This book explores the use of critical and emerging pedagogies in online and hybrid learning environments, with much of the writing growing from the authors’ work in Hybrid Pedagogy. We hope to have 8-10 faculty and/or staff members from across the campus community join us to engage in open-ended discussions about teaching and learning with technology or in tech-mediated spaces.
An Urgency of Teachers was published under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license and fully available online (linked above) for anyone who would like to read or preview it. A limited number of print copies will be provided to participants.
Organization and Schedule
The Library will be purchasing small number of copies of the book for interested in participants. The book will be read over the quarter and discussed at monthly lunch hour meetings. Participants will be expected to commit to:
Attending the monthly lunch hour book discussions on these dates:
Monday, 4/22/19, 12:30-1:30pm
Monday, 5/20/19, 12:30-1:30pm
Monday, 6/3/19, 12:30-1:30pm
Engaging with text and leading group discussions.
Writing one blog post in response to discussions.
To sign up for this book group, please complete this sign-up form or contact the conveners of the Winter 2019 Emerging Practices Reading Circle:
During Winter Quarter 2019, the Library and the Office of Research will be co-hosting an “Emerging Practices Reading Circle” in which we will discuss Mindful Tech: How to Bring Balance to Our Digital Lives by David Levy. This group is modeled on the previous reading groups.
The Library will purchase a limited number of print copies of the book for participants. The group is open to faculty and staff, and we strive to have cross-campus representation and may cap the group to limited number of participants, depending on interest.
Goals
The Library and Office of Research are hosting this reading group to foster an ongoing discussions on emerging forms of pedagogical and research practices. We will use the exercises outlined in Mindful Tech to encourage participants to reflect on the role of digital technologies in daily activities at the university.
Over the course of the reading group, faculty and staff participants will volunteer to “present” responses to chapters, pose questions to the group, lead discussion, and share a reflection on this blog. The goals of this reading group are to:
Engage in an open-ended exploration about the ways that digital technologies influence our work lives, recognizing that they often blend the professional and personal.
Use mindfulness techniques to observe and gain insights into patterns of behavior and emotion responses to digital technologies, with an emphasis on email and social media.
Experiment with mindfulness practices to adopt a new technology and/or alter current practices with a routinely used technology.
Intentionally create an in-person and a virtual community on this blog in which participants share a reflection inspired by one of the exercises offered in Mindful Tech.
Organization and Schedule
The Library will be purchasing approximately 10-12 print copies of the book for interested in participants. The book will be read over the quarter and discussed at monthly lunch hour meetings. Participants will be expected to commit to:
Attending the monthly lunch hour book discussions on these dates:
Monday, 1/14/19, 12:30-1:30pm
Monday, 2/11/19, 12:30-1:30pm
Monday, 3/4/19, 12:30-1:30pm
Engaging with text and leading group discussions.
Writing one blog post in response to discussions.
To sign up for this book group,please complete this sign-up form or contact the conveners of the Winter 2019 Emerging Practices Reading Circle:
Justin Wadland, Associate Director & Head, Digital Scholarship (Library)
Kara Luckey, Research Development Consultant (Office of Research)
Digital Scholarship, like legacy scholarship, refers to a set of practices rather than a single field of study. (Jessie Daniels and Polly Thistlethwaite, Being a Scholar in a Digital Era, 8)
Photo taken while waiting for everyone to arrive to first meeting. The paper in the center shows my rough notes on the book, taken on a library hold slip.
We held our first discussion of Being a Scholar in a Digital Era by Jessie Daniels and Polly Thistlethwaite on October 8, 2018. This was at the beginning the quarter, and I’m just now catching up on the notes I took during that meeting.
We met in the Chihuly Room, so named for the Chinook Red Chandelier by Dale Chihuly that hangs there, and the space soon filled up with faculty and librarians. All ten seats at the table were taken, and we had to pull in chairs from downstairs. People also took some of the comfortable chairs around the room. I forgot to count how many people were present, but I estimate about eighteen because we had some drop-in participants.
