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.

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?

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?

THATCamp Workshops are the heart of any THATCamp (un)Conference.  We all love to learn something new, or learn something better.

We are planning to offer Workshops on Thursday and Friday Morning (Please see schedule).

These are the Workshops we have planned so far!   If you can teach a workshop, please let us know!!  We are adding more every day!

Thursday, June 14

Build a WordPress Website In One Hour or Less!

Learn to build a website with WordPress Blogging software hands-on.  This will be held in the computer lab.  No coding experience required!  A beginners workshop for anyone who wants to build a WordPress Site like the one you are on right now.

Michelle Kassorla is the coordinator of THATCamp HBCU, and a lecturer in Clark Atlanta University’s WISE QEP program.  She has been teaching WordPress for three years.

Think Like a Programmer:  

Learning LaTex as an Introduction to Programming Syntax

Peter Molnar will walk you through this hands-on workshop in learning LaTex, providing you with all the information you need to create a document and begin thinking like a programmer–with no programming or coding experience required.

Peter Molnar is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Clark Atlanta University. 

Introduction to Zotero

Making the Teaching of Style Almost Obsolete!

Zotero is a free open-source program created by the Center for History and the New Media at George Mason University (where THATCamp originated!!).  It works with Firefox as an add-on, and on Safari and Google Chrome as a stand alone program.  It also has an extremely powerful Microsoft Word plug-in which makes teaching style to our students almost obsolete!

Michelle Kassorla is the coordinator of THATCamp HBCU, and a lecturer in Clark Atlanta University’s WISE QEP program.  She has been using Zotero for years, and has just started introducing it to all of her students, random people at the computer lab, and anyone she can stop on the street.

Friday, June 15th

Note-able Software

Evernote and Microsoft OneNote

Notebook software can be the best option for an overall organizational tool at a low cost. Chystal Renfro and Mary Axford will introduce the two most common and most powerful notebook software programs, Evernote and Microsoft OneNote.

The discussion will include characteristics to consider when choosing a notebook software application and how to most effectively use them to organize your personal and professional life. We will give a walking tour of both products using real life notebooks which illustrate characteristics such as device compatibility, organizational structure, and note formats.

Crystal Renfro and Mary Axford are subject librarians in the Faculty Engagement Department of the Georgia Institute of Technology Library. Both have an interest in tools to increase academic productivity and workflow, and teach library workshops on these topics.  Their upcoming article on notebook software will be published in the May/June 2012 issue of the journal Online.

Google Tools

How We Use the World of Google Tools in our Classrooms

Google Tools are powerful, free, and engaging.  This is a session about Google Tools in the Classroom–how we use them, and what we do with them.  This session will be moderated, but it is open for sharing and swapping best practices with Google Tools.

Moderated by Vance Ricks, Associate Professor of Philosophy, and hard-core technophile from Guilford College, Greensboro, NC.

Productivity with ideas

Software for Tracking and Transforming

What You’ve Found and Thought

We generate ideas, save articles from journals and databases, take notes at meetings, jot down notes during phone calls, archive emails, have wow! moments during conversations  – but how do we keep track of all these ideas?  We don’t know which ones will end up being useful, so we tend to save them all.

There is software that can help you take these different kinds of items, combine them, play with them, uncombine them, put them back together differently, and ultimately make sense of them and turn them into new knowledge.   This session will cover some different types of software for dealing with these issues. We’ll look at actual databases using examples of these types of software so that you can see typical problems they can address and get a sense of how they work.

Dr. Shields has a PhD in International Relations as well as a Masters’ in Library Science.  During her first career, in international development, she worked in organizations ranging from the Peace Corps to the World Bank, and in countries as diverse as Tunisia, Djibouti, and Sri Lanka.  She came to Atlanta to work as a librarian in the Carter Center, went on to work for Georgia Tech’s Enterprise Innovation Institute, and moved recently to Kennesaw State University.  She started looking for “idea management” software in the 1980s when she was writing her dissertation, which was based on semi-structured interviews.  The problem of information/knowledge management has gotten steadily worse.