A 2007-2015 discussion of how digital media and technology are affecting learning, teaching, and scholarship at colleges, universities, libraries, and museums.
This Digital Campus episode was recorded live by Chris Preperato during Friday’s second afternoon session of the RRCHNM’s 20th Anniversary Conference and was produced by Anne Ladyem McDivitt and Alyssa Toby Fahringer. Mills Kelly, Stephen Robertson, and Tom Scheinfeldt joined host Dan Cohen to recap the earlier sessions of the day, including discussions on failure, ECHO, History Makers, pedagogy, and digital humanities centers’ websites. The floor was opened for a question and answer session, and audience participants and those on Twitter asked about Tom’s laptop’s dearth of stickers, how to convey scholarship to a broad audience, and gender and digital history centers.
For our hundredth anniversary episode, the digital history fellows divided up the 2007 episodes of Digital Campus and picked their favorite bits — listen to the result if you dare, and be transported back to the days when the iPhone was brand new, when Second Life was the Next Big Thing, and when you had to have an email address with a .edu TLD in order to use Facebook. Good times.
Many thanks to digital history fellows Ben Hurwitz, Jannelle Legg, Anne McDivitt, Amanda Morgan, Amanda Regan, and Spencer Roberts for choosing the clips, and many many thanks to audiovisual guru Chris Preperato for stitching them together.
Our friend Steve Ramsay rejoins the regulars to pore over the Facebook IPO and its fallout for the markets and the gossip pages. Reluctantly, we turn to more familiar turf with updates on the Google Books and George State e-reserves cases. We then take a moment to lament the closure of the University of Missouri press before ending the show with a discussion of the push toward minimalism and readability in digital humanities web design.
The clock strikes noon, and that sound might just signal the end of the bright morning for closed systems in higher education. On this week’s podcast, we discuss Coursekit, a free (for now) learning management system built by dropouts from the University of Pennsylvania; Commons-in-a-Box, a free (funded by the Sloan Foundation) academic social networking system of blogs and wikis that will be built by non-dropouts from the CUNY Academic Commons; and the Berlin 9 Open Access Conference, which seems to have convinced not only several universities but also the White House that peer-reviewed scholarly publications should be, what else, free. Our honored guest is journalist Audrey Watters of Hack Education.
While sitting in our offices and wishing we were outside in the beautiful spring weather, Tom, Dan, and Mills took a virtual journey north of the border to talk to Kevin Kee and Bill Turkel about their recent conference Playing With Technology in History at Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario. Kevin is the director of the Simulating History Lab at Brock University and Bill is the guru of the Lab for Humanistic Fabrication. In addition to discussing the conference and Kevin’s and Bill’s work on the cutting edge–perhaps even bleeding edge–of digital humanities, we also debated the pros and cons of the unconference model for academic meetings and whether we thought that “play” was an appropriate objective for history teachers. Kevin also gave us a sneak preview of the mobile history app he and his team are developing to coincide with the bicentennial of the War of 1812. If you don’t have any idea what “humanistic fabrication” is or if you’ve never pondered whether or not you need a MakerBot, you definitely need to listen to the podcast.
The second most frequently asked question at museums after “Where are the restrooms?” is “Where is the art?” In this episode we ask whether those artifacts belong on a museum’s website, and if so, how, as we debate the proper relationship between a museum’s virtual and physical manifestations. Our news roundup covers the opening up of Harvard’s scholarship, Berkeley’s YouTube channel, iTunesU, and two software projects that aim to improve the library catalog and the museum exhibit. We also highlight Errol Morris’s blog posts on truth in photography, a great museum blog, and a tool for converting one type of digital file to another.
Is the moderated environment of email discussion lists still the best way for scholars to communicate with others in their field? Or is the time ripe to move those conversations onto blogs and less mediated and more open formats? That’s this week’s debate in the feature segment. In the roundup we cover news about greater competition for Microsoft Office and the significance of the New York Times dumping its pay-for-certain-content model. Picks of the week include a great podcast from the BBC, a blog for bizarre and interesting maps, and a way to overlay historical (and other) maps onto current ones.
We begin the news roundup this week with a bit of embarrassing news from Dan, then dig into several stories about big media companies entering the online learning market and Google Books becoming more useful for scholarship. In our feature segment, Tom and Mills explain how they try to stay productive in a world of constant digital distractions like email and blog feeds. Helpful links this week include a terrific site for teaching through famous trials, a way to customize Google, and a dead simple online to-do list. And we remember 9/11 through our own site, the September 11 Digital Archive.
We continue our discussion of blogging, this time with a closer look at the challenges and difficulties of starting and maintaining a blog, attracting and keeping an audience, and making sure it doesn’t get in the way of other academic pursuits. In the news roundup, we compare the iPhone and Facebook platforms, examine two software projects that mine Wikipedia for trustworthiness, and wonder once again if anyone is home in Second Life.
Dan, Mills, and Tom celebrate the tenth edition of Digital Campus with part one in a new series on blogs and blogging. In this episode, we take a look back at how we became bloggers, examine questions of subject matter, voice, and style, and debate the risks and rewards of blogging in a scholarly context. We also report on problems posed by the iPhone for wireless network administrators, the subversive role of SMS in China, and ups and downs for humanists in Second Life. Picks of the week include Flock, a “social” web browser, the David Rumsey collection of nearly 16,000 historic maps, and the launch of plain text Google Books.
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