Go Rogue.

It's been awhile since I posted something in the "classical scholarship" area here, so I figure it's due. Not for lack of content, mind you - it has continually astonished me to realize how active the community of classical scholars is when it comes to digital humanities. I've already mentioned the upcoming Digital Classics Association conference; folks like the Stoa Consortium, the Digital Classicist, EpiDoc, and the good ol' Perseus Project are just a sampling.

Within the Twitterverse, I really like @rogueclassicist, who pushes out a daily sampling of neat stories, from linguistic stuff to archaeological stories to gingerbread Herodotoi.

My Current Enthusiasms...

Some arbitrarily-chosen items which are currently making me happy.


Item the First: CNET brings us the story of an amateur video game editor who rewrites The Legend of Zelda so that Zelda herself is the hero(ine), and rescues Link!

Item the Second: Inverted World, by Christopher Priest. Published in 1974, it's a really engrossing, but relatively unknown, classic of sci fi. Read a review.

Item the Third: LTI apps. For someone who's serious about curation and presentation of a wide range of online content, having a platform which uses LTI is frackin' amazing. Digital hunting-and-gathering has its time and place - but so does well-structured and -presented coherent content.

Item the Fourth: Miegakure, a video game, long in development, but SO worth the wait: a puzzle-platformer in 4 (spatial) dimensions. Any site with a shout-out to Edwin A. Abbott is all right in my book.

Liberal Arts, Humanities and Technology

This post comes from an email dialogue I've had recently with a colleague at another institution. She dropped me a line earlier this semester, after we'd met at a conference, to ask my perspective on the role of the digital humanities ("DH" in the edtech jargon), specifically as someone who works and teaches at a small public liberal arts college - in her words, "the traditional and best bastion of humanities".

It's an important question - one that I think is going to inform a great deal of what we do in edu, higher and otherwise, more and more with each passing year. There are so many interrelated issues and considerations around the umbrella term "digital humanities," it's hard to know where to begin - my apologies if I'm a bit scattered! Hopefully there'll be at least a few nuggets you'll find useful to ponder, or to foster critical discussion.

My colleague asked: "in a word - what's your opinion? Yea or nay, and why?" My answer in a word: yea. I'm someone who sees DH as an opportunity to expand the relevance of the humanities and liberal arts - its values, the habits of mind it cultivates - into an important (and growing) aspect of the contemporary human experience.

Think of how long, and in how many different contexts, we've seen tension between the "pure" practice of the liberal arts and the "public intellectual" model. There's a sense in which the current dialogue over DH is another iteration of that longstanding back-and-forth: how far should we reach out into our students' world of what's happening now, and how much should we insist that they step out of that context and realize the ahistorical, noncontextual values the academy has traditionally endorsed? The liberal arts have a centuries-long tradition, and have stood the test of time. If we change what we do based on technology - especially given the amazingly rapid development of technology - do we risk becoming merely reactive, perpetually playing catch-up to an ever-changing set of technical skills?

Perhaps as importantly, there's a fair concern over the industry-driven nature of technology: even in something as seemingly innocuous as word-processing, the choice of our tech tools bears broad ethical consequences, committing us as individual researchers and teachers, and as institutions, to supporting particular companies/industries. ...Unless we're fortunate enough to be at an institution which has committed to #opensource / #oer resources: but, at least at present, this is a rather tiny (if growing) sliver of the pie!

In another (but related) sense, the humanities' concern over adopting tech is often about self-preservation: the more we admit that tech use is a crucial skill for students to succeed in their lives, the more we admit that it's a viable competitor for the skills we teach! Many see this challenge, and are not sure how to respond: should we "admit defeat", and shift what we do to a model of career training? If not, what's left? stridently and shrilly maintain the value of our traditional liberal arts skills as a counterpoint to those "merely technical" skills - and hope that we can keep attracting students on an "us-vs-them" rhetorical model?

I consider it a misguided tactic to respond to the challenge of technology, and the value of technological skills, by setting up the liberal arts and humanities as a competing "track" or set of skills or aims. If we're serious when we say that the liberal arts represent a way of thinking which is broadly applicable to human lives, regardless of particular role, or career, we have a certain responsibility to support that claim, yes? We perhaps ought to be ready to show our students, and our societies, that being a humanist is fully compatible, and seamlessly integratable [horrible neologism], with being a technologist. And, we ought equally to be ready to show that technologists benefit in authentic ways from the humanities: it's already clear that we humanists are deriving measurable benefits from technology!

In the particular context of the small liberal arts college, one thing that springs to mind is an important footnote to the prevailing public conversation: we are not all using technology to "scale" - no MOOCs here! Our local interactions with technology are very much about improving and streamlining and enhancing the direct, personal connections between faculty and students which have always been at the heart of the small liberal arts college model. While there are certainly very real pressures (especially on larger universities) to use edtech as an expansion tool (with all the issues of justice that entails: labor issues, access issues...), we're focusing on translating the valuable pieces of our small-scale educational practice into methods that use technology as supportive, rather than intrusive.

From the point of view of humanities scholarship and research (which, granted, is not a hugely significant piece of what we do at my institution), DH is fascinatingly rich, not only for the sorts of new research methods it makes available to traditional projects, but for the new areas of research it opens up to traditional methods. I'm going to be at the Digital Classics Association conference in April, where colleagues will be presenting on issues of stylometric text analysis, mapping antiquity, linguistic annotation, citation, and intertextuality - traditional humanistic research interests, but now capable of incredibly robust analysis, visualization, and interpretation, on the basis of powerful aggregation and comparison of data which would have taken lifetimes of individual, manual scholarly effort. On the other hand, there are fascinating sociological, psychological, ethical, anthropological areas of inquiry around our use of, and relations with, our evolving technology, which are ripe for (and already giving rise to) serious scholarly work.

