Tag Archives: pedagogy

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Consumption vs. Production in the Hybrid 2110

  November 3, 2014 , ,

With a lot of help from Ameer, I am finally reaching the point where I can make videos more or less on my own. As I have been making them, I have been thinking about how educationally useful the experience of making the videos is. The countless decisions about what edit out, how to write captions that add to the content of the talking heads, and how to select images that enrich the storyline are really useful exercises in critical thought. The making of the video is more stimulating and engaging than the experience of watching them. Maybe this is simply a reflection of my still-modest chops as a filmmaker, but I think fundamentally it has to do with the difference between consumption and production – or, to use Halverson’s terms, between the kinds of content based technologies educational institutions have often been drawn towards and the learning technologies that have proliferated on the internet. So, I have been thinking about how to use the hybrid 2110 and its video component in ways that try to capture something of the experience of making the films. I know of at least one person at GSU, a VL named Nicole Tilford over in Religious Studies, who has been teaching students in upper division classes to make video as an assignment. You can see some of the results of her student’s work here. However, Nicole has been doing this with upper division courses, which has several significant advantages for projects of this nature. … Continue reading

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The Hoccleve Archive and the Sudden Currency of Old-Fashioned Skills

  September 17, 2014 ,

I haven’t written yet about what is probably my personal favorite of the SIF projects, an ambitious digital humanities project called the Hoccleve Archive, which is attempt to create a digital variorum edition of Thomas Hoccleve’s early 15th century poem, the Regiment of Princes. One aspect of this poem is the complex computing and scholarly challenge of collating, displaying and digitally ‘marking-up’ a 5500 line poem which exists in 43 different manuscript versions. MSS. Dugdale 45, Hoccleve’s Regiment Bodleian Library, Oxford Another Manuscript version of Hoccleve’s Regiment In addition to these manuscripts, the Hoccleve Archive project hopes to conserve and make accessible a huge amount of material gathered in the 1980’s and 1990’s for what turned out to be a (very productive!) failure to produce a printed variorum edition of the Regiment. This extra material, which gives the Hoccleve Archive huge head start, includes over 6000 handwritten collation sheets, and nearly 150 text-based computer files containing an archaic, but still legible orthographic and lexical mark-up of Hoccleve’s holograph manuscripts. Hoccleve Archive Collation Folders Using these materials, however, is far from straightforward. The mark-up of the new, all digital archive will be done XML/TEI (a specialized tag set for manuscripts and literary documents), whereas the older mark-up was done in a customized language, which the computing end of our team (Ram, Sruthi, Rushitha), are translating into XML/TEI. Figuring out how to use the handwritten collation sheets, which have been scanned, but will also need considerable work to convert into digital form, … Continue reading

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Making E-reading more Productive in the Classroom

  September 3, 2014

One of the major projects that I will be working on this fall is a project coming out of the history department’s efforts to re-imagine the US history survey (2110). This is perhaps the key course offering of the entire history department. Certainly, it is the primary, and in many cases only, exposure that GSU students will have to history as an academic discipline. Two faculty members in the department, Rob Baker & Jeff Youngs, have been working for over a year on their version of the course, which will be a hybrid class featuring a custom-built and custom-written multimedia textbook. The course is being offered this fall for the first time as a hybrid course, meaning that students meeting physically only 1 time per week, using the other course period to engage with video segments, online activities (such as quizzes), and the traditional staple of 2110, reading assignments from a textbook coupled with a hefty dose of primary documents. As a SIF fellow, I’ll be helping primarily with editing ‘raw’ video segments, most of which take the form of conversations or debates between historians about important historical topics, adding visuals to the footage to make a more engaging viewing experience. Today, though, I want to talk a little bit out the readings for Rob & Jeff’s version of 2110. Both the primary sources and the textbook itself exist as PDF files, which students access and read through D2l (Desire-to-Learn, GSU’s commercial class portal pages). Having all the readings available … Continue reading