Collaborative Notes for Session (add your own thoughts!)
Digital Tactics: Enhancing the Traditional Classroom (Rebecca Parker and Pilar Herr)Have you ever wondered how digital tools can help you reinvent traditional course materials? Dr. Pilar Herr and Rebecca Parker, from the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, will present the results of implementing Wikispaces and TimeMapper in a traditional upper-level History seminar. Their experiment displays many of the benefits as well as concerns of digital approaches for students and professors alike. The presentation will elaborate how the collaborative digital environment of Wikispaces enhanced the student to student as well as student to professor feedback loops. The use of TimeMapper to visualize the physical space and time of research sources allowed students a multidimensional understanding of their final thesis-driven paper. We will detail the digital modifications to the course's original assignments and discuss the learning patterns that developed from using Wikispaces and TimeMapper. Audience participation and feedback will facilitate future modifications of these assignments, which will better prepare students for careers in our increasingly digitized world.
Creating Multimodal Assignments (Emily Sherwood)
Until recently, video production projects primarily have been seen as a form of entertainment or recreation often added at the end of the semester as rushed and poorly produced final projects that frustrate both faculty and students. However, as our culture has moved from one based in text to one that is increasingly visual, learning to critique and write in multimodal formats is essential for training undergraduates to be effective communicators and consumers of knowledge. This presentation will highlight how the video program at Bucknell has moved from instructional to transformational by partnering with faculty to scaffold successful video assignments. These multimodal projects increase student engagement by encouraging undergraduates to connect course content through a reflective process that also develops their digital, visual, and media literacy skills.
Re-Narrating Institutional History: The Muhlenberg Memories Project (Kathryn Ranieri, Susan Falciani)
This paper showcases a collaboration between an archivist and a faculty member to engage students in archival research with the objective of creating a digital stories based on institutional history. These stories comprise part of the multimodal online platform, the Muhlenberg Memories Project. While the initial focus of the project was on the 1940s, particularly the World War II era, subsequent decades are forthcoming. In Documentary Research, a course in which students produce a digital documentary, the archivist introduces students to Muhlenberg College’s digital and analog materials relating to the period during World War II through active learning exercises. As the semester progresses, students work with the professor to fine-tune their narrative and with the archivist to locate texts and images that support their digital documentary. The students also receive technical support in the Documentary Lab to learn best practices for digitizing archival images and sound. They also create metadata for storing and sharing their projects online.
The students’ documentaries are only one component of the Muhlenberg Memories Project site. Oral histories of alumni from the World War II era, collected over the past two years, have both allowed the alumni to feel connected with their institution and have infused lived experiences into the archives. These digitally recorded histories are available to students and the public. Reconnecting with alumni and their families has in turn resulted in more donated archival material.
A component of the World War II-era archives is a collection of correspondence between Muhlenberg servicemen and the Alumni Office. An additional and ongoing aspect of this project is the textual analysis of these letters. Using JuxtaEditions, open-source transcribing software, the archivist, faculty and students code the letters to understand how the men and the college experienced World War II. The scanned letters, available online, provide additional contextual background information for students, for alumni and for the wider public.
