Digital training session at 9am

amandafrench — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 11:53:56 +0000

So @GeorgeOnline (whose last name I simply MUST discover) has set up several platforms at http://teachinghumanities.org, and we semi-agreed over Twitter that it’d be fun to use the 9am “Digital Training” session to build it out a bit. Gee, anyone have a laptop they can bring?

Do please let us know via Twitter or comments on this post whether you’d like to use the session for that purpose; far be it from me to curtail conversation, especially the extraordinarily stimulating sort of conversation that has so far been the hallmark of THATcamp.

Digital History Across the Curriculum

amandafrench — Wed, 27 May 2009 20:18:31 +0000

How can digital skills and issues be thoroughly incorporated into a humanities curriculum, especially a graduate curriculum? It’s basically a “lazyweb” question, because that’s exactly the question I’m grappling with now in my current position, so if the minds at THATcamp would help me, I’d be extremely grateful indeed. It’s easy enough to design and teach a digital humanities course or two, but there’s something about that approach that just seems wrong. It keeps digital humanities in its own little pen, which is odd considering that those of us yelling into that echo chamber simply *know* that the whole practice of the humanities is going to have to come to terms with new technologies sooner or later. It’s also odd considering how many more careers are opened up to digitally literate people. I do think that digital humanities has been very much a research-oriented field, and I’d really like to concentrate on teaching for a bit. It may be that current educational course-centric structures are simply inimical to the digital humanities; I wager that most of us learned to be digital humanists through collaborative project work and self-directed study, which aren’t well supported by a 3-credit single-teacher single-department course structure.

[Several months later . . . ]

I’m in the thick now of writing a curriculum, and I can tell you a few things:

There are guidelines for M.A. programs set by the National Council on Public History and the Society of American Archivists, and I’m drawing heavily on those. There’s also the AHA’s book, The Education of Historians for the Twenty-First Century, published 2004, but I haven’t had a chance to look at it yet — I’m pretty sure there’s nothing about social networking in it, though! There’s also Dan Cohen’s recent narrative of the GMU PhD in Digital History in the May 2009 issue of AHA’s Perspectives.

What there isn’t is a set of guidelines for baseline digital skills that humanists should have. Perhaps all humanists don’t need digital skills. Nevertheless, it’s something I’m hacking away at.

(Let me just work out a Zotero issue & I’ll link to my bibliography with the above-named resources in it.)

THATCamp » amandafrench

Digital training session at 9am

Digital History Across the Curriculum