The presentation will be held at 4:00 p.m. on Wednesday, April 29 at the Smith Warehouse, 2nd floor Bay 11, (enter through Bay 12).

You can find more information about their course at their website.  The course also received funding from the CIT as part of our 2009 Strategic Initiative Grant program and was profiled on the CIT’s Project Examples blog.

As an end of the semester group project, her class held a Twitter Film Festival, screening clips from films on a course blog and using the microblogging tool Twitter to comment on the films as they were shown throughout the day.  The students were also encouraged to use Twitter during the course to discuss the lectures.

In the video, Mottahedeh discusses her philosophy behind using Twitter and social media tools in the course and her experiences getting used to the technology.  The shared Twitter account used for the festival can be found at http://twitter.com/twitfilm and the hashtag #twitfilm.  The Twitter Film Festival was also highlighted in a Duke News story.

Twitter Film Festival in Duke Film Studies Class from Jeff Cohen on Vimeo.

Talk with Julie Reynolds about using video to teach writing, Julie Perco about teaching with Second Life, Len White or Lucy Haagen about mobile devices, Victoria Szabo or Alex Glass or Peter Haff about using mapping in your course and student Jennifer Kim about effective blog assignments.

Talk with people who have been teaching in the Link (Liliana Paredes, Laura Florand, Sandra Valnes Quammen, Hugh Crumley, Susan Wynn and Deb Reisinger) and find out how to use the flexible spaces.

Learn how your colleagues have used VoiceThread or iTunesU (or find out what these are).  And more!

Register now to reserve your space.

The Mellon Seminars in Digital Humanities have been exploring issues around changes in the Humanities brought about by these new opportunities.  As part of the series, the two faculty leading the seminars, Todd Presner, UCLA, and Jeffrey Schnapp, Stanford, are leading the drafting of a “Digital Humanities Manifesto” in an online blog.

The blog is set up to allow users to comment on each sentence in the Manifesto and discuss its contents.   To join the blog, click on one of the links in the “comments overview” window in the middle of the screen, and then click on “Create an Account.”

More information on the Mellon Seminars in Digital Humanities, which will be held at UCLA and broadcast via a live feed in Second Life each month through June 2009 can be found in a previous CIT blog post.

Digital Humanities Manifesto blog

http://www.smarthistory.org/

The site was founded by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker of the Fashion Institute of Technology at the State University of New York.  The work is an outgrowth of multimedia materials and blogs they were already creating for their courses.

“For years we have been dissatisfied with the large expensive art history textbook. We found that they were difficult for many students, contained too many images, and just were not particularly engaging. In addition, we had found the web resources developed by publishers to be woefully uncreative. We had developed quite a bit of content for our online Western art history courses and we had also created many podcasts, and a few screencasts for our smARThistory blog. So, it finally occurred to us, why not use the personal voice that we use when we teach online, along with the multimedia we had already created for our blog and for our courses, to create a more engaging “web-book” that could be used in conjunction with art history survey courses. We are also committed to joining the growing number of teachers who make their content freely available on the web.”

The New Media Consortium’s 2009 Horizon Report, which looks at trends in uses of technology in teaching in higher education, cited smARThistory as an example of the “Personal Web”, a set of technologies that allow faculty, students and experts to easily build rich multimedia websites, e-books, and other resources.

Below is a short video and you can also read a blog post at Gizmodo about the project.

Miles is a grad student at George Mason in the history department; his department explores the relationship between history and new media.  Miles defined new media as digital media in a variety of forms, whether on a disk or online, and the different ways of sharing that media.

To introduce students to information, there are a variety of resources. One example is a digital form of a print textbook, for example, the online North Carolina History book for 8th graders.  A different type of resource, History Matters, is more of a gateway to a variety of resources.  Then, there are online resources like American Memory from the Library of Congress, which make available historical materials from a variety of institutions.  However, some surveys show that students still prefer printed text for studying Miles also mentioned tools like Zotero which allow people to share online resources.  (CIT has used Connotea and delicious, which are somewhat similar.)

Some digital resources can be used to help students reconstruct history, so they can learn to evaluate and synthesize information. One example is Martha Ballard’s diary. In this example, students translate text written in an old style, and piece together events from several of sources.

A third type of new media can empower students to produce and exchange original arguments and information.  This is where blogs come in.  Miles showed two diagrams for how blogs could be used, which I’ve tried to reproduce, below.  The diagram on the left shows a model where the students each create a separate blog post to respond to an instructor’s question. There is no interaction, and no building on ideas, it’s more of a traditional essay assignment.  In the diagram on the right, one student is assigned to respond to a prompt and creates a blog entry.  Three students commented on the original entry, and then other students comment on the comments.  This method facilitates the production of new ideas.  In Miles’ experience, to keep the discussion respectful, the comments should be moderated; he also mentioned that if each student has an individual blog, the students do not visit each other’s blogs unless required.

A participant described an assignment to a group, which used a wiki to develop a two page paper.  The students communicated over 300 times in developing the paper; the instructor felt that it was successful, and the discussion was deeper than online discussion boards.

Another participant experimented with using microblogging (like Twitter) in online course; he felt that it was successful and community was formed that still communicates even though the course is over.   Some of us at CIT use Twitter to communicate; in fact, I twittered about this session while it was going on, to share links with colleagues not at the conference.

http://www.livingroomcandidate.org/

The collection includes ads and commentary covering every election from the 1952 match-up between Eisenhower and Stevenson to present.  Over 300 commercials can be viewed by year and party or by specific themes and visitors to the site can register to create custom playlists for reference or classroom presentations.

The site also allows embedding of individual videos in your own web page.  Below is “Youth”, one of a series of innovative ads in a montage style created for the 1968 Nixon campaign by filmmaker Eugene Jones.  And, on the Democratic side, “Drums”, created for the 1996 Bill Clinton campaign.

This year’s seminar is co-organized by Jeffrey Schnapp (Stanford University, Stanford Humanities Laboratory, and Mellon Visiting Professor of Digital Humanities, UCLA) and Todd Presner (Germanic Languages and Comparative Literature, UCLA). The seminar’s theme is “What is(n’t) Digital Humanities?”

Through dialogues with expert guest interlocutors and practitioners from various fields, seminar participants will examine, historicize, and critique the emergent field of “digital humanities.” Bringing together insights from media, game, literary and cultural studies, we will attempt to take stock of humanistic inquiry at the start of the 21st century.

Topics will include Web 2.0, virtual worlds, ubiquitous computing, geo-temporal navigation, participatory media, digital narratives, open source knowledge, collaborative authorship, experiential design and the classroom as laboratory.

Seminar guests include: Johanna Drucker, Michael Schanks, Lev Manovich, Diane Favro, Franco Moretti, Tara McPherson, Peter Lunenfeld.

Seminars meet 2-5 pm Pacific Time on
10/8/08, 11/5/08, 12/1/08, 1/5/09, 2/2/09, 3/2/09, 4/6/09, 5/4/09, and 6/1/09.

The following Second Life URL will teleport you to DLF’s Entropia, though you must have a Second Life account in order to log on: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Entropia/110/117/21/. Basic Second Life accounts are free: http://secondlife.com/.

For more information visit http://www.digitalhumanities.ucla.edu/ or join the UCLA Digital Humanities Facebook Group. Topics for each session will be posted on-line once they have been finalized.