Continue reading »]]>

Digi the Duck made an appearance this morning at THATCampHP. The good-humored duck said he was hoping to use some of the energy from Audrey Watters‘s excellent talk on publishing outside the academy to promote DigiWriMo — Digital Writing Month.

Digi was excited to see all the campers. “Yip!” he said.

Modeled after the inspirational National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), DigiWriMo encourages ambitious writers to create 50,000 words of digital writing in the thirty days of November. DigiWriMo’s participants will conspire, collaborate, co-author, cooperate, collude, and even compete to reach their goal in whatever form they see fit: blog posts, text message novellas, code poems, Twitter poems, wiki novels, some creative wizardry of text and image, and more! Digi and the DigiWriMo team encourage all the creative minds who will be too busy to reach 50,000 words to concoct their own goals.

Digi says he hopes you’ll encourage your students, fellow faculty, friends, neighbors, dog-walker, and others to join DigiWriMo this November. To pre-register, visit www.DigiWriMo.com.

Continue reading »]]>

A lot of wonderful conversations are sprouting up both in sessions, at lunch, and in passing. And along with that, a lot of great photos are being posted. Below, you will find a bunch of pictures I am attempting to collect off of twitter so you can access them in one easy location. Enjoy!

Schedule Collaborated and Made – Photo by @rogerwhitson

Photo by @esquetee

Howard Rheingold gives an interactive talk. Photo by @erikpalmer

Participants in a session all join Hangout together. Photo by @erikpalmer

Rheingold’s talk from another angle. Drink that coffee, Roger! Photo by @kathiiberens

THATcampHP from a different angle. Photo by @andycampbell

THATcampHP Google Hangout and Jesse’s face – Photo by @ldhunter

In case you were thinking about food – here’s THATcampHP lunch! Photo by @vrobin1000

All roads lead to THATcamp – well… and Guitar. Photo by @allistelling

Another angle on Lunch, and scheduling it out – photo by @allistelling

Hanging out with Jesse – Photo by @erikpalmer

Continue reading »]]>

THATCamp un-conferences are about redesigning how scholarly and critical conversations work. If you’ve never been to a THATCamp before, here are some short reminders for un-conferencing this weekend. For a more, see Tom Scheinfeldt’s  THATCamp Groundrules. See also THATCamp LAC’s More Hack Guide, compiled earlier this year.

The Rule of Two Feet: Use them. You’re not beholden to any particular session. Feel free to get up, move around, browse, and engage where and when you’d like. Use the Twitter hashtag (#thatcamphp) to follow what’s going on in other rooms.

Less Yack More Hack: Make something, write something, plan something. This guidelines is not about reducing conversation, but about moving toward a new approach, a re-purpose, a strategy, a project.

No “Giving a Paper”: If you suggest a session, you aren’t expected to “read” anything. Instead, your session should be a conversation that you facilitate. Give the group an idea, some shared “content” or questions, and let things unfold.

Push It To The Web: THATCamp Hybrid Pedagogy offers anyone on the web the ability to engage, share, and collaborate with us at Marylhurst University. Remember that others may be peeking in and consider ways to perforate the boundary of the room with a digital tool or two. Start with the GDoc link provided for the session on the schedule.

Continue reading »]]>

How can THATcampers play a role in bringing more of our faculty colleagues on board for practices of teaching and learning with social media?

This question has lots of nuances and side issues that are not well represented in a straightforward statement of the topic. It’s not just social media, but all kinds of other emerging technologies and platforms for online learning. It’s not just conservative faculty, but often also digital native students who resist using social media to learn productively. Getting students to work socially breaks our existing models of assessment, and the technical tools that we need to properly do social assessment still need to be built. The list goes on.

But, if you are like me, you are predisposed to attend THATcamp because you have chosen the red pill, and believe that the new technologies are not just a optional layer on top of the social world of our colleagues and students. So I hope that this discussion session can provide an open-ended  opportunity for like-minded teachers and scholars to share best practices for involving the whole faculty in the kind of higher education needed in the 21st century.

