To participants in the Digital Eighteenth-Century 2.0 Roundtables…
We wish to remind you that both of the Digital Eighteenth-Century 2.0 panels (which we consider one project spread across two sessions) are roundtables. In other words, we expect that presentations will be kept short, leaving most of our time available for questions & answers, discussion, and audience participation. We encourage you to use EighteenthCentury.org to post materials that can be accessed both before and after our sessions (we will announce its availability beforehand). The site runs on WordPress, which is a blogging platform you may already be familiar with. If you’d like your own account on EighteenthCentury.or, please let us know. We would like to have your materials posted online by March 4, two weeks before the start of this year’s meeting.
That said, you should consider this an invitation to brainstorm with us about how more specifically to set up the panel and the accompanying online material.
- Would you like to do this pecha kucha style or leave it more open?
- Should we videotape or audiotape the panels?
- What should we post on EighteenthCentury.org, what should be covered by you, the presenters, and how much should we keep open to what the audience wants?
- How can we ensure continuity and conversation across the two sessions? (We’re assuming, of course, that presenters will attend both.)
Finally, at the end of our second session on Friday, we also hope to specifically discuss the formation of an ASECS Digital Humanities caucus.
Thanks for your participation in planning what we hope will be two very interactive roundtables!
Yours,
George and Lisa
February 11th, 2010 at 10:06 am
Thanks for opening up this discussion and for setting up these panels, Lisa and George. Though the idea of using pecha kucha at a conference excites me, I have to voice some reservation for somewhat selfish reasons that may apply to others. My presentation does not lend itself to slides. It will largely be in Google Earth, and I plan to take the audience on a virtual tour. I could adopt this to pecha kucha style, but I don’t think I could follow the strict guidelines of pecha kucha without slides. Perhaps folks have ideas on this? Or similar concerns?
I would be happy –thrilled even– to share my resources on eighteenthcentury.org. I would think that what gets shared here would be left to the presenters, but I see these panels as a chance to get some really lively discussion and exchange on this site. I would also think that with all the presenters’ consent, we should videotape the sessions and make them available on this website. I would be happy to help with the technical side of doing that, if I can be of service.
Also, I think that continuity between the two sessions is important. I wonder if we could post a lot from the first session on this site and refer folks to it? Or perhaps set up a google wave? Or perhaps tweeting will take care of it?
I am really looking forward to this!
Molly
February 11th, 2010 at 11:35 am
Like Molly, I’m intrigued by pecha kucha, but also have some reservations, as I was planning to surf and edit Wikipedia live (taking requests from the audience, for example) to demonstrate some of its features, which is not the kind of presentation that is amenable to slides. However, I have given presentations about Wikipedia with PowerPoint slides before, so I could definitely do that as well.
I think it would be interesting if we each put together a longer, more formal presentation and posted that here (we could include all of the information we aren’t going to have time to mention at the panel). We could also have links to our references. Having additional information would make the site a necessary resource, rather than just a repeat of the panel.
I think that recording the presentation would be an excellent idea. Depending on the type of presentations, we might want to do a screencast, with screencapture and voice recording. The screen may be much more important than our bodies and videorecording tends to obscure what is on a screen.
The question I’m most curious about is the one regarding the interplay between the audience and the presenter. I can imagine, for example, running a Q&A about Wikipedia. Oftentimes academics are very resistant to Wikipedia – one of the best ways to address their concerns to put them directly on the table. I like the idea of getting people to participate directly in the conversation (as this is part of the wiki ethos), but discussions have a tendency to run long or go off on a tangent. I’m pretty familiar with the concerns that academics have about Wikipedia, so I feel like I could address them in a presentation, but that is not as engaging. I feel like some combination of the two is best.
I’m certainly willing to help out with organizing a Digital Humanities caucus.
I’m very excited at the prospect of participating in this and seeing what other people are doing!
Adrianne
February 12th, 2010 at 6:20 am
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Molly and Adrianne. It’s safe to say that we share your reservations about the pecha kucha format not allowing the presenter to demonstrate how a dynamic website such as Google Earth would work.
My thoughts about these roundtables are influenced by one audience member’s reaction to a roundtable I participated in last year. Two of of the presenters discussed and demonstrated digital tools for pedagogy, and in the discussion that followed we (the roundtable participants) debated their value and potential drawbacks.
