Digital Campus has gone back to school at last. Episode 31 of our podcast is now up and available for your listening enjoyment. Among the topics Dan, Tom, and I discussed in this episode are the launch of Google’s Chrome browser and what this might mean for higher education and, most importantly, what trends in digital technology seem to have the most traction in higher ed at the moment. Our guest for this episode, Bryan Alexander of NITLE.org, gave us a new perspective on what might be coming down the pike. So, take a listen to the podcast and be sure to tell us what you think.
Posts Tagged ‘Academic Commons’
Back to School at Digital Campus
Tuesday, September 9th, 2008Flickr Commons Expands
Sunday, September 7th, 2008[NB: This post originally appeared on the blog hist.net.]
The photosharing website Flickr has expanded its “Commons” project. I wrote about the first iteration several months ago describing the decision by the American Library of Congress to allow the public to start marking up images from their collection. Since that time, Flickr (owned by Yahoo!) has expanded the number of its partners to include the Smithsonian Institution, the Brooklyn Museum, the George Eastman House, the Biblioteca de Arte-Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, the Bibliothèque de Toulouse, the National Media Museum, and the Powerhouse Museum. These additions to the project have increased the number of images available through the commons exponentially and, because the images being deposited in the Commons are being chosen with some care, this collection is rapidly becoming one of the most interesting, if idiosyncratic collections of photographs available to the general public.
Perhaps the most revolutionary aspect of the Commons–after the truly revolutionary bit about about inviting the public to mark up the images–is that these images are posted up into the intellectual common space, i.e., without restriction. Bucking the trend of photo bohemoths like Corbis, which are trying to “monetize” cultural heritage, the Commons project is bravely offering important collections of photographic work for free and without restriction. One can only hope that more institutions with significant photographic collections will follow suit.
A Crisis of Diminishing Expectations (cont’d)
Saturday, September 6th, 2008On Thursday I wrote about a comment I’ve received from many students over the years that spoke to their declining expectations from history classes and the need to rethink what we’re doing to make history courses more appealing, more fun, while remaining rigorous and true to our discipline.
I set myself the task of thinking about assignments I’ve given where the students really caught fire. Two examples I’d offer are the family history I require of my Western Civ students and a web-based scavenger hunt I assigned to students in my Historical Methods course. You can read about the family history assignment by following the link I’ve provided. The scavenger hunt went like this:
I teach Historical Methods in a computer classroom. When we arrived in class one day, I had posted ten images to the class blog, all of them unidentified, all associated in some way with our topic (1989 in Eastern Europe), and all of them renamed files so that the students couldn’t just Google the file names. Then I told the 18 students in the room that before the end of class, they had to be able to correctly describe what was happening in each one of the photographs. If they were unsuccessful, there would be some sort of penalty (unnamed because I hadn’t decided on one yet).
Their first response was to all sit at their computers and start trying to figure out what the images were. They wasted close to half an hour this way before someone said, “Hey, we should divide these up.” That led to more concentrated activity and, within another 30 minutes or so, they had correctly identified five of the 10 images. Then those whose images had been identified started pairing up or tripling up with others. Pretty soon, three more images had been identified through this group effort. Finally, the class split up and worked for another 30 minutes or so to identify the last two, just barely managing to get them all identified before the end of class.
This assignment had two goals–to help them bring together all of the web-based research skills we’d been working on that semester and to let them figure out on their own that historians often have to collaborate if they are going to get anywhere with a research project. Just to make sure they got both of these lessons, I spent the last five minutes of class driving them home in some summary remarks.
On the way out of class they were still energized about having sleuthed out those last two images. That evening I received several emails from students saying how much they’d enjoyed the exercise. And the collaborations that started in class that day carried over for the rest of the semester.
What made this assignment work? First off, it was a challenge and a challenge with a ticking clock. They liked the pressure. Second, it was difficult. The images I chose were intentionally obscure and I had not discussed anything in class up to that point that might provide obvious clues. They liked the difficulty. Third, it had obvious value. They could see how the work they were doing would bear on the research they were doing for their 15 page papers due in about six weeks. If they could figure out these obscure images, then they could certainly find answers to other questions they were confronting. And finally, they liked working together. For all students moan and groan about group work, they actually do enjoy it–so long as their grade does not depend on the work of someone in their group.