Continue reading »]]>

Lewis & Clark College has recently launched an initiative in digital field scholarship (DFS), spanning the humanities and sciences in an effort to explore how liberal education is enhanced via concepts of space/place, geolocated fieldwork, and associated devices/apps. Some examples I’m overseeing include an interdisciplinary undergraduate environmental research project, Situating the Global Environment, and a new DFS “sandbox” project for 2012–13 sponsored by NITLE and involving Lewis & Clark and three collaborating institutions.

In our limited HP ThatCamp time together, I’d like to propose a focus on DFS pedagogy (vs. e.g. technology). Here are a few starter questions:

1. What sorts of conceptual/technical/etc. skills and associated learning outcomes merit prioritization in DFS?
2. How can we best support both the incremental process and the final products of DFS in a course or other setting? How do student-generated text, raw/processed imagery, etc. ideally enter into the process/products?
3. How can the field as a site for learning best interface with the classroom, computer lab, online community, one’s own personal learning space, etc.? How can the field best serve as a gathering point for multiple student projects, multiple courses, multiple institutions, etc.—i.e., how can it support greater cross-disciplinary scholarship?
4. What are the important learning-related opportunities and limitations of digital field scholarship we should keep in mind, as compared to more analog/web1.0/20th-century technologies?

Looking forward to meeting others!…

Continue reading »]]>

The Chronicle of Higher Education began a series last week titled “College, Reinvented“. In addition to 15 thought provoking articles suggesting how higher education should change (for instance “Grades Out, Badges In” and “Ditch the Monograph”), the series is also soliciting designs for new models.  “If you could start your own institution of higher education from scratch, what would you build,” it asks. “Sketch out your idea—in prose or poetry, a picture, a video, or even a song—and send it to us.” Five will be published online, and one will be awarded $500. It’s the beginning of a populist think tank of sorts.

I love this idea. Since leaving the high school classroom in 2003, I have been imagining how school could work differently — how, in fact, it DOES work differently in many other areas of our lives (I explored this earlier this year at THATCamp SE with “Graded By The Street: Experiential Learning”). Institutions give us a wealth of stable structures (like windows, bathrooms, presidents, and libraries), but they also can present certain economic and pedagogical obstacles. In fact, Hybrid Pedagogy began after a series of conversations with Jesse about what our ideal school would look like.

The best THATCamps inspire work beyond their boundaries. I propose that we spend one session doing three things: 1) mapping the ideas already presented on “College, Reinvented,” 2) exploring the spaces that those pieces ignore, and 3) deciding what we (as individuals, as a large group, as teams) want to do to extend the reach of this inquiry beyond the contest (a blog, a report, an initiative?).

Oh, and we could also submit something(s). The deadline is Nov. 1. Submissions can include poems, videos, songs.

Continue reading »]]>

People, and children in particular, learn best by doing, that is hands-on activities that reinforce and integrate knowledge.  “Learning in place” (e.g. how to engineer bridges by visiting, discussing, climbing or building real bridges) has also been shown to greatly improve learning and make it long-lasting.  So, how does one implement these kinds of learning in on-line courses/pedigogy?   Thanks  Jeri

Continue reading »]]>

We’ve been working on a portfolio framework here at Marylhurst, particularly in the context of our “Liberal Arts Core.”  We just spent the last year on a series of conversations (accompanied by pie) on the ePortfolios&Pie Project. Our interest is in exactly what Sara is imagining – a process and practice that goes across courses (even outside the “garden wall” of the university) for students to connect and reflect on their learning. We’ve learned that, for a portfolio to support learning, we need to provide multiple opportunities for students to construct views in different contexts, for different audiences.  We’ve also learned that we need to be ready to meet the student at their “points of reflection” – whether they are an entering student, a student entering a program/major, a student stopping midpoint to evaluate their progress toward their goals, the student ready to graduate, or the student at any point in their learning that they choose. And, we faculty need to engage students directly around reflection, in order for the portfolio framework to have value.  I wonder if we could do a couple of working sessions, toward a project we might complete?  For example, we might create several personas (different, fully imagined people, with names and everything), and walk through what a portfolio framework might mean to them.

