Event Title

Soapbox Session B

Presenter Information

Deanna Sessions
Pouya Jahanshahi
Geoffrey Gimse
Kira Baker-Doyle
Joseph Fanfarelli
John Bork

Location

CB1-307

Start Date

4-11-2017 1:45 PM

End Date

4-11-2017 3:00 PM

Description

Values Beyond Cost: Open Educational Resources in the Humanities Classroom (Deanna Sessions)

Open Educational Resources (OER) are educational materials and resources offered freely and openly for anyone to use and under some licenses to re-mix, improve and redistribute. Usually touted as alternatives to expensive textbooks and rising educational costs, there has been a push for the promotion and development of these type of materials. Using OER makes sense in an economics or science classroom, where a textbook may cost upwards of three hundred dollars, but how can we imagine OER in the environment of a humanities course where required texts can be found at a used bookstore for a few dollars each? Where can we add value for our students - and create teaching and learning resources that embody a humanistic pedagogy that is interdisciplinary, collaborative, participatory, and accessible? This paper explores several case studies related to OER and affordable course content coming out of New York University's Office of Educational Technology for Faculty of Arts and Science. In the first, faculty from the Expository Writing Program and instructional technologists iterate over the course of several semesters to create a digital course reader for a year-long, essay-writing course required of all Tisch School of the Arts students. The e-reader was used in conjunction with several digital annotation platforms, with the instructional goal of making texts truly "open," to encourage student engagement with course content and foster collaboration. While eventually successful in eliminating text costs, the Tisch e-reader initiative ultimately proved costs are not the only factor when determining value of educational materials. In the second, faculty create instructional video modules to supplement course texts for a philosophy course, "Ethics of Identity." Students are required to read both philosophical and literary texts - some with little to none existing contextual or critical resources. Faculty are in the process of creating short video modules providing biographical, historical, linguistic, and cultural contexts for these works. By creating open, reusable resources, we hope to supplement our students' learning, as well as encourage the adoption of these novels into syllabi and courses across the university and the global network. Finally, instructional technologists and subject librarians collaborate to address twin concerns of affordability and accessibility. Faculty will be able to submit syllabus to an optional review service. Subject librarians will advise on affordable course content and open educational resources (as substitutions and/or supplements) while instructional technologists offer any feedback to make sure that course materials can be accessed by those with disabilities, foreign language issues, or other needs that could affect accessing required course material. Overall, these case studies demonstrate that OER can add value to a humanities course, not just reduce costs. By embracing and expanding "open" to all its definitions, we can develop pedagogical materials that foster collaboration, participation in the knowledge-building process, and equitable access.

Towards a Digital Humanities Design Pedagogy (Pouya Jahanshahi)

The field of Digital humanities by the virtue of its own mandate is bound to demand a new generation of thinkers and makers – one comprising of a hybrid skill set of not only writing and mastery of the textual realm, but a keen awareness of processes and potentialities pertaining to the visual realm. Meanwhile, contemporary programs in design education have been undergoing constant and rapid change during the past two decades, reflecting that of the design arena. From interface design to motion graphics and information design, new landscapes demanding the attention of design educators and institutions towards new paths. Bearing the brunt force of the fluctuations in the curriculum structure, and in order to satisfy the needs of upper level courses and the professional arena, foundation faculty are faced with decisions that tend to arrive at either maintaining the status-quo or a constant editing or juxtapositions. Considering these parallel currents, this paper proposes an alternative approach to structuring content and curriculum, with a focus on the foundations: Implementation of project based structure and focus on human creativity and knowledge production, and setting a pragmatic and adaptable course for the Century ahead. Adopting principles based on Bauhaus and Basel schools of thought and design, this document proposes a synergy of traditional content and contemporary perspectives into a 1-year long foundations course. This hybrid structure will encompass:

• 2d / 3d design •applied technical skills
• exploration of methods of inquiry and knowledge production
• surveys of contemporary culture
• classroom based learning complemented by hands on approaches
• collaborations and interdisciplinary activates
• governance of a "Human Creativity" model will govern the over methodologies,

These characteristics shall allow the foundations year to create a base for building upper division and specialized program needs as they vary per institution, while staying nimble and responsive to a landscape that will undoubtedly remain in a state of constant flux for time to come. Note: This paper is a reflection of the process and ongoing results of the directive to restructure and revise the foundation courses at Oklahoma State University, Department of Art, Graphic Design and Art History.

