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Thus far this semester, I have exchanged precisely 0 pieces of paper with my students. Additionally, I have exchanged exactly 0 MSWord documents. (Oddly, the latter has been far more difficult than the former to maintain!) This session will discuss a variety of tools for classroom planning, class prep, “handouts,” readings, discussions, and all of the work of teaching in a paper-free way. I’m not imagining a hardware intensive discussion (e.g. if we all have ipads we can do…). Some specifics I can talk about include: WordPress in the classroom, Scrivener as a class planning and archiving tool, and using Wordle for really a wacky number of things. As a mac user on a PC campus, I can also speak to some of the cross-platform pitfalls. I’m also excited to hear discussion of others’ classroom, class planning, and teaching techniques.

Interestingly, not long after I posted this, I saw this article. Perhaps we can discuss the ethical and class issues around assuming access to the technology required to be paperless as well!

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I like Konrad’s post on little dh and am especially drawn to using digital tools for analysis and mining of data. I teach an introductory computer science course with Python and am particularly looking for applied problems in the humanities. The course focuses on problem solving over a wide range of liberal arts. So I am looking for good research opportunities in the humanities that require some programming but not a high level of sophistication in computer science. I have seen some wonderful applications that show off technology’s ability to handle and process large amounts of info and am seeking more. For example, students write programs to do straightforward text analysis of collections of books or political speeches; they can do some elementary web crawling; and they can process real-time data such as earthquakes or stock prices. So I am looking for good problems that are useful to solve and of necessity engage the students in interesting computer science algorithms. My first goal is to convert all of them to be technology users and practitioners; I hope they reach for technology (including programming) with the same ease they would reach for a bibliography or an online source or an archive or a test tube or any other tool in their discipline. My secondary goal is to convert many of my colleagues to be little dh users, colleagues who have yet to appreciate the enormous benefits these techniques might bring to their research.

So, anyone interested in a session that explores the kinds of succinct, circumscribed dh problems that are amenable to programming solutions? Anyone involved in teaching? Teaching in a liberal arts environment? I’ll supply the computer science know-how if you have the problems.

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Since I’ve begun teaching, I’ve become mildly obsessed with buying anthologies of primary sources. Until I had to get up in front of a classroom, I didn’t realize how difficult it was to select and make available primary sources to teach students with. A good anthology of sources has done more to advance the world’s knowledge than many a monograph.

But print anthologies have their flaws. First, no anthology has all the sources you need; you’ve got to pick and choose from them all. Second, they are expensive—no small issue for students. Third, many of them are out of print. Of course, there are some great anthologies of primary sources on the web: for example, History Matters and Do History. And of course, more and more there are large archives of primary sources online, like American Memory. But it seems to me that a useful tool for teachers would be a way of building your own anthology of sources for teaching.

Enter Omeka.

If you’re not familiar with it, “Omeka is a next generation web publishing platform for collections-based research of all kinds, one that bridges the scholarly, library, and museum worlds through a set of commonly recognized standards. In doing so, Omeka puts serious web publishing within reach of all scholars and cultural heritage professionals.” The self-hosted version of Omeka is easy enough to use, if you have some basic skills at installing and running web apps. But even better, the recently announced Omeka.net offers a hosted service that will make the software even easier to use.

In this session, I’d like to talk about the possibilities of using Omeka to create an anthology of primary sources for teaching. Specifically, these are the topics we might discuss:

• What would an Omeka anthology of sources look like? How would it be organized?
• What might be the best practices in creating an Omeka anthology?
• What are the copyright issues involved in creating an anthology? Does it make a difference if the anthology is publicly available, or available only to students in a given class?
• Can teachers roll their own Omeka anthologies, especially with Omeka.net, or should educational technologists get involved?
• What can Omeka offer that printed and bound anthologies cannot? I’m thinking here of capabilities like geo-tagging primary sources, as well as including media like audio, photos, and video that print cannot.

Most of all, let’s get our hands dirty and actually start using Omeka! I’ll have a self-hosted Omeka installation to use as a sandbox, and it’s easy to sign up for an Omeka.net account. In the words of Dave Lester, we need “more hack, less yack.”

If you’re interested in this session and want to think about it in advance, you might take a look at some of the fine Omeka sites that are already on the web. Two that I think are particularly good models of sites that are useful for teaching are Making the History of 1989 and The Object of History. You can see other examples at the Omeka showcase and at this wiki list of Omeka sites.

One last thing: if we have time, we might also discuss how to use Omeka as a repository of sources for research. Looking towards my future dissertation, I’ve set up an Omeka installation to collect the conversion narratives that I plan to study. (My Omeka archive is almost completely empty now, but here is the shell.) Can we use Omeka to promote transparency in research? If being an active researcher makes for better teaching—one of the assumptions of our research universities—then can making our sources available in Omeka make us better teachers?

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I probably don’t have to convince anyone attending THATCamp that it’s important to cultivate – and to teach our students to cultivate – an online presence. But what does it mean, in practice, to build and maintain a personal cyberinfrastructure?

I can imagine taking a session like this in a couple different, and not necessarily mutually exclusive directions:

1. The technical · How do you get started with a website of your own? How do you use personal web space as a hub, an aggregator, and an archiver of the content you produce in places scattered around the web?
2. The theoretical and the political · Most of us live our digital lives in many places. The content I create lives on my blog, on group blogs, on Twitter, on Github, on Gmail, etc. Some of these places are under my direct control, others are not. What are the personal-data-related arguments for moving away from third-party content-storage services like Twitter and Google? On the other hand, is there a tension between the idea that we should create content only in our own spaces and the underlying distributed spirit of the Internet itself? In short, is a truly personal cyberinfrastructure something we should even be aspiring for?
3. The pedagogical · Ed tech gurus like Gardner Campbell (from whom I believe I’m stealing the phrase ‘personal cyberinfrastructure’) and Jim Groom have experimented with and theorized about cyberinfrastructure in the classroom, teaching their students how to set up their own servers and also how to think about their identities as full citizens of the web. What is to be gained by such an exercise? Is it worth your class time to teach students about things like cPanel and WordPress? Should we fight the apparent tendency for our students to live their online lives in third-party silos like Facebook?

What do you think? Is there the makings of a session here?