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!

My dear THATCampers!  I just wanted to touch base and tell you that I can’t wait for all of us to meet!

Wednesday from 4-6 p.m., I will be in the “Quiet Study Room” on the bottom floor of the AUC Woodruff Library doing early registration and also providing any assistance that anyone might need in some basic tools for THATCamp–like how to use Twitter, the WIKI, and our WordPress site.  Please stop by if you have any questions at all!

We have given the security people at the front door a list of your names, so you should be able to get in with no problems.  However, if you DO have a problem, the security people also have my cell number–so please give me a ring!

Wednesday night, some of you might enjoy going out to a nearby Cantina called “No Mas.”   I am told they have a wonderful bar and restaurant there, as well as some nice shops.  There is a pre-conference Schmooze set for 6-8 at No Mas.  I didn’t make any reservations,   but I figure we can all meet there casually.

From 8-9 a.m. in the AUC Woodruff Library “Quiet Study Area,” we will met for some coffee and some more registration for anyone who needs to pick up badges then, and then, at 9 a.m. we will convene our scheduling session for the (un)conference.

Please be prepared to suggest some session ideas (even on the fly), so that we can make this a very useful and interesting THATCamp!

These Ground Rules have been established by the THATCamp organization at the Center for History and the New Media at George Mason University, where THATCamp was founded.

Since then, THATCamp has become an international phenomenon, helping to bridge the gap between people, projects, and the digital divide of technology and humanities teaching and research.

These are the THATCamp Ground Rules:

1. THATCamp is FUN – That means no reading papers, no powerpoint presentations, no extended project demos, and especially no grandstanding.
2. THATCamp is PRODUCTIVE – Following from the no papers rule, we’re not here to listen and be listened to. We’re here to work, to participate actively. It is our sincere hope that you use today to solve a problem, start a new project, reinvigorate an old one, write some code, write a blog post, cure your writer’s block, forge a new collaboration, or whatever else stands for real results by your definition. We are here to get stuff done.
3. THATCamp is COLLEGIAL – 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. So no nitpicking, no tweckling, no petty BS.
4. The Law of Two Feet – If, at any point in a session or workshop, you decide that it is not useful to you, you are expected to use your two feet to go to another session or workshop.

]]> http://hbcu2012.thatcamp.org/06/12/some-details-before-the-conference/feed/ 1 http://hbcu2012.thatcamp.org/06/12/building-digital-bridges-to-cross-cultural-divides/ http://hbcu2012.thatcamp.org/06/12/building-digital-bridges-to-cross-cultural-divides/#comments Tue, 12 Jun 2012 11:22:36 +0000 http://hbcu2012.thatcamp.org/?p=432 Continue reading →]]>

I am a part of a team of students, scholars, entrepreneurs, and volunteers who are building a digital library and genealogical/family history database for African Americans (Gullah-Geechee) in coastal Georgia and their “distant relatives” in Sierra Leone. The purpose of this project, sponsored by the Carlton-Carew Ep Foundation, is to exchange resources and ideas, initiating a dialogue to bridge cultural, historical, technological and economic divides in the present. At THATCamp I would like to share the goals for this project, find new friends and partners, and most importantly get feedback and suggestions on how to incorporate emerging technologies into this project.

I think it would be a great idea to add a film editing workshop. If there isn’t already one.

For those who don’t know, Khan Academy is a website of over 3200 short videos on such topics as math (from basic all the way up to calculus), physics (from just a little above my head to way above my head), finance, art and history.

Duolingo is an innovative language learning platform where users learn a language for free while translating the world wide web at the same time.

Both of these sites incorporate some of the ideas included within the Digital Humanities Glossary that Michelle posted: Digital Pedagogy, Digital Teaching, Flattening Learning Curve, Flipped Classroom and Gamification.

