On this episode of Digital Campus, host Mills Kelly, along with Dan Cohen, Amanda French, and Stephen Robertson discuss the role of technology in the classroom and some of history’s most teachable moments courtesy of the US Postal Service.

To begin, everyone weighs in on the Maya Angelou stamp controversy and whether or not quotation inaccuracies are getting worse because of the internet.  Then the crew discusses a recent survey by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation which found that only 20% of college and university professors have used “high-tech teaching methods.”  Dan argues that the majority of professors default to textbook teaching just to get the job done. While professors lack digital diversity, the group then shifts to discussing whether the Apple watch could cause problems in the classroom. Could widespread adoption of wearable technology lead to easier cheating? The podcast wrapped up by congratulating Amanda on being elected to the THAT Camp counsel for another year and the announcement that THAT Camp has switched to Reclaim Hosting.

Related Links:

• Book author Joan Walsh Anglund Says of Angelou stamp: ‘That’s my quote’ — the Washington Post
• Professors Know About High-Tech Teaching Methods, but Few Use Them— Chronicle of Higher Education
• U.S. Postsecondary Faculty in 2015: Diversity in People, Goals And Methods, But Focused on Students — Survey by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
• Apple unveils Apple Watch and new MacBook — the Guardian
• THATCamp Council Elections
• Reclaim Hosting

Running time: 41:28

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Stephen Robertson hosted this episode and was joined by the whole crew of Dan Cohen, Amanda French, Mills Kelly, and Tom Scheinfeldt, as well as the digital history fellows, Anne Ladyem McDivitt and Alyssa Toby Fahringer, as producers. Important upcoming trends in digital humanities and educational technology were discussed, as well as the ongoing struggles of utilizing technologies on campus and their value to academia. The conversation then moved to the changing nature of Twitter. The group debated the usefulness of Twitter and the purpose it fulfills in an academic environment. Dan also laments his struggles with being the go-to historian for Answers.com.

Changes in Twitter

Straumsheim, Carl. “Twitter Has the Chatter.” Inside Higher Ed. August 19, 2014.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/08/19/study-scholars-are-present-professional-networks-engage-twitter
Chimero, Frank. “From the Porch to the Street.” August 26, 2014. http://frankchimero.com/blog/from-the-porch-to-the-street/

Jacobs, Alan. “The End of Big Twitter.” The New Atlantis. August 31, 2014. http://text-patterns.thenewatlantis.com/2014/08/the-end-of-big-twitter.html

Priego, Ernesto. “On the Public Humanities and the Reign of Opinion.” August 26, 2014. http://epriego.wordpress.com/2014/08/26/on-the-public-humanities-and-the-reign-of-opinion/

Rybak, Chuck. “DH Toe Dip: The Serendip-o-matic” August 28, 2014. http://www.sadiron.com/dh-toe-dip-the-serendip-o-matic/

Bright, Peter. “Twitpic to Shut Down Picture Sharing Service After Trademark Dispute with Twitter.” September 4, 2014. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/09/twitpic-to-shut-down-picture-sharing-service-after-trademark-dispute-with-twitter/

Jim Groom of Reclaim Hosting responded via blogpost to Tom Scheinfeldt’s suggestion that digital media cannot be taught in an online capacity: “Catching Up with Reclaim Hosting”

Running time: 45:57
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In the absence of Amanda French, Dan, Tom, Mills and Stephen were assisted by only two Amandas.  Tom and Stephen kicked off this podcast with a discussion of new rules for the electronic management of government records and the implications of these new rules for transparency and historical access.  We then heard Dan’s thoughts on the Open Syllabus Project, which resulted in a discussion about how educators share or borrow from each others syllabi.  One of the questions raised was whether or not syllabus writers can claim copyright over their content, which segued nicely into a discussion of Blackboard’s new open source policies.  Our group noted open sourced does not necessarily mean open access.  Finally, the group celebrated the first birthday of the Digital Public Library of America and congratulated Dan on its success.