Bridging the Gaps: Digital Humanities Labs as Spaces of Access and Engagement in the University (Geoffrey Gimse)

While it may not have always kept pace with the rapidly evolving state of digital technology, digital scholarship in the humanities has come a long way. Researchers today regularly use, create, design, and deploy digital algorithms, techniques, strategies, and media to gather new insights into their topics of interest. For some, this analysis has turned to the very systems and structures that drive these technologies moving from new media studies, to software studies, to critical code studies and beyond. This ongoing research into these underlying structures has helped to create new understanding into how publics and individuals construct much of their modern world and has created new possibilities for research and analysis. Quite often, at the center of this growing research stands the digital humanities lab. These labs often act as points-of-entry for digital scholars and, at their best, bring together different researchers with a shared interest in digital technology. Digital humanities labs have helped to open new doors to interdisciplinary practice and collaboration. This growth and development does not come without challenge, however. As digital research grows in importance and new technologies and disciplines arise, a growing series of divides are beginning to appear. In this soapbox talk, I will highlight two divides: the separation between digital humanities scholars and non-digital humanities scholars and the separation of digital scholars from digital developers and designers. I will argue that these divides, while different, both stem from a failure of digital scholars to effectively engage with these two publics, and I will suggest that digital humanities labs can and have become spaces where those divides can be bridged. By moving beyond highlighting academic scholarship in the digital humanities into providing access to shared pools of expertise in both the humanities and technology, digital humanities labs can continue to drive new research and interest. In this sense, the digital humanities lab becomes more than a technical makers' space, which carries its own affordances and barriers, and into a space for academic and technical inquiry and invention. This is not an easy balance to maintain, and is often an ongoing struggle for smaller labs. Using examples from my own work and experience with the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee Digital Humanities Lab and the work of others, I will suggest ways in which digital scholars and digital humanities labs can help to make digital humanities scholarship more accessible and useful to audiences and researchers inside the university and beyond. As we think of the worlds made possible by the digital humanities, we must be careful to ensure that access to those worlds is not limited to a privileged few. Digital humanities labs, large and small, can help to make those worlds more accessible to all.

From Fake Participation to Embedded Selves: Four Dimensions of Participation in Open, Online Learning (Kira Baker-Doyle)

https://youtu.be/OIJ1G_WFOws Open, online learning has been embraced by some educators as a way to broaden the networked scope of learning and foster connections to real world contexts and communities. Openly-networked learning introduces a different paradigm of student engagement, shifting from a traditional mode of participation in which the student primarily engages dialogically with the instructor regarding assignments and feedback, to one in which students exchange information, resources, and feedback with each other and the communities in which the course connects the students. The shift represents a different way of thinking about equity, access, expertise, and public representation in learning contexts. This presentation describes the results of research on the ways in which students participated in an open, online course that used the Connected Learning (Ito et al, 2010) approach as a pedagogical framework. Connected Learning emphasizes openly networked and peer-supported learning. The findings demonstrate tensions for students in their expectations and understanding of participation in the openly-networked paradigm of learning. This presentation will describe the four different ways in which students perceived and enacted participation in the course, ranging from "fake participation" to authentically embedding themselves in the learning community. This research has significant implications for issues of access and equity for openly networked learning and has specific take-aways for online practitioners regarding how to establish a culture of democratic participation in an open, online course, and how to evaluate participation.