I am proposing a session in which we go through the websites Khanacademy.org and Duolingo.com (I have established accounts with both) and use them as a context for a discussion on the concepts above. More importantly, of course, the discussion will be used to generate thoughts about what we can do as educators to use these technologies and others like them to maximum benefit. Or perhaps we should be creating our own technologies?

If you haven’t used these sites, I encourage you to check them out. They’re actually pretty fun.

Michael Luther
Reference Librarian
Robert W. Woodruff Library

One of the challenges of operating in the digital humanities is a reliance on often unreliable campus infrastructures; let’s spend some time hacking digital humanities advances/innovations (especially for the classroom) such that the backups and alternatives are easy for

• students who don’t have computers at home,
• classrooms without (or with intermittent) networking,
• last minute chaos arising from incompatible technology, and
• all the rest.

Most of us who are working at HBCU’s and small liberal arts colleges find ourselves alone in our quest to use Digital Humanities in our classes, in our research, and in our departmental work.  I would like to suggest the idea of a Digital Commons for HBCUs, where we can work together toward common projects.

Last November, City University of New York announced they would be creating a “Commons in a Box” that would make the creation of a Digital Commons easy to set up.

I would like to talk about the possibility of setting up a commons, and some of the technical and logistical challenges that might be part of such a project.

The Mervyn H. Sterne Library at UAB hosts UAB Digital Collections (www.mhsl.uab.edu/dc/), including oral histories, student-created ethnographic films, images, letters, and other documents related to medical history; StoryCorps interviews, and archives of a number of UAB publications.  Although we don’t have a special collections department, we also have stand-alone physical items that could be incorporated into different courses.

I’m interested in working with arts and humanities faculty on specific student assignments and/or digital humanities projects using the digital and physical material in our collections.  Students can of course use the material as primary sources in traditional papers, but I’m really interested in students combining archives and digital collections to and technology to present their own interpretations of the subject matter.

For this THATCamp session, I’d like to talk about how others are using library archives and digital collections at their institutions and brainstorm ideas about assignments/projects that can incorporate this material.

Starter questions:
How might different disciplines in the humanities use library archives and digital collections?  What are project ideas?

What are the best platforms to host student projects that incorporate material from archives and digital collections?

I would like to see a session on how virtual environments can be used as educational tools in the classroom.

Van Dora

Hi.

I’m not sure how many are familiar with screencasting (web 2.0 tool) but I think a great session on using screencasting as a tool to comment on student writing and other assignments would be beneficial to all.

Van Dora

A year ago, when I was hallucinating about having a cache of iPads to pass around my class, I responded to a grant initiative in my region for proposals involving a consortium of members from four universities in North Carolina’s Piedmont Triad Region.  The project “Apps4Art” was born (had to come up with a good reason for needing iPads didn’t we?) –and the quest embarked on was to download as many arts-related Apps as we could find on the market in 2011-2012–decide which were good, bad or ugly and develop a critique/jurying process that would evolve into a questionnaire for students–to help us compile statistics on Art Apps: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly.  The four people involved in this project were a Museum Curator, a Printmaker, an Actress/Creative Entrepreneur and an Art Historian.

With more and more educators –higher ed and K-12 bringing iPads into the classroom, there appeared to us to be  a need to have some sort of review/vetting system. We envisioned a kind of Rotten Tomatoes/Popcorn approach to compiling our data for Art related Apps.  We figured this out after spending too much money on worthless Apps.

Would be happy to share the results of our work—our rating system, our questionnaire etc.  Any other content-areas starting to be intentional about looking for quality and efficacy in Apps?  Our hands-down favorite, the Top of our Top Ten list of Arts-related Apps…The Museum of Modern Art’s Abstract Expressionism App.  (Moma AbEx Ipad App). (Free:)

Janet Seiz, Art Historian,

North Carolina A & T State University, Greensboro, NC

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).

Many of us have been saddled with outdated Blackboard Systems for Course Management at our campuses.  What system do you use?  What are the alternatives?  How do we organize and deliver our courses without confusing and overwhelming our students?