Big Changes in Store for the Future Management of Government Records

• http://blog.historians.org/2014/04/big-changes-store-future-management-government-records/#sthash.iaTcUFTk.dpuf

Blackboard’s acquisition of open source software

• http://www.blackboard.com/About-Bb/News-Center/Press-Releases/Strategy-Update/Open-Letter.aspx
• http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/03/27/blackboard-buys-moodlerooms-creates-open-source-division#ixzz1qccBFsqC
• http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/digital-tweed/long-and-open-view-blackboard#sthash.ioEFvof6.dpbs

Open Syllabus Project

• http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/new-syllabus-archive-opens-the-curricular-black-box/51285
• http://opensyllabusproject.org/

Udacity charges for certificates

• http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/udacity-will-no-longer-offer-free-certificates/51757

DPLA’s 1st Birthday 

• http://dp.la/info/2014/04/17/dpla-1st-birthday-announcement/

Running time: 41:38
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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.

Running time: 58:13
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Tom, Dan, Mills, Amanda, and Stephen returned for this week’s episode of Digital Campus, joined by Digital History Fellows Ben Hurwitz and Jannelle Legg. We began by discussing a JSTOR’s new individual subscription offering, JPASS, which allows individual users access to more than 1500 journals for a monthly fee of $19.50 or $199 annually. While our panel commended JSTOR’s efforts, Mills expressed concern that the cost of subscription will effectively prohibit JSTOR’s target audience (including adjunct faculty) from access. Amanda pointed out that while JSTOR access has been greatly expanded through library and other institutional subscriptions, many people are unaware of the ways they can currently receive free access. The discussion then moved to “Signals,” a performance monitoring software from Purdue University. Signals is a data-mining program which collects information about individual students such as time spent in online assignments, completion of homework, and performance on quizzes and tests. This information is used to alert students to areas of strength and weakness within their academic schedule. While the program is showing early signs of success, the panel was concerned that this type of program will not encourage students to develop independent study skills.

Next, the group examined the growing complexity of free speech on the internet with two recent news stories. In the first, Facebook ‘likes’ were found to be protected by a fourth circuit appeals court in a case involving a newly re-elected Sheriff and six fired deputies. The second story involved a tenured journalism professor at the University of Kansas that was put on leave as a result of a controversial a tweet. Our final news story concerned the digital footprint that shadows us on the web. In this story a law in California requires the creation of an “eraser button” for minors. The aim is to give users under 18 the ability to delete content from websites, apps and online services. While some contended that the erasure of some data, particularly on popular sites like Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, could be effective – our hosts expressed skepticism that these imprints can fully be erased from the internet. To conclude, Patrick Murray-John delivered a report from the Center about the release of the Omeka API, which will allow users to connect Omeka with other platforms.

NOTE: I mistakenly said that Patrick Murray-John is the Lead Developer for Omeka. Patrick Murray-John is the Omeka Dev Team Manager; John Flatness is the Lead Developer. See http://omeka.org/about/staff/. — Amanda

Links to Stories Discussed:

JSTOR individual passes – http://www.thedigitalshift.com/2013/09/digital-libraries/jstor-launches-jpass-access-accounts-for-individual-researchers/

Coursework nagging software “Signals” at Purdue apparently increases graduation rates – http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/purdue-u-software-prompt-students-to-study-and-graduate/46853

Court rules that Facebook “likes” are free speech –  http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/18/4744288/appeals-court-rules-that-facebook-likes-are-protected-as-free-speech

Kansas professor suspended after tweet – http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/09/23/u-kansas-professor-suspended-after-anti-nra-tweet

“Delete-button” for minors in California – http://gizmodo.com/why-californias-new-web-wide-delete-button-for-teens-w-1377730365

Related Links:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/27/fat-shaming-professor-geoffrey-miller_n_3509505.html

http://omeka.org/

Running time: 50:39
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Sure, there are a few talented people who have gotten EGOTs (an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony), but has anyone gotten a CEGOT? Find out who the lucky recipients of Campies are this year, awarded to the best and the worst in the world of technology and academia. Tom, Mills, Amanda, and Dan make their selections, as well as their predictions for 2013. The Digital Campus crew has often been right in the past, so be sure to tune in and know the future. (Past performance is no guarantee of future results.)