Questions that I’m interested in exploring:

What is the purpose of reflection? When does reflection occur (e.g. every class?) and on what (e.g. individual artifact such as a paper and/or or on a “whole” that is emerging for the student)? How can we make continuous engagement (reflection and connection) meaningful for students?

How does the “magic” happen? How do we turn what is otherwise just a collection of artifacts (papers, etc.)  into a meaningful, rich & deep learning experience for students? What does that mean about reflective practice (our own as learners, the university as a community of learners)?

How can we use ePortfolios to give students both the private, safe space to try & fail, to be authentic selves and the public showcase space that summarizes their learning at a particular moment in time? Is it necessary for the safe space to be private? Will a public space curb students’ willingness to take risks and be authentic?

Continue reading »]]>

As an ed-tech librarian I’ve been working with different departments on creating an online portfolio piece for their students. Unfortunately, this has been limited so far to portfolios that only demonstrate a student’s work in a specific department or class – not the student’s work across all classes, activities, and experiences.

I would really love to hear from other campers about their exposure to student portfolios or any method that went after a holistic assessment of the student rather than just a single class assessment.  It seems like we are training our students to see their time in college as unrelated little sound bites from class to class rather than seeing the big picture of their overall education.

In my dream world, having this big picture approach would mean students could create projects that span across their classes, including elements from Biology, History, and Literature, for example.  Faculty would get a sense of what their colleagues were doing in other classes because they would see it in their own students’ work.  But I will also be the first to admit that I can be naive about these things, so another part of this discussion might be how such an interdisciplinary approach to student assessment would or would not work.

Continue reading »]]>

Are class lectures moving toward being done electronically? Or will the traditional whiteboard continue to be used? If they are electronic, does that mean that PowerPoint necessarily has to dominate? Or are there alternatives?

One alternative is to use HTML5 coupled with JavaScript. This provides several advantages:

• The teacher can scroll smoothly through concepts, rather than having to show them on discrete slides.
• The contents of the lecture are in an open easy-to-read format, that will be easily viewable for decades to come. (Without relying on proprietary software.)
• Lectures can be posted online with no problem.
• JavaScript applets can be inserted easily. These can perform small interactive demos, which could be easily traded among teachers throughout the world.

Are there other possibilities?

Continue reading »]]>

I am a 20th and 21st century Americanist and research in the area of transnational American studies. I am currently pursuing a project that will think of ways in which we can incorporate GIS and GPS technologies in the Digital Humanities. Since the basic thrust of transnational studies is to question and erode national boundaries and nation-based paradigms of comprehension, I think there is a productive overlap between transnational theory and these new technologies that enable us to circumvent and remap nation-based imaginaries. I am interested in sharing ideas about the ways by which we can incorporate GIS and GPS technologies in the DH and in transnational studies. In what ways can we use technologies such as Google Earth to enhance DH? What software should we be familiar with? Do we need to be vigilant about corporate interests when we utilize GIS and GPS  technologies?

Continue reading »]]>

THATCamp Hybrid Pedagogy will be held in Portland, OR at Marylhurst University on October 20 and 21. The event is being organized by the English & Digital Humanities program and Center for Learning & Teaching at Marylhurst and the editors of Hybrid Pedagogy: A Digital Journal on Teaching & Technology.

THATCamp Hybrid Pedagogy will bring together teachers, librarians, technologists, and students to discuss points of intersection between the digital humanities, digital pedagogy, online learning, teaching with social media, and open education.

Hybrid pedagogy does not just describe an easy mixing of on-ground and online learning, but is about bringing the sorts of learning that happen in a physical place and the sorts of learning that happen in a virtual place into a more engaged and dynamic conversation.

What is THATCamp? For more about THATCamp Hybrid Pedagogy and the unconference format, go to our About page. Also, read about other THATCamps at thatcamp.org.

Registration is now open.