Workshop Tomorrow: Digital Connecticut College

Join us at 3 p.m. tomorrow, March 6, in the Advanced Technology Lab in Shain Library to learn how to make your own website using our new service, Digital Connecticut College.

Digital Connecticut College provides students, faculty, and staff with the opportunity to register a domain name and create a digital presence through various mediums such as blogs, portfolios, and wikis. You can easily install open source applications such as WordPress, MediaWiki, Drupal, Scalar, and Omeka to your own domain, and use this space to develop class projects, share your research, and create your digital identity. At this workshop, we will help you get the process started, and show examples of the types of projects that you can create.

Let us know you’re coming by registering here, or feel free to drop in!

Introducing “Digital Connecticut College”

Yesterday we held a workshop to introduce Digital Connecticut College. Thanks to everyone who attended!

What is Digital Connecticut College?

Digital Connecticut College provides students, faculty, and staff with the opportunity to register a domain name and create a digital presence through various mediums such as blogs, portfolios, and wikis. You can easily install open source applications such as WordPress, MediaWiki, Drupal, Scalar, and Omeka to your own domain.

Why would I use it?

Although are are the beginning stages of rolling this out to the community, we can share some ways faculty, staff, and students are already using Digital Connecticut College.

• Faculty research website. Use your domain as a space for digital scholarship, or to share your research with a broader community.
• Online annotation of texts. Upload your course material into an interactive site that allows for student comments, discussion, and annotation. CommentPress and hypothes.is are two available options that we can support.
• Collaborative class website. Several courses created a class website, sharing the results of their coursework with a wide audience.
• Weekly writing. Students post reflections based on course readings or films. The site is shared with everyone in the class, and students comment on each other’s posts creating a vibrant online discussion.
• Small group or individual websites. Students can also share their research or a project by creating their own websites.

How do I get started?

Contact Diane Creede, Lyndsay Bratton, or Jessica McCullough to create your domain and get started! If you have an idea, feel free to contact one of us. We can work with anyone regardless of your experience with technology.

Open Access Week 2018

Every year in October we celebrate Open Access Week, an international celebration of everything open. If this doesn’t sound familiar, read up on the topic through the (brief!) blog posts we published in previous  years:

• What is Open Access
• Impact of Open Access
• Local to Global Open Access
• Is Your Work Still Yours?
• Teaching Open Access

This year we are focused on advocating for the use of Open Educational Resources (OER) on our campus. Many staff and faculty colleagues have been thinking about ways to decrease the total cost of a Connecticut College education by replacing traditional textbooks with OER. During Open Access week this year, we will conduct a whiteboard survey in Shain Library asking students questions about how students use, acquire, and pay for textbooks. In following weeks we will collect and share the results of the survey.

We also invite you to attend and participate in a hands-on workshop to explore and discover OER for your courses, learn about and help shape future grant opportunities for OER implementation. Details are below – feel free to register or stop by as  your schedule allows. As always, coffee and snacks will be provided!

OER and Your Course: Integrating Open Content into the Curriculum – Register
Monday, October 22 | 3:00-4:00pm | Advanced Technology Lab, Shain Library
Open educational resources (OER) are educational materials that are distributed at no cost and have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-­purposing by others. OER include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks,  streaming videos, tests, software, and other materials. Much work has been done at the College to integrate OER into classes. We will share what OER programming is developing and how to integrate these resources and practices into your own courses.

Moodle (and More!) Drop-In

Return by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 ImageCreator

To help ease your return to the classroom, we are offering instructional technology drop-in hours. Stop by to get some last-minute class prep done with colleagues! Bring your questions on Moodle, WordPress, Computer Labs, Google Apps, or whatever else is on your mind. Bring your own computer or use one of ours in the Advanced Technology Lab and get last-minute class preparation done. See you there!

Moodle (and More!) Drop-In
Monday, August 27, 2018 | 9:00-11:00am
Advanced Technology Lab, Lower Level, Shain Library

Definitely coming? Let us know!

Weatherproofing Workshop Recap

*This post was scheduled for later in the day, but we are publishing it now due to the weather!

Did you miss the weatherproofing workshop last week? We focused on three types of activities you can do with your students if you are unable to attend class. Here are just a few ideas we shared. If you want more information or need step-by-step instructions about anything mentioned, contact Diane Creede or Jessica McCullough!