In the last 5 minutes, one audience member said, “I have a lot of questions, and would like to learn more about how these tools work, but we don’t have enough time remaining.”
So I’ve wanted to come up with some way to have a successful, engaging roundtable and also let audience members leave with a better idea of how they could start using some of the tools and methods presented.
So my strongest desire is not necessarily that all presentation stick to the pecha kucha form, but that we come up with a way for audience members to gain entrance to the world of (what we’re calling) “The Digital Eighteenth Century 2.0.” If something other than using pecha kucha will work for accomplishing this, that’s fine with me.
As we all know, the discussion in sessions like this often “run long or go off on a tangent,” to quote Adrianne, and this will frustrate an audience member who would like to learn more about Google Earth but finds that the bulk of the discussion ends up being about Wikipedia.
Is it possible to avoid such a situation? How? Should we just acknowledge that this might happen and not try to come up with a strategy for avoiding it?
As for using this web site, it’s our goal that we might get closer to use EighteenthCentury.org as a place to share supplementary materials:
Audio files
Video files
Screencasts
Tutorials that demonstrate the basics of how certain tools work
Links and references for further reading
For an example of what a step-by-step tutorial aimed at beginners might look like, consider a ProfHacker post I wrote called “Using Wordle in the Classroom (1 of 2),” in which I demonstrate how word clouds reveal important information about diction in two poems from our period. (I still have to write part 2! Hopefully soon.) Another example of a step-by-step tutorial, which I use with my students, is “Social Bookmarking 101“
Screencasts are also quite useful. Consider these short videos I created for my students using Jing, an inexpensive and very easy tool for such purposes: “How to use this website.” (Of course, there are more sophisticated (and more expensive, and somewhat more time consuming) ways to do screencasts: see, for example, “Screencasting 101.”
As I wrote last July at The Long 18th, we have the materials and we have the tools, but we’re just not using them as we could. In part, I think, many people just don’t know what’s possible (or they don’t know how) but would be willing to learn.
February 12th, 2010 at 6:51 pm
I, too, was intrigued by pecha kucha, but am not sure I could really pull that off for this forum (though it’s something I’m going to have to explore further, particularly in my classes: it seems a good antidote to what I’ve taken to calling the PowerPoint-less presentation).
To be candid, I’m still pondering just what angle to take in this discussion. I’m also presenting on the “Digital Humanities and the Eighteenth Century” panel during the session after this one, and I’m trying to work out the best way to divvy up the material. Both presentations will have to do with the site I’ve been developing, but my thought had been that, for this panel, I’d focus on pedagogical questions and talk about the site as a resource for research in the other.
I was actually about ready to start work on a new screencast about some upcoming developments on the site, and will be happy to provide a link to that here once it’s done. Handling those sorts of “How does this resource work?” questions ahead of time would, I hope, free up time for more discussion, as George suggests.
I wondered if it might be possible to get a little clearer sense of what each of the participants would be discussing. As I’ve said, my thinking about my own piece is still developing, so I’d be glad to hear about the kinds of things others wanted to talk about. One benefit of having the blog, it seems to me, is that we can begin to get a sense of what conversations might emerge, and can tailor things to promote those conversations.
As I’ve been thinking about this panel, I’ve found myself mulling over the varying levels of success (and, um, its opposite) that I’ve had over the semesters in trying to get students engaged in online work. I kind of figured I’d talk very briefly about my interest in getting students to think about questions of bibliography and print history, even at an institution without access to ECCO, et. al. (the things that prompted me to start developing Eighteenth-Century Book Tracker in the first place), and then move on to what’s come to seem to me to be a really fundamental question about these kinds of pedagogical efforts. I’ve been finding that the biggest challenges aren’t technological, but rather social.
We have all sorts of technological options for extending our conversations with and among students beyond the three hours (or so) we spend in the classroom. The greater challenge I’ve found is trying to figure out how to get those conversations woven into the fabric of students’ digital lives once they leave class. That’s something, I’m sorry to say, that I have yet to nail to my satisfaction. Despite what we so often hear about the “digital generation,” my own experience has been that my students, on average, aren’t as tech savvy as people assume they are, and, furthermore, have very little interest in technology qua technology. They know how to use the things that help them do something that they want to do (Facebook, IM…), but aren’t automatically keen to venture much beyond that—and why would they be? In a way, I think pushing these sorts of tools in pedagogical settings is at least as valuable for the ways it might prompt students to become more thoughtful and sophisticated users of online resources as it is for the ways it allows us to teach the eighteenth century.
