Tag Archives: pedagogy

Scaffolding Our Way toward a DH Project: Pedagogical Foundations of Looking for Whitman

Posted on by under Responses

While checking out the “Finding Whitman” DH project, I kept connecting the multiple projects and assignments with the basic foundations of literature circles.

In no way am I trying to unethically reduce the pedagogy behind this DH project, or similar ones. Rather, I am trying to build a schema from what pedagogy with existing tools makes DH projects so transformative.

I think the roots are in literature circles, at base level–a group with different roles and expectations (different DH projects and assignments) to create a well-rounded discussion and co-exploration of a text. After all, isn’t the point of meaningful pedagogical assignments and lessons supposed to start a conversation?

    Frontispiece Project mirrors the Connector Role
    Image Gloss and Material Culture Projects mirrors the Illustrator Role
    Annotations Project mirrors the Passage Master/Literary Luminary Role

I also think that DH projects have the ability to take the basis of creating conversation and co-constructed understanding to the next level beyond the discussion that literature circles offer. DH projects, like this Whitman one for today, is also a resource, a platform for publishing, and is an easily adaptable, “live” space because it is open source.

Though this idea is innovative and breaks the classroom confinements and boundaries, there were mixed reviews from participants. I feel that maybe scaffolding toward such a DH project requires attention to the basics, pedagogically working from the ground-up to the WWW. Would modeling the co-constructivity in the classroom before dedicating to such a project (or similar project) help students appreciate and rely on interacting in a more meaningful way? In my mind, here’s the scaffold: Lit Circles (with modifications + additional activities)–>Class wiki/blog–>Class DH Project–>Inter-campus/location related DH Project. Would mastering these DH projects in the spaces and locations we are most comfortable in be a possible way of integrating a larger-scale project? Or, are the larger-scale and multiple locations just “too big” for “us” right now? What is the best approach? While we all have to operate on our own pedagogical praxis and comfortability levels, it would help to have some model based in theory to apply to praxis. I’m open for opinions on this. I think this is an important point to address, if we are ever to implement a DH project or tool that reaches each student in the most meaningful ways possible.

Classroom Applications for Voyant

Posted on by under Responses

In efforts to incorporate digital literacies and technologies into the classroom, I began brainstorming a list of classroom applications. Since much of our discussion focuses on how to use these tools in meaningful ways, I thought we could all participate in offering our own practical suggestions. I am not sure where to go with this in a Lit course, as we have discussed the various ways that these tools were utilized in our readings from last week, but I’m thinking we should be focusing on extensions of those activities–the “so what?”

Dear community of scholars, please add on to this meager list of mine!

    Voyant

–Composition Classes–

Application: Writer’s Notebook
Pedagogical Value: Allows for inclusion of multi-genre applications, mapping of word frequencies, which may lead to general themes of writing, can be used for brainstorming entries, etc.

Application: Revision Processes
Pedagogical Value: Maps word frequencies, could help with word choice, repetitive phrases, parallelism, etc.

–L & C Classes–
Thinking of ways that Voyant can be used in the context of the classroom, I’d like to add this to our running list from class discussion yesterday (3/3) with Dr. Sherwood’s Thoreau Voyant:
Application:Index for Comparison/Contrast or Mapping of Rhetoric.
Pedagogical Value:
With a work like Walden, Thoreau makes an argument for his anti-social lifestyle. Based on the mapping, there is a wave intersection between “solitary” and “social” when the diagram is enlarged between 31 and 35.
Looking at the diagram, it looks as though these two opposing terms represent a dialectic: solitary (thesis) and social (antithesis). The dialectic takes this map: thesis–>antithesis–>thesis–>antithesis–>thesis, which then conclusively rises above the rhetoric (frequency increases) and is correlated with a rise in the word frequency of “solitude.”
The application of compare/contrast already provides a visual Venn diagram with the purple and green lines, which can help students in locating the trends and points of intersection between these terms. Additionally, this visualization can offer to students a visualization of the rhetoric and dialectic mentioned above, which can be used in a lit or comp class.

