Course Management Tools for the Humanities
Session 072
Victoria Szabo
Thursday
11:00 am-12:00 pm
Room: Rm402
Session Abstract
Course Management Tools for Humanities need to emerge from current pedagogical practices in the humanities disciplines, allowing changes in teaching practice to emerge organically. In addition, instructors want to use the kinds of media and communication resources increasingly familiar to them from their own lives, in a flexible, modular form.
Presentation Materials
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Additional Information
Slides
Session Notes
Lots of great ideas that already exist – moving from boutique to scalable (CMS focus)
What is going to help me teach better, and reinforce the work I already do
What "they" use
- Wikipedia
- Google
- Folksomony
- Friendster (or LinkedIn, Orkut, etc...)
- iTunes (easy, accessible, people want to use it)
- Flicr, Ofoto
- Instant Messaging, texting email, blogs
- Amazon.com or Wells Fargo (high level customer service)
Incremental, iterative design processes necessary. Some learning theory, some observation.
Moving into a methodological approach. Learning how to learn, methods for research, process for expanding and adding.
Object of inquiry can be just about any medium, from any participant(s) in learning experience. Can't have one type of rule, need to bring in and use and reuse in multiple ways.
Humanistic Analysis of Texts (includes all types of media) that CMS needs to support.
- Spatial
- Comparison
- Contextual analysis
- Over time
- Social impact/political/Psychological impact
- Performance and its relationship to a static form
- Ecomonic considersations
Tool development Implications
- metacognitive workspace
- copyright and fair use
- everything is object, but unstructured...
iTunes
"New Content phenomenon" even if available before, familiarity of tools/ubiquity.
Problem, separate interfaces
Still can't do stuff above
Fair Use/DRM still issue
"The Human and the Machine" course – freshman interdisciplinary course.
Using CMS, Wiki, websites (for student projects, big media), clips of performances, Gameplay, Individual ownership of video.
Mixster – creative commons tool for remix. Looking at public domain stuff
Questions and Answers
Q: iTunes working with RSS?
A: Not this semester, working on
Q: What to do with student content?
A: Will go down after end of semester. Need to develop archive plans
Q: Spatial solutions? And students recording their process for assessment
A: Making tools visual and 3-demensional (like Grokster? Visual Thesarus?). Allow objects such as comment object, text object could be put into workspace. But, how make easy enough to use. Doesn't matter where you are in the system. Students should be empowered to do that work.
Q: All humanities students?
A: No, all students. Choice of 10 courses. A lot of techies choose this one.
Q: Time management for students a problem?
A: Apply project management. Yes, hard to constrain the projects to doable and within humanist context (get lost in the technology).
Q: Idea that needed humanities tools without special tools
A: CMS is an optional. First only custom sites, then saw value of CMS. Impetus was about access to content in context and analyze.
Q: What's your idea to use for primary source and secondary source?
A: still make students buy primary source if need entire text. Portions are being represented. Looking at tools in library to provide good detail.
Q: Working on project that lets people bring in images from repository. For faculty and students. Are there different ways to work with students?
A: Use to annotate paper. Depends on quality of image. Search terms useful to students? Load course-based search terms to layer on top? Teaching database at Princeton where did this.
Attendees
~40-50
Great session. I'd love to see more sessions lead by teachers showing the kind of things they do and that they would like to do.