To start the conversation, I closed my computer and opened a notebook I started earlier this year to track conversations I’m having around digital scholarship. It was a wild ride once we started talking about the first three chapters of Being a Scholar in a Digital Era. Two people had signed up for each chapter, and I asked each person to provide a brief response and pose one question to the group. My intention was to do a kind of round robin or survey of people’s responses, but there was such energy around certain topics that people couldn’t keep from responding the questions.
Here are just a few that I heard and jotted down:
How does one transition from being a “sage on the stage to a guide on the side”?
What is the overlap between engaged scholarship and open access? (This was my own.)
How do we effectively teach in a networked environment? How do we effectively shift to open models?
What is the actual labor that goes into teach, learning, and scholarship? How do we account for the disruptions, blurring of boundaries, and expansion of labor that technology of creates?
I felt like I was in eye of an intellectual cyclone circling around that room, drawing its power from everyone’s curiosity and uncertainty, their questions and attempts at solutions, their excitement and anxiety. My brain went into facilitation mode and focused more on keeping the conversation on track and making sure everyone’s perspective was heard. Thus, I was more focused on the present than on remembering. Yet somehow my hand kept moving. Here are the messy notes I took that day:
I show these notes because they are evidence of one approaches I bring to the “craft” of digital scholarship. As a member of Generation X, my life and education has straddled analog and digital worlds, and this background has informed many of the practices I use to navigate and understand digital scholarship. Perhaps this is why I was so drawn to the discussion of the “craft” of digital scholarship mentioned in Being a Scholar in a Digital Era.
In the appendix to his classic The Sociological Imagination, titled ‘On intellectual craftsmanship’, C. Wright Mills exhorts aspiring scholars to keep a journal and create a ‘filing system’ to reflect on personal experiences, notes about the literature in one’s field, along with charts and diagrams. In this appendix, Mills refers to being a scholar as ‘a choice of how to live,’ he says, ‘as well as a choice of career’. It is, he explains, about being a scholar, ‘a structure of habits’ (Mills, 1959). (Daniels and Thislthwaite, 10)
The next five pages (pp. 11-14) of Being a Scholar in the Digital Era then go on to recount the many, many changes that have transformed scholarship, scholarly communication, and the distribution of knowledge. In sum, “The ever-changing pastiche of digital technologies, alongside the analog of occasional in-person meetings, enables a new level of connectedness among scholars across geographic distance and types of institutions. Sharing research interests and exchanging work among scholars has never been easier.” (14)
Rather than digging into the specific changes (which is the purpose of this reading circle), I would like to stay awhile on the idea of craft because it reminds me of observations in another book I read recently: David Levy’s Mindful Tech: How to Bring to Our Digital Lives. In this text, Levy develops a notion that our interactions with digital, online technologies can become a kind of craft:
When I suggest we think of our online activity as a craft, I mean to call attention to the skill involved. But I also mean to highlight three addition dimensions of craftwork, making four in all: intention, care, skill, and learning. (David Levy, Mindful Tech, 7)
Levy’s book then investigates how personal practice shapes our digital identities (whether personal or professional) and offers a series of activities that enable readers to develop their own sense of digital craft. I don’t have space to explore his ideas thoroughly, but I am realizing that one of the core ways that I have cultivated my own sense “digital craft” has been to deliberately blend it with the analog. I often seek out and create spaces for reflection away from the screen and humming hard drive so that I might recognize more awareness along the dimensions Levy develops. One of these is with a notebook.
These observations are all highly personal, but so are habits–or practices. Taking this a step further, I see my role as an educator-librarian is to also encourage and support the digital craft of others. Yet, how do I do this in a meaningful way? This book group is one example. A few days ago, I took what I’ve heard and tried to distill it. On the left are themes (pink), and on the right issues of practice (yellow).
This group is modeled on the successful reading group that the Library hosted as a trial last spring and documented on this blog. Over the coming academic year, we plan to continue to host quarterly reading groups on texts or books of interest to the UW Tacoma academic community.
The Library will purchase a limited number of print copies of the book for participants. The group is open to faculty and staff, and we strive to have cross-campus representation and may cap the group to ten participants, depending on interest.