My course Lying About the Past is based largely on the lessons I’ve learned in assignments like this one. The course incorporates many of the characteristics of this type of assignment and already the students are clearly enjoying themselves and are doing good work. I am also teaching a field studies course this summer–Becoming Warsaw–that will take 15 students down to the Northern Neck of Virginia for two weeks of field research where they get to act like real historians (and go canoeing, swimming, fishing, eat crabs, fight off mosquitos, etc.). This too will be a rigorous course, but one that trys to make history fun again. We’ll see how they like it.
Should Grants Count?
Friday, September 5th, 2008Not long ago I wrote a series of posts about digital scholarship and whether or not digital work should “count” in the classic sense of counting on American college campuses, i.e., for promotion and tenure. Because digital scholarship is very difficult to pull off without external funding, it’s a reasonable question whether or not writing grants and getting grants should count as well? After all, you can’t do one (digital scholarship) without the other (funding).
For an answer to this question, don’t ask the AHA’s Professional Division.
As Rob Townsend reported on the AHA’s website, the Professional Division recently responded to a query from a department chair who was being pressured by his administration to count grant funding the same as an article in a peer reviewed journal. The response of David Weber, the vice president leading the Professional Division, was (to my mind anyway) very unhelpful.
In the first paragraph Weber argues that the receipt of a grant is an honor and recognition of past achievement, not the same thing as the “completion of a project,” which Weber defines unequivocally in only two ways–a book or a peer reviewed article. As he writes, “past achievement is past and scholarly promise is not scholarship.” But, of course, one could just as easily argue that a book or an article was also a “past achievement” and no indication of “future promise” (for Weber an important part of scholarship).
He adds, “I think we all know senior scholars who have received fellowships for specific projects but who failed to complete them. I once had a colleague who received a coveted Guggenheim to finish a book. He never did.” But, of course, one could just as easily say, “I think we all know scholars who published a book, got tenure, and never did another lick of scholarly work.”
I guess it’s not clear to me how winning a highly competitive grant is somehow less of an indication of future promise than an article or a book.
Weber goes on to say, “Grant monies in the humanities are notoriously tight, and the major competitions receive many hundreds, or even thousands, of applications every year. This means that in a given year, large numbers of high-quality, deserving applications are rejected. Should a scholar who tries for a prestigious grant and narrowly misses out, or is named an alternate, be penalized in the same way as his/her colleagues who never even bother with grant applications?”
But don’t we penalize those scholars who write “high-quality, deserving” books or articles who fail to find venues for publication of their work? Speaking as an East Europeanist, I can testify to the fact that publishing opportunities in my field are likewise “notoriously tight” and that in any given year many high-quality and deserving books fail to find a publisher, much to the consternation of colleagues who have read the work and know how good it is. Somehow I doubt the Professional Division would advocate rewarding these scholars for doing such good work, but not getting it published, despite the fact that the decline of academic publishing has made it so difficult to get published in what are known in publishing circles these days as “marginal fields.”
I wholeheartedly agree with Weber that institutions of higher education should resist the trend toward metrics for evaluation of scholarly merit. Like Weber, I think it’s the quality of the dossier that matters, not the quantity of what’s in it according to some defined counting scheme.
But to disqualify the effort of those who write significant grants as somehow nothing more than a “past accomplishment” is to reject the very logic of his own argument. To provide some perspective on what I’m talking about, let’s examine a case I know very well–the writing of a major NEH grant for a digital project.
Three years ago, two colleagues and I wrote the grant that funded our project Making the History of 1989. This grant was funded by the NEH with an initial grant of $180,000 plus a $10,000 matching requirement for a total of $200,000 once we raised the matching funds. The narrative for the grant runs 20 pages and when the entire document with all of its associated appendices, budgets, and workplans comes in at around 150 pages. When I came up for tenure two years ago, part of my dossier was evidence that, with my to colleagues, I had written successful grants (I left out the ones written but unfunded) totaling $730,000.
But this, apparently, is not an essential activity of a scholar–at least not in history. In biology, physics, mathematics, engineering, psychology, and plenty of other fields–just not history. Or at least, so says the AHA’s Professional Division.
Clearly, those of us in digital humanities have more work to do when it comes to convincing the AHA that digital scholarship is something completely different and needs to be examined on its own terms, not on the basis of how it is or is not like a book or an article.