*Screen shot of magnification of this frequency section borrowed from Dr. Sherwood’s blog: *thoreauvoyant

Natural –> Unnatural: Bridging the Gap

Posted on by under Responses

The only “normalization” that exists in Digital Humanities seems to be its constant transformations and temporalities. In tapping into that temporal and transitional sphere with our pedagogy may prove to be a viable option for guiding students toward the genuine collaboration that we set in our course goals.

Coming from someone who is not a blogger, not a fan of numerous online discussion board posts, and not a fan of having to read 15+ posts (500+ words) of others in addition to class readings, I can empathize with student resistance to online classroom tools. Even in the graduate community, where I am so inclined to read the responses of my peers and have candid interest in my own learning community, I still find that it is often just another thing I can cross off of my to-do list. With this being said, I am still open to the idea of academic blogging and the use of other tools. I’d like to have a different opinion of them than those evidenced by my experiences. I think the crux is finding a way that these tools can work for you and your students in meaningful ways.

We discussed incentives in class on Tuesday. While “grades are the least interesting part of what makes a course a course,” as noted in Owens, in our education system and in the eyes of students, grades are undoubtedly necessary and important. This is nothing new, so I’m not going to delve into this issue. However, the focal issue is going beyond the grade and fostering something genuine and collaborative.

To create a viable online learning community, it may be helpful to take coursework in technological steps to achieve the collaboration that is representative in your goals for the course. If were to implement a course blog in the future, I want it to be easily understood to students that that space should be as open and collaborative as the online social media platforms that they access. An idea to bridge the “interactive” gaps between blogs and social media for students may be to begin on social media. In my class, now, I use Twitter with my students for several pedagogical purposes–truncating criticisms and responses to 120 characters or less, publishing student “work,” student accessibility, and most importantly, relevance. Students (at least mine) are constantly on Twitter. The platform and experience is already natural for them. By utilizing it as a classroom tool, and using our class twitter feed as a way to transcend inside/outside-of-class discussions, I have one foot in their online collaborative community and the other in our collaborative classroom community. What could be a viable option is to then gradually transfer the activity on Twitter to a blog, with slightly different constituents and expectations. The transition, however, wouldn’t be as unnatural as just starting from the blog on day 1, considering that students blog as much as I do (which is not at all). Here, I think it is about acclimating to the unnatural by practicing what is natural and assimilating new tools into what we already know/do to provide avenues for convergence between the two (natural/unnatural). Taking something that students use every day and transforming how they use it to bridge a gap to 1) the classroom and 2) another platform of communication may prove to be helpful. The transition from Twitter to blog would be tangible for my students (and any Twitter-using student). Tags can be used in blogs, blogs can be connected to Twitter, and students can use the two inter-connectedly. A blog, in this fashion, would be an elongated version of the kinds of collaboration that they do on our class Twitter, which makes available the extension of conversations in class and online in a new space that provides different user opportunities for collaborative learning.

What does digital English mean to me?

Posted on by under Responses

At its most simple, digital English is codex on steroids. Digital English transforms the codex by disembodying, re-embodying, and re-purposing knowledge into multiple accessible forms.  It is a  hyper-branch of the English discipline that correlates with the transformations of the “current” technology. This includes both technological accessibility and internet trends during the time of its application. “Current” becomes even more relative within digital English, because of its continuous transformations and reformulations. This constant reinvention invokes in its pedagogy an equally and eternally transformative one. 

My initial thoughts with digital English include the linguistic side of its entity. There is an entire lexicon that belongs to digital English. Whether it be general knowledge of techy jargon (<embed clever technological hypertext here>), conversational English (BRB), or locational terms (my iBlog post vs. my Facebook post), language also follows the transformative and innovative properties of digital English in how we dictate meaning for a variety of purposes. 

Skip to toolbar