Goals
The Library and Office of Research are initiating this effort to create an intellectual space for the UW Tacoma academic community to discuss emerging forms of pedagogical and research practices. Over the course of the reading group, faculty and staff participants will volunteer to “present” chapters, pose questions to the group, and lead discussion. As time permits, the Autumn 2018 Reading Circle group will:
Share and investigate scholarly practices in response to readings and overall exploration of digital and publicly-engaged scholarship.
Identify useful resources from the book and the wider community of practice.
(Re)imagine approaches to community- or publicly-engaged scholarship.
Assess faculty needs for training, development opportunities, and infrastructure support for digital scholarship that engages with the public.
Seek collaborative opportunities to develop internal and external support communities.
Organization and Schedule
The Library will be purchasing approximately 10-12 print copies of the book for interested in participants. The book will be read over the quarter and discussed at monthly lunch hour meetings. Participants will be expected to commit to:
Attending the monthly lunch hour book discussions in October, November, and December.
Cropped image of “White on Spectral Colors” from Color Problems by Emily Noyes Vanderpoel, digitized by the Smithsonian and available in the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/colorproblemspra00vand
With our last meeting coinciding with the wind-down of the Spring Quarter, we had a pretty light turn-out for the discussion of the final chapters of Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom by Battershill and Ross. Yet among the six people in attendance, we had a good mix of faculty and library staff and managed to fill up the hour and half with conversation.
As I was looking for images to accompany this post, I was drawn particularly to the color analyses charts of Emily Noyes Vanderpoel, which I found in the Public Domain Review. These charts and studies seemed appropriate because our conversation revealed a spectrum of responses to topics discussed. Sometimes the discussion formed clear pictures of opportunities and positions, other times they were suggestive, shaded by our own views or experiences. Toward the end, some ideas began to take shape for me of possible futures, but we didn’t have time to explore them in detail. Later this month, I intend to write a blog post that will offer a few possible scenarios, and then we’ll hold a Zoom meeting with the participants to explore what resonates most.
As the Masters of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies (MAIS) Graduate Program Director, Riki was particularly drawn to this chapter. She noticed right away that the chapter assumes that grad students will be entering academia, and yet most of the MAIS students she works with are getting a terminal degree. Some of the observations about the professionalization of academics did not seem relevant. What did seem applicable was that digital scholarship approaches open up career opportunities outside of academia. Effective, critical, and professional uses of communication and digital technologies seemed the most obvious skills most transferable to the workplace.
“Color Note of a Sliced Orange” from “Color Problems”
The question of risk came up again too. The conversation on p. 156 of Battershill and Ross1 resonated with the group because it highlights the tensions and contradictions of graduate level digital projects. We are all “digitally assisted scholars,” Riki pointed out, but when initiating a new project, it can be extraordinarily difficult to calculate the amount of time that must be devoted to it. Students considering innovative uses of technology may need additional support. Right now, because there isn’t a central place to conceive of such projects, faculty advisers likely bear the brunt of this work.
Tim led us in a discussion of how to develop internal support communities. One of my favorite slides from his presentation emphasized:
Slide from Tim Bostelle’s presentation, offering suggestion for encouraging DH.
As the Head, Library Information Technology, he also modeled some of the approaches suggested in the book. He searched the UW Tacoma website to find other departments and colleagues on campus that might be collaborators in DS groups and activities. The Center Business Analytics in the Milgard School of Business, the Institute of Technology, the Office of Research, and Nursing all came up in his searches for faculty using digital tools in their scholarship and research.
We also discussed the Student Technology Fee Committee, which distributes funds for technology resources that serve students. Having led the Library’s application process for many years, Tim has gained a lot of experience going through the STF application process. He would be open to partnering with faculty members to put together proposals for rounds in the future.
Because I wanted to learn more about this area, I led this discussion, focusing my conversation around the use of social media. Doing a quick poll among the participants, we discovered the variety of social media platforms we use, with Facebook and Twitter being the most popular.
“Color Note from a Bunch of Azaleas” from “Color Problems.”
The uses ranged from professional to completely personal and private or a mixture of something in between. Some avoided social media because of information overload or it seems like a waste of time. Others recognized that social media, Twitter in particular, can be “insanely useful” (direct quote) if you follow the right people. Some of those who use Twitter mentioned that they have UW Tacoma “Twitter buddies” that they engage with, but it is not necessarily embraced across campus as a platform for communication and information sharing. Some observed that when used as tool for professional communication, Twitter does seem to favor public, formal conversations, but others recognized the risks of such platforms.
