I wanted to throw out some preliminary ideas for potential sessions:
— development of an app and/or tools for the Elliston Project
Over the past several years a number of us have been working on the Elliston Project, starting by digitizing a large body of recorded readings in our own Elliston Poetry Room over the past several decades. We’re now in the midst of working on a more attractive and user-friendly public interface, but would also welcome suggestions and assistance in terms of developing tools and potentially an app or mobile interface for the project.
— audio in the humanities (critical or creative uses)
This is a central part of the Poetry: Sound, Media & Performance class I’m teaching this semester, as well as the Audiopoetics workshop I’ll be teaching in the fall. It might be worthwhile to discuss the use of audio — like the resources available in our Elliston archive — both as primary texts, but also as a mode of critical engagement and/or as a creative end.
— digital obsolescence / link drift / retro-incompatibility / etc.
An issue I’ve run into in some of my classes this term — everything from expired security certificates to vanishing resources — but which also reminded me of Jerry McGann’s recent visit, where he wasn’t able to show us some of the tools he and his team had spent years working on because they needed to be updated to meet current web standards.
Today’s front page of Aaaaarg.org.
— underground commons / free culture / benevolent piracy / etc.
Does information want to be free? How are resources like Aaaaarg, Monoskop, torrents, Facebook groups where PDFs are shared among a scholarly community, etc., as well as open source archives (permissioned or not) changing the face of scholarship in the 21st century? How do things like the Aaron Schwartz case and the perilous fate of net neutrality affect our discussion of these phenomena?
— print vs. digital interactivity in the classroom / the portable digital library
What benefits and deficits are there when a class has no hard copy texts? Are students reading on their laptops or tablets more prone to distraction in class, less likely to annotate texts, more or less focused when reading, etc.? What are the financial pluses and minuses? How does this allow for a more adaptable pedagogy and/or limit one’s choices? What does it mean as a scholar and teacher when you can carry hundreds (if not thousands) of books, articles, and other texts on your phone/tablet/laptop?
— digital attention spans
Somewhat related to the topic above. I’m thinking in light of ideas proposed by folks as diverse as N. Katherine Hayles and Kenneth Goldsmith, but would welcome others’ perspectives outside of my own discipline.
Hello campers,
I definitely second the idea of discussing use of audio/video and other media in the classroom. What are some pedagogical questions/conflicts that arise out of such strategies? How might one draft assignment prompts and also assess students?
How does f2f, hybrid or fully online environments work for use of media? Does media replace printed text or complement it?
I struggle with students writing providing perfunctory responses to media used in assignments. Does embedding questions within the audio or video yield better results? Thoughts, experiences?
also, do we have a twitter page set up for our specific workshop?