolding is a pedagogical strategy in which instructional supports are provided to students as needed early in learning, then gradually removed as students develop proficiency. Over the past three years, Technology Fellows have learned that creating scaffolded assignments is critical for technology-enhanced assignments. In this session we share examples of scaffolded assignments, discuss how we have used this strategy in our own courses, and help you discover practical ways to apply this technique.

Discussants include Virginia Anderson, Anthony Graesch, Suzuko Knott, Hisae Kobayashi, Laura Little, Jessica McCullough, & Emily Morash

Social Media for Teaching & Learning: Case Studies
Thursday 26 May, from 8:30 AM to 10:15 AM

What can social media do to improve your students’ learning and help you better meet the goals of your course? Faculty at the College have been experimenting with incorporating Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other platforms into their pedagogy. At this session we will hear from several faculty members who used social media for a variety of goals: engaging with content outside of class, connecting with experts, practicing new languages, continuing classroom discussion, and connecting course content with current events, among others. We will hear about the challenges and successes in using social media to accomplish specific pedagogical goals.

Discussants include Luis Gonzalez, Anthony Graesch, Hisae Kobayashi, Laura Little, Karolin Machtans, & Marc Zimmer

Accessibility for All: Simple Technology Tools & Strategies to Help Every Student
Thursday 26 May, from 10:30 AM to Noon

Just because students aren’t registered with the Office of Accessibility doesn’t mean that they can’t benefit from some of the tools and techniques that are used to make course materials more accessible. In this hands-on session we will look at simple tools and strategies you and your students can use to improve learning. Specific topics include making lengthy digital documents (like a syllabus) navigable, using closed-captioning with audio and video materials, creating machine-readable materials, utilizing screen readers for PDF documents, and activating accessibility features in Moodle, Google Drive, and iOS devices.

Interactive workshop facilitated by Diane Creede, Lillian Liebenthal, Jessica McCullough, & Melissa Shafner.