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.

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?

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

Proposal for ThatCamp Beirut 2015 session: Exploring HathiTrust

AUB has recently joined the HathiTrust partnership community. In their words, the

“HathiTrust Digital Library is a digital preservation repository and highly functional access platform. It provides long-term preservation and access services for public domain and in copyright content from a variety of sources, including Google, the Internet Archive, Microsoft, and in-house partner institution initiatives. ”

I propose that we explore, over a half day, what we can discover with our access to the HathiTrust. Watch the video on this page for some background.

As a partner institution, researchers at AUB gain access to the HathiTrust Research Center Portal. The HRTC portal provides some computational infrastructure for creating worksets of texts, carrying out algorithms and visualizing them.

If you are interested in attending this session, I would suggest that you request access a few days in advance, since it was a bit slow the first time I tried (maybe because of the .lb on my email.) If you are not part of a member institution, we will pair up in the session so all can learn.