My Dear THATCamp HBCU participants–

Please feel free to add a reflection upon your THATCamp HBCU experience to this site, or, if you have added it to another blog or website, please feel free to share that link with the rest of us here.

Remember, any posts that are tagged “Thatcamp” and “proceedings” will be immediately picked up by  “Proceedings at THATCamp,” a publication of the Center for History and the New Media at George Mason University.  After you finish your reflection/article/essay, just click on “Proceedings” under the category button next to the post.

We would all love to hear what you have to say about your experience, how you are using the knowledge you gained, and any suggestions you have for next year.

Thank You!

Michelle

Atlanta Reflections

I’m so thrilled that we had such a productive day at THATCamp HBCU!

There’s more to come tomorrow!  Please remember, if you have any new session ideas you would like to happen, please add them to the WIKI in the schedule section.

Please make sure that you add your notes to the WIKI so that others who couldn’t be at the session or workshop you attended could still learn about that topic.

Also, there is a small poll that THATCamp.org would like everyone to take when they are done with THATCamp HBCU in order to evaluate how our THATCamp went.

I can’t wait to see you all tomorrow!

Please, please, please . . . if you have a session idea: propose it!  If you think you have a session idea, but aren’t sure:  propose it!

This is an (un)conference!  If we don’t have lots of session ideas, we don’t have sessions!!

If you are unsure about how to post, please contact Michelle and she will assist you.  You can also suggest last-minute session ideas at the opening session on Thursday.

Please post your Twitter ID on our WIKI because the silly “comments” section on this blog won’t let us do it without eliminating the link.

The Hashtag for the Conference:  #THATCamp #HBCU

OK, I’m taking the ultimate THATCamp risk–trying something very new.

I created two new areas for our THATCamp in order to help organize and take notes for this (un)conference.

First, I made a “dashboard”–where you can access many of the tools that are useful for THATCamp HBCU all in one place.

Next, I made a WIKI–so that we can all take collaborative notes and make schedules, etc. (This can also be visited using the dashboard).

I hope these are both useful and that they work.  If they don’t–we can always abandon them!  

Michelle

I thought this might be a helpful guide for many of you who are new to the field!

You can find this helpful document by clicking HERE.

If you took a look at our schedule outline, you will see that, on the last day of the conference, during lunch, we are scheduled to do something called “dork shorts.”

Dork Shorts is a THATCamp tradition which is loosely based upon the idea of PechaKucha 20X20, a presentation that gives a lot of information in a very short time.

In 2 minutes or less, you can present a project you are working on–either one you are currently doing, or one you are now inspired to do because of THATCamp HBCU–and make some powerpoint slides to show as you do it.

It doesn’t have to be fully realized.  You may present on things you are just thinking about, if you wish.

Here is an example, from THATCamp CHNM:

Calling all iPad users . . .

Andre Vlajk, Higher Education Account Manager in Technology Assessment, Planning, and Consulting for Apple will be presenting two workshops for THATCamp HBCU on Thursday, June 14th:

1) “Tips and Tricks on iPad”

Demonstrates some of the new features in iOS5 with a focuses on the educational relevance. The workshop is designed to show ways to more efficiently use your iPad. The seminar is designed to be sharing and interactive so bring a tip/workflow/app to share. The target audience is educational iPad users. Personal iPad Recommended

2) “Beyond Textbooks: Creating textbooks, distributing via new iTunes U, and access textbooks on the new iBooks”

Apple announced iBook Author, iTunes U app and iBooks 2 on January 19th, 2012.  See a demonstration to explore usage of these new tools.  See www.apple.com/education/ for an overview.  No iPad Required.

OK, everyone!  It’s time to get posting!!

THATCamp HBCU depends upon you to decide what we will be doing in our sessions. Do you want to discuss a theory?  Find common ground? Rant?  Rave?

This is your chance!  You don’t need a “finely crafted proposal”–just throw something out there and see what we think!

Fellow THATCampers will comment, suggest, and eventually vote on whether we hold the session.

This is how it works–stolen in most of it’s entirety (I changed some dates) from THATCamp Prime website!:

Technical details

Once you are registered, you should receive login information for the site. To propose a session, log in and go to Posts –> Add New. (Note from Michelle: This isn’t how it has worked for me!  If you want details about how to get onto the site to post, check out the page on How to Post Session Proposals for more guidance.)

Write your session proposal as a blog post and publish it to the blog. In the first time slot on Thursday morning (6/14), all of us will go over all the proposals together and create an agenda for the next day and a half from them. We encourage all participants to propose a session.

Content details

Some session genres and examples are given below. The best tip: do not prepare a paper or presentation. Plan instead to have a conversation, to get some work done, or to have fun. An unconference, in Tom Scheinfeldt’s words, is fun, productive, and collegial, and at THATCamp, therefore, “[W]e’re not here to listen and be listened to. We’re here to work, to participate actively.[…] We’re here to get stuff done.” Listen further:

Everyone should feel equally free to participate and everyone should let everyone else feel equally free to participate. You are not students and professors, management and staff here at THATCamp. At most conferences, the game we play is one in which I, the speaker, try desperately to prove to you how smart I am, and you, the audience member, tries desperately in the question and answer period to show how stupid I am by comparison. Not here. At THATCamp we’re here to be supportive of one another as we all struggle with the challenges and opportunities of incorporating technology in our work, departments, disciplines, and humanist missions.