1. Record mini-lectures or a full lecture. This can be so easy and done on the fly! Record audio directly on PowerPoint slides, or make mini-lectures and share with students. Students can listen/watch from any location, and you can include some of the more participatory ideas below to hold discussion and check for understanding. Technologies we demonstrated are PowerPoint (Insert Audio feature), QuickTime audio/screen capture, Jing, and whiteboard apps such as Educreations.
2. Hold discussion, collect responses, and continue group work.  Students can participate in discussion and participate in group projects just as they would during class. Use a Moodle Forum to elicit responses to readings or your recorded mini-lectures, or to hold (asynchronous) discussion. Google Docs can be used for group work – ask students to add you as an editor and check in, answer questions, and provide feedback as they progress.
3. Meet virtually. Have an exam coming up and want to be available to answer questions or hold a review? Hold virtual office hours using a tool such as Zoom. A free license allows for a 40-minute virtual meeting. We have a limited number of Pro licenses that we can distribute for longer meetings. Other options are Google Hangouts or Skype.

In Search of Video Content?

Are you looking for that perfect film that will inspire discussion? One that will serve as introduction or closure to a topic, or perfectly demonstrate a concept? Searching Google and YouTube may not be the most effective way to find great educational films. Here are some free, online video resources that you may not know about. Of course, I would be remiss if I did not mention Kanopy, a resource with thousands of full length films, funded by the library, available to Connecticut College students, staff and faculty. 

Warning: Exploring these resources may take you down long and winding rabbit holes!

• AdViews: A Digital Archive of Vintage TV Commercials (1950s-1980s)
  Maintained by Duke University Libraries Digital Collections.
• American Indian Film Gallery: The Films
  Several hundred short films arranged by tribe.
• AP Archive
  The film and video archive of The Associated Press (AP), including over 1.7 million newsreels and stories from 1895-current.
• British Council Film Collection
  Archive of over 120 short documentary films made by the British Council during the 1940s designed to show the world how Britain lived, worked and played.
• C-Span Video Library
  Archive of government programs covering Capital Hill, The White House and U.S. politics for over 20 years.
• Digital Public Library of America
  The DPLA brings together digital collections from across the country into a single platform and portal. Search by keyword, then filter by “Type” to “moving image.”
• Folkstreams
  Documentaries on folk and roots culture, many from the 1960s.
• Frontline (PBS)
  Thought provoking journalism from PBS now offers their archive streaming online.
• Internet Archive – Moving Images
  A vast archive of public domain and ephemeral films.
• The Living Room Candidate: Presidential Campaign Commercials 1952-2012
  Produced by the Museum of the Moving Image.
• Mosfilm
  Hundreds of full length films streaming online — in Russian only.
• Moving Image Archive
  More than a million digital movies uploaded by various users, many of which are available for download.
• The National Film Registry
  The National Film Registry is a list of movies deemed “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant” that are earmarked for preservation by the Library of Congress. With few exceptions, films can can be downloaded, edited, mixed and used to create new content.
• The Open Video Project
  A shared digital video collection from UNC Chapel Hill’s School of Information, most with Creative Commons licensing.
• SnagFilms
  More than 2500 award-winning independent documentary titles
• Video Data Bank
  Videos by and about contemporary artists from the School of Art Institute of Chicago.
• WGBH Open Vault
  Provides online access to historical news and feature stories produced by the public television and radio station WGBH (Boston).

Leveling the Playing Field with DELI

Three years ago in my Costume History class, I noticed that students with access to color printouts and Photoshop were producing higher quality work on their assignments. Committed to creating a more equitable learning environment, I made an appointment with Digital Scholarship and Visual Resources Librarian, Lyndsay Bratton, to discuss ways that the College’s DELI program might help level the playing field in my class. After some collective brainstorming, Lyndsay suggested that I integrate DELI iPad loaners into the course and recommended the Skitch, Paper, and Morpholio applications as potential digital tools. After some testing, I decided to go with Skitch, because its intuitive interface allows users to label, caption, and markup imported images on both the iPad and Mac.

Fast forward to fall 2015 and the introduction of iPads into my Costume History course. After giving students guidelines on how to successfully complete their weekly “costume research dossiers,” an assignment in which they must accurately locate, cite and label images of historical western dress, Lyndsay stopped by to distribute iPads, chargers, and styluses. She took time to walk students through the iPad’s various functions and together we familiarized them with Skitch, Google Drive, Pinterest, Vogue Runway, and the many other applications she generously installed onto everyone’s tablets. After solving some minor tech issues, the class quickly acclimated to the new technology. The ultimate test finally revealed itself when the first round of annotated images were due. Not surprisingly, the clarity/quality of work executed with the aid of Skitch showed a vast, across-the-board improvement compared to assignments submitted the previous year.

To conclude, I recently completed my third round of teaching with iPads and I find that the majority of students appreciate the opportunity to borrow the devices. Some said they thought the Skitch app worked better on their personal laptops and a small minority found borrowing an iPad burdensome. Since my goal is to create equal access and not to add more stress, I make borrowing completely optional. This policy has the added benefit of freeing up limited resources for the DELI program to accommodate more classes.

