The Knight Lab tools are a great collection of visualization and presentation software that is designed for embedding into websites. In the video below recorded on 19 March 2019, Tim Clarke demonstrates how easy it is to build Knight Lab presentations that can expand and support a Berg Builds project. Knight Lab tools include Story Maps, Timelines, before and after image juxtapositions, and many other kinds of simple but powerful tools that work great with WordPress and are often just the right size and complexity for a student assignment.
Qualtrics is a tool for building and distributing surveys and questionnaires. Qualtrics makes it simple to build a quick web-based survey, but the capabilities of this survey platform are vast and sophisticated. Qualtrics permits collaboration both in building survey instruments and reviewing survey data.
Nicole Hammel from the Office of Institutional Research and Kenneth S Michniewicz Assistant Professor, Psychology, walk through the features of Qualtrics as well as an overview of our Institutional Review Board whose policies and procedures guide the creation and distribution of most surveys on campus.
The Digital Learning Team is excited to share a new TechTalks format: video plus. We know that the standard TechTalks session at 8:30 a.m. isn’t feasible for many, and so this format combines a short video available for viewing at any time with a Twitter chat. Our first video plus session explores the opportunities to build and teach with digital collections using the Shared Shelf platform. The video for this session is an edited 10-minute version of a past Tech Talk with Susan Falciani and Lora Taub-Pervizpour. The video is below and the paired Twitter chat is on October 25 at 8 p.m. Join Susan, Lora, and members of the Digital Learning Team on Twitter for 45 minutes (or as long as you can), tweeting with the hashtag #bergcollects.
Video
Background
Muhlenberg is one of 42 small independent colleges around the country participating in the Council of Independent Colleges Consortium on Digital Resources. Funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the initiatives supports librarians, archivists, and faculty collaborating to advance and understand the uses of digital archives in liberal arts teaching and learning. Now in its third and final year, Muhlenberg has benefited greatly from participating in this consortial project.
The initiative provides participating institutions with three years of free access to Artstor’s Shared Shelf, a cloud-based asset management service that enables faculty and staff members across many disciplines and departments to organize and access documents, video collections, audio collections, and digital images. The availability of Shared Shelf enables institutions that lack the expertise, time, or software to build and manage digital collections on their own. During the grant period to date, Muhlenberg has built (or is currently building) eight collections, work that engages librarians, faculty, staff, and students in hands-on, experiential and integrative learning:
Historical Campus Photographs
Muhlenberg in the 40s Digital Stories
Navy V-12 and V-5 World War II Photograph Collection
Photographic History
Protest Artifacts
Robert C. Horn Papyri Collection
The Muhlenberg Papers
The Ray R. Brennen Collection
Among the many projects we have learned about from our CIC consortial partners, below are a few of the ones that stand out for their connections to faculty interests and educational activities at Muhlenberg:
A professor of marine biology at Martin Methodist College in Pulaski, Tennessee, has established an expansive marine biology digital collection of his own photographs from years of researching coral reefs in Key Largo, Red Sea, and Trinidad. The collections are infused into student learning in courses including General Biology for non-majors, Ecology, and Invertebrate Zoology.
At the University of Puget Sound, a Theater Arts Collection documents the process of campus productions from script to stage through set models, scene notes, costume renderings, production photographs, programs and posters. The collection archives this significant element of campus culture and provides faculty resources for introducing students to working with primary sources, for research on material culture, and for fostering visual literacy and multimodal composition.
At Presbyterian College in Clinton, South Carolina, an English professor has developed The Textile Mill Memory Project and is developing a significant collection of digitized artifacts from the Robert Mercer Vance Collection of photographs, correspondence, clippings, and other items related to the Clinton and Lydia textile mills. Faculty in theater, history, and English are drawing on this collection in their teaching and students are contributing to it in a new course infusing oral history into documentary research.
In this video plus Tech Tuesday session, we invite faculty and staff to explore these resources, watch the video introduction to the Shared Shelf platform and Shared Shelf Commons. Explore the digital collections that Muhlenberg has already created and published to the Shared Shelf Commons, including The Robert C. Horn Papyri Collection, the Ray R. Brennan Map Collection, the Muhlenberg Family Papers, and the College’s historic photograph collection. During the Twitter chat, some of the things we hope to encourage faculty to imagine include identifying new digital collections related to their scholarship, ways to integrate digital collections into teaching, how to engage students in working with existing collections or creating new collections related to course work.
Join the Digital Learning Team on April 25 for a Tech Tuesday discussion on a pilot project we initiated this year: Domain of One’s Own. Members of the Digital Learning Team have written about the early months of this initiative in a series of blog posts that are rounded up in this post: http://diglearn.blogs.muhlenberg.edu/2016/10/31/blogging-is-everything/. In this Tech Tuesday session, we update the community our progress with the initiative and introduce future possibilities for getting involved.
