In August 2012 Lewis and Clark College invited members of the NITLE network to experiment with digital field scholarship by playing in a digital field scholarship sandbox.  These projects were selected and have been contributing to a collaborative website for digital field scholarship, https://sge.lclark.edu/dfs/. View each project’s individual page to find out more.

Davidson College, Math Maps

https://sge.lclark.edu/dfs/project/geotagged-math-maps/

Directed by Tim Chartier, Associate Professor of Math

Students create geotagged math maps as a service-learning project in a course on Finite Math.

Muhlenberg College, Documentary Research Storymapping

https://sge.lclark.edu/dfs/project/documentary-research-storymapping/

Directed by Lora Taub-Pervizpour, Associate Professor and Chair, Media and Communication

Students in a Documentary Research Course create a collaborative storymap that aims to capture the human particularity of places in Allentown, Pennsylvania.

Reed College, Carbon Field Studies

https://sge.lclark.edu/dfs/project/carbon-field-studies/

Directed by Kristen Bott, Instructional Technologist, with Julie Fry, Assistant Professor, Chemistry and Environmental Studies, and Chris Koski, AssistantProfessor, Political Science and Environmental Studies

Students use smart device geolocation and collaboration to place issues of carbon sources and sinks in a spatial context via the Digital Field Scholarship WordPress site.

NITLE congratulates all three projects, institutions, and all sandbox participants on being selected to participate in the 2012-2013 sandbox.

In addition to the above projects, students in a Digital Field Scholarship Seminar: https://sge.lclark.edu/dfs/project/digital-field-scholarship-seminar/, led by Dr. Jim Proctor (who also directs the sandbox) at Lewis and Clark College also are participating in the sandbox.

Sandbox participants will share their projects and insights in an upcoming Shared Academics seminar, Thursday, April 25, 2013, 3-4 pm EDT.

Find out more about digital field scholarship from this previous Techne Post: “What is Digital Field Scholarship?”

On Thursday, January 24 at 4:15 pm, NITLE presents this session at the 2013 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Colleges and Universities:

Undergraduates as Public Digital Scholars

How do we prepare students to be lifelong learners who are adaptive, networked and engaged citizens? By becoming public digital scholars, undergraduates learn digital methods of analysis, critique, and networked communication and gain experience in the increasingly public, global, collaborative, and networked process of knowledge production and exchange.

Rebecca Davis, Program Officer for the Humanities, National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education; Jeffrey McClurken, Chair and Associate Professor of History and American Studies, University of Mary Washington; James Proctor, Professor, Environmental Studies Program, Lewis and Clark College; Daniel Chamberlain, Director, Center for Digital Learning and Research, Occidental College. Read the rest of this post »

How far will massively open online courses go?

One limit to the impact of MOOCs has been their disconnection from college credit. Learners can work through as many MOOCs as they like for personal improvement, but without any impact on their school transcripts. The American Council on Education (ACE) is considering changing that. The Gates Foundation funded an ACE examination of several Coursera courses to see if they can recommend accreditation.

Will this happen? I launched a NITLE prediction market to find out.

As of this writing, traders seem to think ACE will favor the MOOCs:

One day’s worth of trading.

Read the rest of this post »

Today Middlebury College hosted a panel discussion on digital technology’s impact on scholarly publication, with a focus on liberal education.  What follows are my liveblogged notes, lightly edited.

First, the panel began with each participant describing their relevant background and work.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick (MLA; formerly Pomona) outlined her path towards working on scholarly communication.
It began by her blogging about peer review and technology, which led to a collaboration with the Institute for the Future of the Book. Together they persuaded McKenzie Wark (New School) to publish his book Gam3r 7h30ry on the Web for commentary, developing the CommentPress WordPress plugin to facilitate discussion. Fitzpatrick then used the process to publish her own book, Planned Obsolescence.  Her continued work led to her current position as the MLA’s director of scholarly communication.

Read the rest of this post »

If you are looking to build your capacity in digital humanities, consider one of the NEH-funded Institutes for Advanced Topics in Digital Humanities.  The calendar of current opportunities is here: http://www.neh.gov/divisions/odh/institutes

Topics for this year’s institutes include digital research in modern studies, 3D visualization for cultural heritage sites, linked open data for Ancient Mediterranean and Near East Studies, data curation, high performance sound technologies, text-encoding (TEI), and tool building.