Battershill and Ross in their chapter provide a lot of useful tips for promoting scholarship with social media and connecting to other scholars.
Joanne presented on the final chapter, connecting to research. She appreciated the advice of “making things count more than once,” meaning that explorations in digital pedagogy enable faculty members to experiment in the classroom and then share the results with the wider community through publishing:
Each skill you learn and teach…should not be self contained, but rather, part of a life cycle. [By this] we mean that this skill should be adaptable for your other needs” in research and teaching. (196)
Also, Joanne’s overview referred extensively to the book’s web companion, highlighting specifically “DH Tools and Tips for Conducting Research” as particularly helpful.
A few other things Joanne mentioned were of particular relevance:
Think about the classroom as a lab [where you are doing] “empirical experimentation from which new and interesting results may be derived” (200)
Practice-based vs practice-led research: Faculty who implemented new strategies with students have found that it has also led to new forms of research (practice-led) and also allows the activity itself to be treated as research (practice-based), (200)
Another important point: establishing ethical collaborative relationships among the participants of projects, especially when they involve students. The DH community has articulated these principles in a Collaborators’ Bill of Rights, but institutions have adopted them as well. UCLA’s Student Collaborators’ Bill of Rights is one example.
In the best case scenario the students will leave the course, not with answers, but with more questions, and even more importantly, the capacity to ask still more questions generated from their continual pursuit and practice of the subjectivities we hope to inspire. — Michael Wesch, quoted on p. 123 of Battershill & Ross, Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom)
“Ice Cave, Paradise Glacier,” from page 79 of “The Mountain that Was God” by John Harvey Williams.
Ever since I first saw them, the strange, disorienting photographs of tourists and climbers venturing into ice tunnels on Tahoma (aka Mt. Rainier) have always appealed to me, and I include one here because it seems a good a place as any to begin this summary of our exploration of the practical aspects of integrating digital humanities practices in the classroom at UW Tacoma.
Tools Discussed
As always, I like to pull together a quick list of the digital tools raised during our conversation:
PowerPoint (and slide presentation software, in general) – Mentioned mostly in a critical way as the default form of presenting information.
Tumblr – An alternative form for sharing class information, one faculty used it at other intitution.
Voyant – A text visualization software program that allows visualizing and analyzing text.
Juxta – Software program that enables comparison multiple versions of text.
Playing with a Tool: Voyant
Expanding on the use of tools, I wanted to show what it can look like when you take text and put into Voyant. For this sample, I used a public domain text called The Mountain that was God by John William Harvey1.
Showing the text analysis of of “The Mountain that Was God.” Click image to view full analysis in Voyant.
Summary of Summary of Book Discussion
OK, let’s get to business. We met in April to discuss chapters 4-8 of “Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom” by Battershill and Ross. This section of the book presents a kind of “life cycle” overview of how digital humanities might be incorporated into the classroom, demonstrating how instructors can structure their courses around engagement with digital technologies and resources. In the summaries below, I pull key points raised during the conversation.
Randy began by expressing his discomfort with presentation slides, which was why he wrote a blog post. This opened up a conversation around the ways that technology can inadvertently shape expectations and convey certain unintended values. One person mentioned how having presentation slides can give the illusion of being organized. 2
Other technologies seem to enable collaboration and do not limit the ways students might interact with it. For instance, in the past Randy has used Tumblr for his classes.
This raised questions about how technology might inadvertently shape learning objectives, rather than be the source of students interactions with technology, as Battershill and Ross suggest. Instructors’ time and comfort level with new technologies can influence their adoption. It seems that one way around these issues might be to approach the development of learning objectives as an iterative process that developed in relationship to technology.
Another important strand of our conversation touched on setting clear expectations about online behavior.
Libi was really engaged with this chapter and offered a tour of the tools that it exposed her to. In her slides, she investigates the tools that seemed relevant to her. Generally, she favored tools that are easy and don’t take a lot time to figure out. As a historian, she seemed to prefer tools that analyze differences in texts. She did ask some questions about how she would engage students with the tools beyond just looking at them.