How to Transition into the Coding World: Lessons Learned from Teaching Humanities Students (Joseph Fanfarelli)

Learning to code for the first time is typically a challenging endeavor, but more so for students who doubt their capabilities. After all, a student's self-perceived ability to succeed (self-efficacy) is strongly related with her classroom performance (Chemers, Hu, & Garcia, 2001). Thus, a student who believes coding is hard or I'm not a coder may be reducing her chance of success before her study even begins. This "soapbox" talk will examine this phenomenon in reference to humanities Ph.D. students in a face- to-face web coding course. Students in this course have varying technical skillsets, but most enter the course from traditional humanities backgrounds with no coding experience. As such, many students exhibit a strong overt apprehension toward the topics of study. This talk will discuss the challenges faced in teaching these students, and the strategies that have been implemented to address these challenges. Specifically, it will examine topics such as identifying and addressing preconceived weaknesses at the beginning of the class, encouraging students and acknowledging their learning progress, and making the content more relatable. Another key issue is the technical jargon and ways of speaking that are common within the coding world; a field-specific vocabulary becomes a barrier of entry to students who have never encountered it, providing a strong source of apprehension for novice coding students. Thus, this talk will also address how prior knowledge in reading and writing can be used to bridge the gap between general and coding literacies. It will discuss the similarities between English language structure and coding structure, creating simile between writing sentences and coding statements, punctuation and syntax, paragraphs and functions, and so on. It will draw lessons from the very basics of algebra to explain how variables are used in coding, and explain how basic knowledge of pop culture dance can be leveraged to teach functions and loops. This talk will be targeted to two types of audiences. First, educators looking to teach coding to students with no prior experience, whether they are humanities majors or not, will identify new strategies for presenting and relating material to their students. They will come away from this talk with specific strategies they can implement in their courses. Second, individuals looking to learn to code for the first time will be introduced to basic coding constructs in a way that is understandable to those who are not part of the coding in-crowd and who are not yet literate in coding jargon. With this portion of the audience, the goal is to provide a starting point and encouragement for learning to code. Overall, this talk will identify ways to bridge the gap between prior knowledge and coding knowledge in order to help apprehensive participants or their novice students to transition into the coding world.

Raspberry PMREK (John Bork)

While the stereotypical scholarly aversion toward developing technological prowess and programming skills has long been laid to rest by the emergence of digital humanities, and demands for cost analysis, schedules, and project management reflect the extent to which an engineering mindset has infiltrated academic thinking, hard problems remain, precisely at the interface of hardware and software systems. Montfort and Bogost explore this territory by introducing platform studies, a low level yet comprehensive perspective on cultural artifacts like the Atari VCS. However, meaningful tinkering with extant devices implies familiarity with electronics, as well access to circuit schematics and technical data for reverse engineering. Moreover, mistakes can ruin fragile circuitry and components. Raspberry PMREK combines a fully playable, classic electronic pinball machine whose missing sound board has been replaced by a Raspberry Pi passively interfacing the existing microprocessor control unit (MPU) via custom circuits connected to its GPIO connector. Its inspiration is the Pinball Machine Reverse Engineering Kit (PMREK), a free, open source software project that completely replaced the MPU. Besides risking damage to the game's working parts, it relied on the availability of ISA bus computers, an ISA prototyping board, and a number of obsolete integrated circuit chips. While the ubiquitous, inexpensive Raspberry Pi seems like an obvious substitute, understanding the technical reasons why it is not exposes a class of hard problems for digital humanists seeking to undertake studies that span software and hardware, revealing the irreducible materiality of the former through its interactions with the latter. It embodies the platform studies level of analysis, examining the ways the same MPU used in thousands of pinball machines manufactured from the late 1970s through the mid 1980s generated sound effects during game play. Over the years they transitioned from a xylophone struck by individual solenoids, to digitized sound effects, background music, and eventually synthesized speech, all triggered by the MPU. The initial goal for the media arts show is to successfully replace a missing sound board by tapping into the solenoid control bus used to trigger it, and based on its detection of solenoid requests via the Raspberry Pi's GPIO data interface, employ custom software to generate sound effects via the Pi. This passive approach reduces the risk of damaging the other circuits on the game that made the original PMREK project so risky, and presents a lower stakes reverse engineering challenge: determining whether and how user space programs on the Pi can perform the high speed input/output operations required to detect the state changes on the solenoid bus and generate the sound effects without recourse to developing a custom Linux kernel module. Beyond simulation of the original equipment, new interpretations of the game's theme could be created by extending the repertoire of sounds and voices by writing more software, and devising ways to track the state of the game to go beyond the original signaling done by the MPU. Doing so invites interdisciplinary collaboration between those skilled in electronics, software engineering, digital composition, and game play mechanics.