Note that while we have arranged for some hands-on skills training workshops beforehand, and there may be some smidgen of presenting going on therein, you can also propose to teach a workshop at the last minute. As long as you know something and others don’t, it will likely be productive for all concerned, even if you haven’t prepared much. And, if it isn’t, we encourage participants to invoke the law of two feet to find a more productive session.

Session proposers are session facilitators

If you propose a session, you should be prepared to run it. If you propose a hacking session, you should have the germ of a project to work on; if you propose a workshop, you should be prepared to teach it; if you propose a discussion of the Digital Public Library of America, you should be prepared to summarize what that is, begin the discussion, keep it going, and end it. But don’t worry — with the possible exception of workshops you’ve offered to teach, THATCamp sessions don’t really need to be prepared for; in fact, we infinitely prefer that you don’t prepare.

At most, you should come with one or two questions, problems, or goals, and you should be prepared to spend the session working on and working out those one or two points informally with a group of people who (believe me) are not there to judge your performance. Even last-minute workshops can be terrifically useful for others if you know the tool or skill you’re teaching inside and out. As long as you take responsibility for running the session, that’s usually all that’s needed. Read about the Open Space Technology approach to organizing meetings for a longer discussion of why we don’t adopt or encourage more structured forms of facilitation.

Session genres

1. General discussion — Sometimes people just want to get together and talk informally, with no agenda, about something they’re all interested in. Nothing wrong with that; it’s certainly a much better way of meeting people than addressing them from behind a podium. Propose a session on a topic that interests you, and if other people are interested, they’ll show up to talk about it with you.
   • Jon Voss, Toward Linked Data in the Humanities, Great Lakes THATCamp 2010.
   • Nick Mirzoeff, An actual digital revolution?, THATCamp Prime 2009
   • Jeffrey McClurken, Archiving Social Media Conversations of Significant Events, THATCamp Prime 2009 (this session was combined with Nick Mirzoeff’s, above)
   • Eli Pousson, How do we share our knowledge of historic places?, THATCamp Columbus 2010
   • Frédéric Clavert and Véronique Ginouvès, Les archives orales et le web (Oral testimonies and the web), THATCamp Paris 2010
   • Zach Whalen, ARGS, Archives, and Digital Scholarship, THATCamp 2010
2. Hacking session — Several coders gather in a room to work on a particular project. These should usually take more than an hour or even two; if you propose such a session, you might want to ask that one room or swing space be dedicated to it for the entire day.
   • David Uspal, Hackfest: HTML5, THATCamp Philly 2011
   • Wayne Graham, Mostly Hack Zotero hacking session, THATCamp Prime 2010
   • Stéfan Sinclair, One Day, One Toolet, Great Lakes THATCamp 2010
   • Ben Brumfield, Hackfest, THATCamp Austin 2009
3. Writing session — A group of people get together to start writing something. Writing can be collaborative or parallel: everyone can work together (probably in Google Docs) or by themselves (yet with a writing vibe filling the air) to write an article, a manifesto, a book, a blog post, a plan, or what you will.
   • Julie Meloni, “Project develop self-paced open access digital humanities curriculum…, THATCamp Prime 2010
   • Dan Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt, One Week, One Book: Hacking the Academy, THATCamp Prime 2010
4. Working session — You’re working on something, and you suspect that some of the various people who come to THATCamp might be able to help you with it. You describe problems you want solved and questions you want answered, and strangers magically show up to hear about what you’re doing and to give you their perspective and advice. This is not an hour-long demo; you should come with specific questions or tasks you want to work on with others for most of the session.
   • Aditi Shrikumar, Text Mining and the Digital Humanities, Great Lakes THATCamp 2010
   • Kathleen Fitzpatrick, “how to transform something like CommentPress into a viable mode of open peer review,” THATCamp Southern California 2010
   • Sherman Dorn, The Ill-formed Question, THATCamp Prime 2009
5. Workshop — A traditional workshop session with an instructor who leads students through a short introduction to and hands-on exercise in a particular skill. (Note: the workshop series was formerly called “BootCamp,” a term we have now deprecated. Note too that as of January 2012 the Mellon fellowship program for THATCamps with workshops has ended.) A workshop may be arranged beforehand by the organizers or proposed by a participant who agrees to teach it.
   • Kirrily Roberts, FreeBase workshop, THATCamp Bay Area 2010
   • Bethany Nowviskie and Bill Turkel, Hacking Wearables and E-Textiles Workshop, Great Lakes THATCamp 2010.
   • Aditi Muralidharan, Visualization workshop, THATCamp Bay Area 2010
6. Grab bag — Ah, miscellany. One of our favorite categories. Indefinable by definition. It’s astonishing how creative people can be when you give them permission; performances and games are welcome.
   • David Staley, An installation, THATCamp Prime 2009.
   • Mark Sample, Zen Scavenger Hunt, THATCamp Prime 2010 (N.B.: The Zen Scavenger Hunt didn’t actually happen, but it was still a great idea).