The focal point of our Domains initiative launch this semester is a Faculty Learning Community. Ten faculty and several Digital Learning Team members have been meeting throughout Spring semester to explore new possibilities for faculty, staff, and students to design and build their digital presence with greater flexibility and independence, and to exercise greater agency in determining what and how to share their scholarship and learning publicly online. Each faculty member is developing their own domain, some focused on teaching, others focused on scholarly projects. The themes, readings, and activities for the FLC are openly available here: http://dooo.flc.bergbuilds.domains/. The FLC site provides much more background on the project and the motivations behind our Domains initiative than we can address in our short Tech Tuesday presentation. We hope you’ll take a look and perhaps even encounter material there that you want to share with students or colleagues.
Throughout the year, the Digital Learning Team has been developing the resources necessary to support faculty, staff and students in developing their digital presence via Domains. Tim Clarke has developed a thorough site for support documentation here: http://help.bergbuilds.domains/. Building on and extending the knowledge base created by folks who developed Domain of One’s Own at University of Mary Washington and its early adopters at Emory University and Oklahoma University, Tim’s documentation takes you step by step through the process of creating a Domain and getting up and running.
We’ve also been cultivating expertise among a cadre of Digital Learning Assistants who have offered workshops, one on one consultations, and course visits to help faculty and students begin building their Domains. Faculty consistently note how helpful it is to have peer assistants–much like a writing assistant or a learning assistant–to help introduce Domains to students and support them as they begin creating, curating, and organizing their sites. The DLA website and schedule is here: http://diglearn.blogs.muhlenberg.edu/people/digital-learning-assistants/. While we don’t know the DLA Fall 2017 schedule just yet, it’s certainly possible to begin thinking about a DLA-led workshop to help introduce your students to Domains.
In May and June, DLT members are giving several presentations at conferences near and far about our early work with Domains. Check back soon for blog posts and slides from those presentations.
TechTuesday is cancelled today because of the storm, but the Digital Learning Team has an alternative that doesn’t require stepping out into the snow. This afternoon, Tuesday, March 14, at 2 p.m. EST, we warm up our snow day with a Twitter chat about students, protest, distraction, and taking risks. The conversation will focus on Sean Michael Morris’ recent blog post, “Deeply Aggrieved.” With this piece as a starting point, we’ll consider what’s at stake for students in the current political environment and what our responsibilities are as educators in this crisis moment.
Below are a few questions to get our chat going. Read the post, bring your own questions, and join us for this hour-long chat. We’ll be using the hashtag #snowberg. It’s helpful to include it with all of your tweets so that other participants can easily follow along.
Sean Michael Morris is a digital teacher and pedagogue, and instructional designer at Middlebury College. He is known for his work in critical digital pedagogy and social justice, and directs the Digital Pedagogy Lab. In his latest post, published on March 12, Morris reflects on recent protesting by Middlebury students against the presence of Charles Murray on campus, and an opinion piece by Frank Bruni in the New York Times of that event. One reader on Twitter called Morris’ post “the only required reading on the Middlebury protests,” while another described it as a “must-read for all working in higher education — and anyone else with an opinion about what’s happening here.” Morris challenges readers to question some of the increasingly common ways that college students are described– “emotionally coddled,” “distracted.” He also invites us, as educators, to consider what more we can do to show up for our students, who carry into our classes and campus spaces known and unknown adversities of which we may not be fully aware, let alone prepared for.
As the snow continues to fall and the wind blows sideways, the Digital Learning Team at Muhlenberg is looking forward to reading and reflecting on Morris’ post and invite you to join in at 2 p.m. EST.
Question 1
As educators, how can we better show up for students moving through and with adversity? How can we make our classrooms and community more hospitable spaces?
Question 2
Morris asks us to critically examine our image of a distracted learner. Who is a distracted learner? What kinds of learners do we have in mind? How helpful is that category?
Question 3
How can we practice “Zen-like honesty about the state of things” so that our courses and syllabi help students prepare for their future, to solve the crises in our world today? What kinds of assignments and activities might empower them in this work?
The Fall 2016 Tech Tuesday series ends December 6 with a long awaited session on 3D modeling. Jordan Noyes, Instructional Technologist, will introduce faculty and staff to a variety of software for modeling, texturing, rendering, and more. In this session, Jordan will encourage participants to think about the ways these changing technologies might be integrated into pedagogy and inspire new possibilities in teaching and learning. Attendees will be introduced to a range of examples of digital scholarship and course assignments to help begin discussions around where and how to incorporate 3D modeling into a liberal arts curriculum. See Jordan’s blog for further details and join us for the last Tech Tuesday of 2016!
Screenshot from Margo Hobbs, Contemporary Art Spring 2016 Scalar Book Project
When Margo Hobbs, Associate Professor of Art, was frustrated with the limits of available textbooks for her Contemporary Art course, she had the idea to engage her students in researching, producing, and collaboratively publishing a a digital textbook for on the topic. For this Spring 2016 project, Margo’s students explored global contemporary art since 1989 through a variety of digital and openly available online resources and tools. Together with Margo, they learned to use Scalar, a free, open source authoring and publishing tool, collaboratively generating a digital textbook published to the web. The platform offers a great degree of flexibility in design and structure, making it easy to produce multi- and non-linear paths within a multimedia project. Scalar was a good choice for Margo’s Contemporary Art project, because it can showcase images as well as text, and you can build items that annotate or comment upon other items.
