Pedagogy

Article: Possibly Impossible; Or, Teaching Undergraduates to Confront Digital and Archival Research Methodologies, Social Media Networking, and Potential Failure

digital humanities, Pedagogy, Publications, research

My newest article,  co-authored with Suzan Alteri, titled “Possibly Impossible; Or, Teaching Undergraduates to Confront Digital and Archival Research Methodologies, Social Media Networking, and Potential Failure” is available in Issue 14 of the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy.  Issue 14 is a Themed Issue on Teaching & Research with Archives.

The Table of Contents is available here: https://jitp.commons.gc.cuny.edu/table-of-contents-issue-fourteen/

Abstract

This article details an undergraduate student research project titled “The Possibly Impossible Research Project,” a collaborative effort between the Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature at the University of Florida and the Writing and Communication Program at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The article outlines the pedagogy behind a multimodal digital research project that provided Georgia Tech students with in-depth instruction into archival research processes while improving the Baldwin’s annotated bibliography. The article then details the process of teaching the course and how students responded to the project both during and after the course. This assignment also offered students an opportunity to uncover and make meaning as researchers in their own right, and to distribute that new knowledge through public facing digital platforms such as Twitter and Wikipedia. The authors conclude that the collaborative project had meaningful impacts on the undergraduate students, the course instructor, the curator of the Baldwin Library, and the larger academic community; further, it can serve as a model for engaging undergraduate students with archival research, analysis, and dissemination. This article outlines the assignment in detail, including the interactive digital scaffolding assignments. The article cites student research journal tweets and final reflective portfolio essays to demonstrate the successful fulfillment of the student learning outcomes.

Code4Lib Presentation: “The Possibly Impossible Research Project”

digital humanities, Pedagogy, Presentations, research

I am presenting today at Code4LibSE 2018 @ The Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library. My presentation today is on a project I completed with my Spring 2018 Georgia Tech course on the History and Rhetoric of Science Writing for Children.

Presentation Slides: “The Possibly Impossible Research Project”: Using Digital Research and Social Media to Teach Archival Research Methods

Text Only Version of Presentation Script

 

Celebrate Teaching Day 2018

Pedagogy, Presentations

This year, for Georgia Tech’s Celebrate Teaching Day, I chose to focus on using social media (i.e. Twitter) to create a public-facing research journal. This exercise was a part of a larger unit asking students to research possibly impossible materials on 19th century female authors of science texts for children, in co-operation with the Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature. For more on this assignment, please see the entry for this course in my teaching portfolio.

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Presentation at MLA 2018

Presentations, research

I will be presenting on the 2018 MLA Panel 314 titled “Blended Learning: Balancing Social Media and Face-to-Face Pedagogies.” The panel is sponsored by the HEP* Teaching as a Profession and will take place on Friday, January 5, 2018, 12:00 noon–1:15 p.m., Chelsea Room, Sheraton.

My paper “Better Learning through Hashtags: Building Community and Improving Discussion with Twitter” will discuss productive ways to integrate Twitter into composition and English classroom practices; it will cover both general best practice guidelines and specific examples of successful activities, based on a case-study course taught at the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2016 and 2017. This presentation will argue that as a classroom tool, Twitter can be used to improve comprehension, expand peer-to-peer interaction, reinforce active learning, and introduce multimodal forms of class participation. Well-designed Twitter assignments and activities can expand students’ spheres of interaction beyond the physical classroom and into a digital social media environment. This presentation will discuss the potential of “livetweeting” as a framework for student active learning work that embraces the interactive and collaborative nature of Twitter as a social media platform.

My Powerpoint is available here: MLA2018_BetterLearningThroughHashtags