Since visiting archives and libraries and exposing students to primary sources is a key part of her work, she has also found virtual tours of collections to be useful and has done this with the Tacoma Historical Society.
Rebecca felt that this chapter was mistitled and thought it should be called “Troubleshooting Technology.” The solution could be summed up with a single word: “practice,” so that you can avoid most of the typical problems. Many in the group generally felt the most helpful suggestions were to design the course into module units that could be adjusted if needed.
A key point that resonated: Battershill and Ross emphasize that total technological failure can turn into a valuable teaching moment.
Mention of the Inspiration Lab at Vancouver Public Library was of particular interest. It is space with a variety of technologies and digital tools that enable visitors to create new works.
“The “inspiration lab,” for example, is open to university groups as well as to the public, and often, students can do more than use the equipment: they can participate through lab-based activities that start in the classroom in the broader creative and critical digital activities happening in their own communities.” (Battershill & Ross, p. 103)
A group on campus is looking at developing maker/tinkerspace, as well as a Learning Commons. We recognized that a space where faculty could practice and receive support would be welcome on campus. Right now, this happens in a variety of places and tends to be scoped to particular technologies.
Nicole wasn’t able to make it but her slides pull out the key points. I particularly liked the points that she highlighted from Battershill and Ross as principles/best practices:
Require short reflection papers for graded work that use new digital skills.
Limit your students to one new tool or platform per assignment.
Be flexible: adapt to student needs but have a clear rubric and set of expectations.
Digital assignments do not need to be overly complex: public writing, such as a public blog, “is at the very heart of the digital humanities.”
Alex presented this chapter; he found it to be consistent with the rest of the book in the ways that offered methods of encouraging experimentation by student and incorporating the possibility of failure into assignments. He felt that a key point was to move beyond “being good with computers” or achieving mastery. Measuring progress and competency seem like better measures.
Drawing from his experience, as well as the reading, the group felt that getting students involved in the evaluation and partnering with them to create rubrics can set these expectations. Other options are to offer classes pass/fail and using in-take surveys to evaluate the students.
Yet there were questions around:
How do you evaluate risk and effort? How do you encourage and assess risk?
Alex offered the assignment description and rubric that he uses when assigning students to create digital videos in his “Intro to Masculinities” class:
The group reading “Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom” will be meeting in less than an hour, and I’d like pull together a quick agenda for the meeting. This round, group members volunteered to read and then post notes on an assigned chapter. People chose to post them in several place:
On March 26, 2018, we held the first meeting of the Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom reading group. At the beginning of the meeting, we each wrote three topics we would like to discuss, then circled around and starred 1-2 topics on each other’s lists. Here are the notes from that activity:
Tools Discussed
During the conversation that followed, several tools were mentioned, and in each blog post, I’d like to note these so we might start a list of the different technologies being used:
Fold.cm – An alternative to PowerPoint, students are able to use this make multimedia presentations.
StoryMapJS – An easy to use tool for creating interactive maps.
Key Points
Defining Digital Humanities/Digital Scholarship
The discussion leader (Justin) raised questions about the value of starting all conversations with definitions of digital humanities and/or digital scholarship. The group found the book’s definition helpful for framing the conversation:
“We see DH not as an exclusive or unified discipline, but rather as a constellation of practical ideas, technologies, and tools that can be incorporated in a modular fashion into your own classroom practice.”1
Some of the participants recognized that definitions become important when articulating the scope of research or teaching practice to internal or external audiences, but some have struggled with overly narrow definitions of digital humanities. Ultimately, the group appreciated the emphasis on learning goals:
“Rather than engaging with new tools for their own sake, we recommend that you ground all your experiments and exercises in course content. This will allow you to design you course carefully, on a case-by-case basis, so that particular exercises are suited to the particular course topic or text.”2
Resistance vs. challenges
The conversation gained momentum around the book’s “Presumption of resistance” and went on to explore a number of related topics. Initially, several in the group critiqued the the way that Chapter 1 assumed varying kinds of resistance to digital humanities techniques. Generally, the faculty members present felt supported in their experiments with DH practices and that students were generally receptive to these approaches.