Links mentioned on the podcast:
Tumblr growth
Peter Brantley, “You Have Two, Maybe Three, Years”
Lorcan Dempsey, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Libraries, Discovery, and the Catalog: Scale, Workflow, Attention”
Calling a Quorum — for Real
Buffeted by the Web, but Now Riding It
Amazon Is a Great Company Because It Has the Most Generous Shareholders in the World

Running time: 56:50
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It’s time for a new school year and another year of news and views from the Digital Campus regulars and irregulars. Tom, Mills, Amanda, and Dan are joined by Audrey Watters and Bryan Alexander to do a post-mortem on the “summer of MOOCs” and a pre-mortem on the Twitter-esque service App.net. (With Mills finally joining Twitter over the summer it was time for the rest of us to leave.) We also make our picks for the hardware that you’ll see everywhere on campuses this fall–if we were doing the buying.

Links mentioned on the podcast:

Stefan Fatsis knows a lot about team handball
Dozens of Plagiarism Incidents Are Reported in Coursera’s Free Online Courses
Principles of Macroeconomics: The Online Version
App.net
Glenn Fleishman on what App.net could be
Only 250 users of App.net have generated half of the posts
Amazon to Apple: the game starts now
Microsoft Surface

Running time: 49:36
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We’re joined this week in our last episode before our traditional summer hiatus by Bethany Nowviskie, Director of Digital Research and Scholarship at University of Virginia Libraries and president of the Association for Computers in the Humanities. We mainly discuss what’s going on at UVA, agreeing that it’s a good thing we’re having nationwide discussions now about what universities are doing, have done, and should be doing in the digital age with regard to scholarship and learning, and wondering whether the farmer and the cowman should be friends academics and businesspeople can find a common language. Back by popular demand is our old “pick of the week” segment, featuring UVA’s own ongoing archive of events taking place there.

Links mentioned on the podcast:

• Sullivan Resigns from UVa: Complete Coverage – The Chronicle of Higher Education
• reality bytes – Bethany Nowviskie
• Syllabus Journal
• ReadLists.com
• Encyclopedia of Connecticut History
• Archive of Materials Relating to the Resignation of President Teresa Sullivan

Running time: 54:36
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The Oxford English Dictionary defines “mook” (with a ‘k’) as “An incompetent or stupid person”; apparently it’s a word that achieved notoriety from its use in the 1973 film Mean Streets. But we’re not discussing that kind of “mook,” no sir: on this episode of Digital Campus, we’re discussing Massive Open Online Courses with Audrey Watters of Hack Education. We argue that there are MOOCs and then there are MOOCs, speculate about the purpose and future of MOOCs, and (at least in Audrey’s case) relate our own experiences as MOOC students. It’s a MOOC-a-palooza. (And don’t forget that Dan predicted that 2012 would be the year of MOOC-o-mania last December: we’re proud.)

P.S. As promised at the start of podcast, Mills has now revealed the educational hoaxes perpetrated by his students in his course “Lying About the Past.” Well played, all.

Links:

• Proto-MOOC Stays the Course / Open Course “Digital Storytelling” Enjoys Modest Success
• Massive Courses, Massive Data: Harvard Joins MIT in Platform to Offer Massive Online Courses
• ‘Supersizing’ the College Classroom: How One Instructor Teaches 2670 Students
• 5 Things I’ve Learned From MOOCs About How I Learn

Running time: 44:24
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Get out your sunglasses and tanning lotion, because it’s time for the spring break edition of the podcast. Tom, Mills, Amanda, and Dan bask in the warm retina-screen glow of the new iPad and wonder if tablets are about to take over the classroom. We revisit our slightly mocking pronunciation of certain new online education start-ups, and whether their model of video instruction actually instructs. Finally, we pour libations for the print edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Links mentioned on the podcast:
Tablet Ownership Triples Among Students
ASU Professors Sue Over Online Course Ownership
Khan Academy releases iPad app
TED, Known for Idea Talks, Releases Educational Videos
Universities Cracking Down On Social Media
Spring Break Gets Tamer
Encyclopaedia Britannica Halts Print Edition

Running time: 48:53
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