Thank you to everyone who made the DHC-NC Mini-Institute last Friday a success! It was great to see so many people attending and presenting at the virtual mini-institute. Since we did not record these mini DHCI sessions, we wanted to use this space to briefly recap and reflect on our morning session.
During this time of remote and blended learning, educators of all kinds are reassessing what it means to work with digital projects in the classroom. Since your classes may function a little bit differently this fall, now may be a good time to shake things up and try out a new digital humanities assignment!
However, digital projects can pose unique challenges, especially in remote classrooms, and it’s important to think about what technology, internet, and troubleshooting support students (and you) have reliable access to for an online class that includes a creative digital project.
We thought about some of these obstacles and rounded up a few suggestions in our presentation “Resources and Techniques for Designing and Supporting DH Projects in Remote Classrooms,” along with other digital pedagogy pointers:
- Why digital? Ask yourself the important questions about any digital humanities assignment: does this need to be digital? Will making it digital transform the students’ experience of the material and support course objectives? (See Hannah Jacob’s blog post, “Getting started with digital humanities in the classroom”)
- Consider using backward design to plan digital assignments (See Wiggins and McTighe’s white paper, “Understanding by Design Framework”). First, define the big ideas you want students to learn, next decide what evidence will show they understand, and finally design instruction and activities.
- Make sure the focus is on student learning objectives rather than on an interesting new digital tool. It’s easy to fall into the trap of planning a whole unit around cool technology you want to try!
- Using digital pedagogy guides, project charters, and lesson planning guides (even if they’re not meant for digital humanities) is a great place to start asking the right questions during planning.
- Set clear expectations about the goals of the assignment and the limitations/opportunities for the process of using technology for the assignment. This is especially important when teaching remotely!
- Choose the right digital tool for your project after you figure out what the purpose of the lesson/assignment/unit is. Consider what your students have access to remotely, and who is available to help with issues when they inevitably arise.
We finished our presentation by dividing up the attendees into Zoom breakout rooms for discussion. When the groups shared their conversations, we heard about engaging with analog alternatives to digital tools even in an online classroom, designing digital humanities assignments that students can complete on mobile devices, and using cloud-hosted and open-access tools to help mitigate access and equity issues.
If you’d like to read more, we created a bibliography of planning resources for DH in the classroom, which also includes the discussion questions for the breakout rooms. You can also see our presentation slides here.
This information was originally presented at the Summer 2020 Digital Humanities Collaborative Institute on July 17th, 2020 from 11:00 – 12:00pm EST via Zoom. The presenters were Magie Murphy (she/her/hers), Visual Art & Humanities Librarian at UNC Greensboro and Claire Cahoon (she/her/hers), Libraries Fellow at NC State University. Special thanks go to Sarah Morris and Hannah Jacobs, whose work was a strong influence in the presentation!
Full link to the presentation bibliography and discussion questions: go.uncg.edu/dhci