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Note: To participate in the DELI program, proposals for Spring 2018 are due Wednesday, November 15!

Participating in the Open Access Movement

How do you become a part of the open access movement?

What makes it [Open Access] possible is the internet and the consent of the author or copyright-holder.

From Peter Suber’s Very brief introduction to Open Access.

Fortunately, Information Services has the internet and sharing platform (Digital Commons) figured out for you. Determining the copyright-holder is a little more complicated. By default, you own the copyright to all your creative work as soon as it is recorded (online or in print). If your work was published in a journal, you needed to sign at least *some* of the copyright over to the publisher so they could distribute the work. Unfortunately, in many cases, authors actually transfer ALL rights associated with their work to the publisher, or certainly more rights than the publisher actually needs. Depending on the rights you granted the publisher, you may not be legally allowed to distribute your scholarship via Digital Commons or other online repositories like ResearchGate or Academia.edu, provide copies to colleagues or students(!), or reuse parts of it in upcoming publications (like books!).

How do you know?

If you signed a Copyright Transfer Agreement, read the document carefully and ask your publisher to clarify any language that you don’t understand. If you no longer have a copy of that agreement, we can use databases like Sherpa/Romeo to search for a journal and find “a summary of permissions that are normally given as part of each publisher’s copyright transfer agreement.”

Attend our workshop today (4:15pm, Davis Classroom) where we will help you determine which articles, conference presentations, and other research can be made openly available in Digital Commons.

Open Access Week 2017

Happy Open Access Week 2017! Still not sure what we mean by Open Access, or how it relates to your research, teaching, or the college in general? Open Access is a complex issue and constantly in flux due to innovations and changes in technology, federal and state policies, grant funding agency requirements, for-profit and non-profit publishing stipulations, and the culture and expectations of the Academy. This week, through a series of posts, we will explain Open Access with special attention paid to our local environment at Connecticut College.

OA Defined

According to Peter Suber, “Open Access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. What makes it possible is the internet and the consent of the author or copyright-holder.” Tomorrow’s post will discuss Suber’s last statement in more detail. In the meantime, this video does a nice job of summarizing the history of publishing and the need for Open Access.

Upcoming September Events

We hope to see you at some of our upcoming events this month. Beverages and snacks are provided, as well as friendly colleagues and interesting conversation! Feel free to register or just stop by as your schedule allows.

Thursday! Joint Session with the Center for Teaching & Learning 

Helping Students Read Effectively: In Print & Online – Email Tanya Schneider to Register
Thursday Sept 14, 8:45-10:15 AM| Hood Dining Room, Blaustein Humanities Center
Reading is a significant part of our students’ learning on campus, and much of this work takes place outside of class. How can we effectively guide their efforts to make sure that they are reading effectively and preparing well to reflect on their reading during class? How does reading online and in print differ, and how can we teach students to read carefully and critically in different media? This joint session with Instructional Technology will help us all consider methods that colleagues are already implementing and other approaches that we may want to share with our students.

Technologies for Teaching & Research Workshops

Reflect, Integrate, Demonstrate: Student Digital Portfolios – Register
Tuesday, September 19, 2:00 – 3:30 | Advanced Technology Lab
As we build a curriculum that asks students to reflect upon and integrate their coursework and co-curricular activities, several members of of our teaching and learning community are experimenting with digital portfolios as a space for this work. Through digital portfolios, students can archive artifacts that document and demonstrate their path through their education. Narrative explanations and curated examples make clear why they selected courses, a major or pathway, as well as what they learned and accomplished. We will demonstrate platform options and end with a discussion and leave with ideas for future implementations.

Media Literacy and Fake News – Register
Tuesday, September 26, 2:00 – 3:30 | Davis Classroom
Authorship, authority and credibility.  How do we help our students distinguish a more-credible resource from a less-credible one? What is media literacy and why do our students need to understand it? We will offer assignment ideas and class activities faculty can use to incorporate media literacy into their courses.

Reading Group

Debates in the Digital Humanities
Thursdays 2:30-3:30: September 21, October 26 & November 30
Advanced Technology Lab
Texts Available Online

Should liberal arts campuses do digital humanities? What is the role of teaching and learning in digital humanities? How are the digital humanities impacting your field? How do the digital humanities engage with, improve, and/or perpetuate problems of social justice? Debates in the Digital Humanities addresses these questions and many more. We will read some chapters together, and others of your choosing, based on your own interests.

Attend one session or all three! Please let Lyndsay Bratton know if you are interested in attending any of the meetings, so that planned readings can be communicated.