Faculty at every institution of education need to be having this conversation. Because if we don't, we cede the field: we tacitly abdicate our claim of relevance to a whole swath of human life in the 21st century. And that, if anything, is exactly the opposite of what I, at least, believe to be true.

Faculty Protip: Aggregate for Sanity!

Let's face it: it's annoying to have to manage many different systems! Log in to First Class to check email; then to Banner to input grades; to Digication to check on your students' ePortfolio projects; then Canvas to build course content; then your own personal calendar (Google Calendar, or iCal, or whatever); then your social media and favorite blogs or news sites ... it never ends!

This proliferation is exactly why it's important to aggregate whenever you can - avoiding overload is a crucial key to using tech effectively. Here are some aggregations I use, and you can too!

1. Merge your communications. When you send an Announcement or message through Canvas, did you know that a copy automatically goes to First Class too? Nice. Easy.
2. Merge your calendars. The magic of RSS makes it easy to put your course calendars right into your personal calendar - why check two different places? It's as easy as copy/pasting a link: here's the guide.
3. Merge your info streams. If you have a bunch of favorite sites and/or blogs you like to check for daily news, imagine a world in which you could simply access a single site with the newest information from all of them at once. For personal use, try an app like Feedly; if you're using sites for your courses, you can add the feeds from news sites and blogs directly into your Canvas Announcements area - and your students will automatically get the latest news!

Pew Research on Teens, Tech

I've been having a great time munching the numbers in the report, released by the Pew Research Center this morning, entitled "Teens and Technology 2013" (*.pdf).

I've shared the document, as well as a few key highlights, with the faculty at my institution, in hopes of sparking some serious conversation about it. I see too many who are still thinking of current technology as just another iteration of the projector - a fad that'll ultimately fade, leaving the same, good old pedagogical frameworks and expectations. I disagree: as near as I can tell, there are serious issues of justice at stake in the adoption of technology in our classes - here's one example:


• Approximately 1 of every 4 teens uses on the internet mostly on a smartphone/tablet.
• Of these, girls are more likely than boys to be "cell-mostly" internet users.
• Among older teen girls who are smartphone owners, 55% say they use the internet mostly from their phone.

If I make a conscious choice to refuse to incorporate (or at least accommodate) mobile technology when it's available, am I affecting my students' access? Dial it back a few years, and a few iterations: what if I refused to accept emails from students, or insisted that essays be hand-written only? Harmless idiosyncrasy, or something else?

PLAYDATE13 - Boston!

Kinda brings me back to 1979 and "Pop Muzik"... :-D

Portland, Chicago, and Boston are all hosting their own PLAYDATE events. In case you're wondering, yes, it's an acronym: People Learning & Asking "Y": Digital Age Technology Exploration. Jenny Magiera has a great post about the origins of this idea - here's her summary of what the event's about:

This conference will be geared towards those who just want to explore - or play with - apps, websites, programs or tools that they've always wanted to dig into more deeply, but never had the time or support to do so. Modeled after an unconference or an EdCamp, the sessions will be participant-driven and hands on. Most importantly - there will be no sit and get. Period. No Presenters. Period. All of the content will be learner driven, exploration based and hands on. Just like the model of education we hope for our students. At the end there will be a share out of learning and take aways "The Play Off" - and digital content and notes will be disseminated to all.

 And so, I'll be in Boston this Saturday, learning with inspired and exploring colleagues from around the state, trying out a range of tech tools designed around classroom use. In the spirit of the unconference and open educational resources, we've already been crowdsourcing a resources list - bookmark it, and add to it! If, like me, you're involved in providing any sort of training or professional development, or if you're just looking for great starting-points to explore new things, what better place to start than a list specifically curated by your colleagues?

(And you can bet that some of what I pick up at #PLAYDATE13 will be making its way into TechFest2013 this May at MCLA...)

Dungeons & Discourse, SXSWedu-style

Thursday morning, it was all about Dungeons & Discourse, baby.

Yes, it was the final day of a conference. Yes, we were opposite a MOOC "cage match". Yes, our session was at 9 a.m.

Even so, we rocked, if I may be so bold as to say it. Emily, Justin, and I had been spreading word of our projects and our session at every conceivable opportunity over the previous days, and interest was high (especially after the double-endorsement from the SXSWedu Advisory Board a week ahead of the conference!). Edugaming was one of the key themes weaving through this year's event, and we were ready to feed the hunger: after many, many sessions talking abstractions about games in education, people were ready to hear about three projects that are actual - actually reaching students, actually breaking out of factory-model education, and actually collaborating in an altruistic, non-competitive way.

If you're interested in seeing and hearing how it went, here are some links for ya:

Let me tell you about the Dread Sophist...

• The official SXSWedu podcast of our session (I start talking at 22:00 about Dungeons & Discourse, but you should listen to the whole thing, of course - Project LAPIS/BIOME and Tres Columnae are kindred spirits, and amazing projects.)
• The Prezi I was using during my talk (you're just going to have to figure out the timing for yourself, I'm afraid :-)
• The public demo of Dungeons & Discourse in the Canvas LMS (it's not fully functional, of course; but it'll probably whet your appetite.)