As I say, I’m still working out the details in my own mind, and I hope this doesn’t sound like too contrary a note for a panel like this one. I’d love to hear about the directions others are thinking of pursuing, because I think these panels are going to make for some fruitful discussions.
February 15th, 2010 at 7:23 am
Ben, I’m personally very interested in student digital resistance. In my History of the Book/Literacy and Technology course last semester (http://hotbookwsu.wordpress.com/), which included web projects and blogging, I had to work against not only a lack of technical know-how and an economic digital divide, but more problematically, an attitude amongst English majors that new technologies were inherently debauched. Their wariness did make them critical consumers & users, and our focus on changing attitudes about the book helped denaturalize that technology as well. After the class, some students are still unreconstructed bibliophiles (not least /because/ this has become marginalized–the attractiveness lies precisely in the seemingly embattled nature of that position), but others, including creative writers and future scholars, found a new platform/voice/medium through our online activities. This is a long way for me to say that I agree that part of what we must do in the Humanities classroom is to teach the skills for critical reading, writing, and participating in our _all_ of the many literacy environments our students will negotiate in their lives. Thus I’d be happy to hear you talk about your problems and successes in that area.
February 25th, 2010 at 8:36 am
Like Lisa, I am very interested in student digital resistance–in fact, as I, too, continue to mull over my comments for this roundtable, I am increasingly faced with the need to deal, head-on, with such resistance. I used zotero, omeka archives, and wordpress to teach basic research methodologies and textual interpretation to graduate students at a very small, private Catholic university, the graduate student body at which is highly diverse, especially in terms of ages and skills. We also visited the Library of Congress and experimented with EEBO, ECCO, and Burney–we have neither these resources nor extensive microfilm collections on our campus. I went into the class with one idea, and realized–much later, as it turns out–that it had to be radically rethought.
In my presentation, I am now planning to frontload the class purpose, show some of the resources we used to participate in research and writing, and share some of the problems I encountered, along with some possible ways to overcome those hurdles. Part of what interests me about this topic is much like what Ben says:
This class wasn’t really about the 18c, but about how to think more closely and critically and holistically about literary texts, research, and argumentation. I believe there are very real ways in which becoming more cognizant of and expert with a variety of digital research tools–even including library catalogues–can help students interact with texts and concepts in more sophisticated and self-aware manner. For instance, knowing how–even the basics of how–a database works and represents is data can change how we conduct searches.
I think I could do this in pecha kucha, but I also don’t want the format to suture over the real physical problems that many of my students encountered when trying to deal with our resources–the encountering of which focuses the ways technology (might) offer unique opportunities to confront some assumptions of transparency in literary interpretation. However, I also don’t want to eat into others’ time. I would be interested in the discussion format, but, like George, I think it is very important to have a resource that allows us to indulge, later and in the privacy of our own homes, in the wealth of experience the roundtable collectively represents.
February 25th, 2010 at 10:45 am
Dear All:
I apologize for coming to this discussion so late: I would be willing to use pecha kucha style along with, as Ben proposes above, a series of videos that will give more information. I’ll bring the urls to those videos as a handout but also post them on the prezi slide presentation — I THINK I can set prezi to advance automatically at 20 seconds per slide; if not, I’ll use power point.
So you can all have more time, if you need it.
Quick question: are we certain that we will have live internet? It might be wise for us each to have a power point that cans all the clicks you make, just in case the internet doesn’t arrive. I’ve had that happen at too many presentations . . . . — and I think everyone should have their ppt. slides on a flash drive . . .
March 10th, 2010 at 6:38 pm
Apologies for being SO tardy. I love the pecha kucha idea! I’m not sure it will work for me, but either way, I’m going to try to stick to the 6 minutes and 40 seconds.
March 11th, 2010 at 5:49 pm
Could we get a firm decision on the length our presentations should be and the format? Thanks!