As the conversation progressed, however, the group began to recognize that there are some real challenges to potentially working in this area at UW Tacoma:
Extreme range of digital literacies and skills among students: Instructors experience a wide spectrum of digital abilities and aptitudes among students. Many students are “digital natives” and are well-versed in the rhetorical approaches used in this media rich environment, but most have experienced the digital realm as consumers rather than critically-engaged learners and creators. Some might even struggle with commonly-used technologies, such as Word or PowerPoint, while others may take to it quickly. Finding a middle ground can be quite challenging.3
Student access to technology:One professor present has surveyed his students access to and ownership of technology. Although we didn’t have the precise numbers, he found that while most UW Tacoma students have smartphones, a sizeable percentage do not have access to the internet at home and may not own a computer. Flowing from these observations, someone observed that for assignments that require a lot of technology: “Whatever we do has to be on campus and in the classroom?”4
Recognizing failure and frustration as part of learning: Several present had backgrounds in design and recognized failure as part of the design process, but translating this approach to the classroom, technology-related assignments, and assessment can pose some difficulties. Students experience a lot of anxiety if they don’t know technology required for the assignment. Compounding the problems, instructors may not want to sacrifice classroom time for learning associated technology. One response has been to use low stakes assignments to establish a baseline of skills and then evaluate the students on growth. Another possibility is assigning reflective pieces about the process.5
Topics we would have discussed if we had more time
Possible workshops or training or workshops could be built around the following topics:
Universal Design: There was an overwhelming interest in UD, but many present felt that they would need additional training and support to integrate this.
Digital Public Library of America:Many were drawn to this as a resource and would like to investigate how to better integrate into courses.
Thinking through implications of publicly-shared student work: Many classes that are creating alternative assignments are producing work that worthy of sharing with a wider audience, but several questions about permissions, student privacy, and digital repository structure remain.
Creative Commons and copyright in general: Working in the digital environment raises a host of copyright questions, and many wanted to learn more about how to navigate these questions.
Battershill & Ross, 2. Another helpful quote: “For us, digital humanities simply represents a community of scholars and teachers interested in using or studying technology. We use humanities technologies to study digital cultures, tools, and concepts, and we also use computational methods to explore the traditional objects of humanistic inquiry.” ↩
Many of the later sections actually explore this issue, especially Chapters 5 & 6 on designing and managing classroom activities, but at this early stage, we appreciated the emphasis Battershill and Ross placed on learning goals. ↩
Battershill & Ross discuss similar issues in the section “Privacy, safety, and account management” (52-67), but the entire Chapter 3 “Ensuring Accessibility” explores related themes. ↩
See Battershill and Ross, “Your students resistance,” (19-21) for a related discussion. ↩
If you have questions about the group or would like to join us, please contact Justin Wadland, Associate Director and Head, Digital Scholarship Program at the UW Tacoma Library. (Participants in the group are listed on here on our Google Team Drive.)
Goals for book group
The Library is supporting this effort so that we can develop a shared vision of programmatic approaches to digital scholarship at UW Tacoma. Over the course of the reading group, faculty/staff will volunteer to “present” chapters, pose questions to the group, and lead discussion. As time permits, the group will:
Share and investigate teaching practices and materials in response to readings and overall exploration of digital humanities.
Identify useful resources from the book and its companion online guide.
(Re)imagine courses and activities that could be enhanced by incorporating digital pedagogy.
Assess faculty needs for training, development opportunities, and infrastructure support to encourage digital humanities practices in the classroom.
Seek collaborative opportunities to develop internal and external support communities.
Schedule and location of book group
All of the meetings of the book group will be in Tacoma Paper and Stationary (TPS) 110.
March 26, 3-4:30pm: Introduction to Chapter 3 (pp. 1-59)
April 23, 3-4:30pm: Chapter 4 to Chapter 8 (pp. 61-145)
May 21, 3-4:30pm: Chapter 9 to Conclusion (pp. 147-211)
The Library and Office of Research will once again be hosting the Emerging Practices Reading Circle for Spring Quarter. This time we’ll be discussing An Urgency of Teachers: the Work of Critical Digital Pedagogy.