The possibility of creating multiple pathways and non-linear multimodal narratives within Scalar was ideal for a collaborative student project in the interdisciplinary RJ Capstone Seminar. In S
Screenshot from RJ Fellows Spring 2015 Community Connections Scalar Book Project
pring 2015, the project, “Many Ways of Connecting,” asked students to reflect upon and document the changing relationship between Muhlenberg and the wider community of Allentown, and to explore this relationship along multiple dimensions. In their Scalar publication, students were able to represent the diverse and sometimes intersecting avenues for connecting with Allentown that, as students, shaped their experiences at Muhlenberg. Their project highlights the multi-linear pathways through which students participate in community-based learning, service, engagement, and activism.
After building the digitized Robert C. Horn Papyri Collection in Shared Shelf, Muhlenberg archivist Susan Falciani was interested in extending the collection into a platform that would make these resources more public and accessible, especially for use in teaching and learning. Omeka afforded her the ease and customization necessary to build a rich, searchable collection of the objects in this collection. It required no HTML knowledge, though she was able to rely on colleagues with CSS skills for help with design customization. All said, Susan produced this exhibit in about 20 hours time. Her presentation on the project at the meeting of the Council for Independent Colleges Consortium on Digital Resources for Teaching and Learning, is here.
Screenshot of the Robert C. Horn Papyri Collection
In this Tech Tuesday, we explore both of these open-source, free, and widely used tools for digital scholarship. We will touch on some of their affordances, show examples produced with each tool, and consider some of the reasons for choosing one or the other depending on the type of project faculty are interested to produce and the kinds of materials to be integrated. Omeka is used widely to build digital exhibits, collections, and archives that are image-rich, with the key feature that it integrates Dublin Core metadata schema for describing items within an Omeka site. This standardized vocabulary means that data can easily be moved into and shared with other systems. Scalar is a media-rich digital publishing platform allowing multiple authors to add and annotate text, image, audio and video elements, and connect those elements in multi- or non-linear narrative paths. The annotation feature in Scalar is particularly rich–anything in a Scalar book can be annotated in just about any format. Beyond annotating images with text, text can be annotated with audio or video, video can be annotated with audio, and so forth.
If you are unable to attend in person, we are offering a live stream of the session through Zoom. Please sign in to the link below before the session begins at 8:30. A moderator will be there to share any questions you may have with the presenters. Join from PC, Mac, Linux, iOS, or Android: https://muhlenberg.zoom.us/j/963994155
Resources on Digital Pedagogy and Digital Publishing
Jen Jarson, Information Literacy and Assessment Librarian and Social Sciences Subject Specialist, has curated the following resources to provide additional information on these featured tools, and in particular, to highlight their affordances for developing digital literacies and pedagogy. If you have discipline-specific information literacy questions related to Tech Tuesday, please contact Jen at jarson@muhlenberg.edu.
There are many possibilities for integrating real-time (synchronous) online communication and collaboration in teaching and learning. For traditional, blended, or online courses, opportunities to virtually connect with students, with faculty or other professionals in other locations expand teaching and learning beyond our campus boundaries, IT/DL has made it easier to do this with a new web and video conferencing tool called Zoom. This TechTuesday session introduces faculty and staff to Zoom, via Zoom. If being physically present on campus at 8:30 a.m. for TechTuesday has made it difficult for you to attend these early morning sessions, this week we’re using Zoom to introduce you to this tool while hoping also to widen access to and participation in Tech Tuesday sessions. (You’ll have to access your own coffee, however).
Some of the ways you might use Zoom to support interactive and student-centered learning, or to communicate with students beyond face to face opportunities, include:
Guest speakers–enliven a class by bringing in faculty, students, and experts from around the world
Holding class when weather prohibits coming to campus or while you are traveling (with the option to record the class for students who couldn’t attend or for later reference)
Group activities around a shared problem, question, or text
Virtual collaboration space for students working on group projects
Student-led class discussions, review sessions, etc.
Conferences with students to discuss their work
Virtual office hours to widen availability and participation
To join this Tech Tuesday session via Zoom, you need a smartphone or a computer. Although a webcam and microphone are required to join in on the discussion, if you don’t have these tools you can still view and listen. Here’s the link to join the session, which you can access beginning at 8:15: Join from PC, Mac, Linux, iOS or Android: [link removed] Participation is limited to 50.
A few suggestions to help ensure a successful experience:
If you are joining by video, check your background and be aware of what’s visible behind you. Move distracting visual elements (piles of laundry, leaping cats, etc.)
Join the session prior to the meeting start time, as early as 8:15, to allow time to verify audio and set up
Headsets are recommended, especially if you are joining only by audio without video
If you are joining by video, reduce distracting glare and uneven lighting in your environment, by closing window shades. A well-lit room is important, but the combination of outside light and indoor fluorescent light can disrupt the camera and image quality.
Use the features in Zoom to interact with the session presenters if you have questions or comments.
