Minimal computing

For those of you who heard me talk about minimal computing on Thursday, you may remember I mentioned a platform named Jekyll. I would be happy to show you how it works and how to set one up and start publishing static sites on the internet for free. It’s really simple. If you were not able to make it on Thursday, don’t worry. We talked about the benefits of using minimal approaches for many of our projects, including dynamically generated static sites. The static sites in particular have the enormous advantage of being faster to access regardless of bandwidth. If there is enough interest I can get everyone set up.

Another option we can talk about is the markdown-pandoc process for writing papers. I also encouraged people to use simple text editors as an alternative to Microsoft Word for some projects. I would be happy to show you the method I talked about that helps you generate well designed html-docx-pdf from the same document.

Categories: Session: Teach | Comments Off on Minimal computing

Digital humanities and professional territoriality: a cross-competencies framework

DH projects are situated at the cross roads of multiple disciplines that need share a common framework to produce inter-operable digital material. Producing DH resources is in fact an interdisciplinary task that implies convergence of multiples skills and competencies that no one can any longer pretend to perform alone. Through collaboration, DH resources and corpora are more likely to be better structured and well formed. However, in such a multidisciplinary configuration, core questions about competency and territoriality are posed: who is who? who does what and at which extent? How one does what and with which tools? etc. A set of such questions lead to further interrogations related to curricula, professional skills and competencies, data convergence, system interoperability, budgeting and research project management.

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Advocating for Alternative Forms of Scholarship

The journal Hybrid Pedagogy recently put out a CfP on the Scholarly and the Digital

We could focus our discussion on the topics suggested in the CfP and “make”, at the end of the session, a google doc (or several, authored by different people) that gives our perspective on some of these topics in our region.

  • How the digital and the scholarly interact;
  • The culture of academia which resists digital and public scholarship;
  • Tales of great success in pioneering (and finding acceptance for) digital work;
  • Digital pedagogy, especially as it challenges traditional pedagogy;
  • Lessons learned along the tenure track; lessons learned off the tenure track.
  • The pursuit of multimodal scholarship, teaching, and learning;
  • The hybrid scholar;
  • Meta-level consideration of what “counts” as scholarship, ideally in a form that pushes at the edges of what “counts.”

I am personally particularly interested in “The pursuit of multimodal scholarship, teaching, and learning” and questions of how we promote and assess alternative modes of assessing student learning whether in theses or undergraduate work. How do we give space for creative forms of expression and find ways of demonstrating also the meeting of more traditional goals/outcomes?

Categories: Crowdsourcing, General, Session Proposals, Session: Make, Session: Talk, Teaching, Tenure and Promotion | Comments Off on Advocating for Alternative Forms of Scholarship

Develop Twitter Scavenger Hunt for Digital Literacy

I was thinking of having a session where we brainstorm togethet possible items on a Twitter scavenger hunt activity we could use to develop digital literacy for our students.

The “make” is a repository of activities for a Twitter scavenger hunt; we could also play parts of the game and reflect later.

As a starting point, here is a Twitter Scavenger Hunt I used last semester. Also there are great Alternate Reality Game ideas for scavenger hunts like this one

We could split the time as follows:
1-hour brainstorming
45 mins play
45 mins reflection

Categories: Collaboration, Digital Literacy, Games, Session Proposals, Session: Make, Social Media, Teaching, Workshops | Comments Off on Develop Twitter Scavenger Hunt for Digital Literacy

ThatCamp Beirut registration open!

Registration for ThatCamp Beirut is now open!

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Save the date!

We are organizing a THATCamp for Saturday, March 7, 2015 at the American University of Beirut. We will be hosting a digital institute from March 2-6 with a variety of courses before the un-conference takes place.

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