Headed to the Modern Language Association Annual Convention in Austin, TX

I will be spending the weekend in Austin, Texas to attend the Modern Language Association’s annual convention.  It will be nice to catch up with some far flung friends and colleagues, to go to a few sessions, to mix and mingle and network, and to be a part of an electronic roundtable on digital pedagogy in the humanities:

Join us for this Electronic Roundtable on Sunday, January 10, 2016, 10:15 – 11:30 AM in Lone Star G, JW Marriott at the 2016 Annual Convention of the Modern Language Association in Austin, Texas.

Presiding: Rebecca Davis, Saint Edward’s University; Matthew K. Gold, Graduate Center, City University of New York; Katherine D. Harris, San Jose State University

Speakers: Edmond Chang, University of Oregon; Brian Croxall, Brown University; Kathi Inman Berens, Portland State University; Virginia Kuhn, University of Southern California; Jason Loan, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Chuck Rybak, University of Wisconsin, Green Bay; Jesse Stommel, Mary Washington University.

Curating Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities

Curating Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities opens outward one of the most hidden acts of our profession: teaching. Often only students and faculty are privy to the workings of a classroom setting or results of a particular assignment. For this electronic roundtable, we propose to expose, discuss, and demonstrate not just the acts of learning and teaching, but also the interaction between our evolving reliance on digital tools as a way to engage with public humanities.

New digital methods of critical analysis are reshaping academic practices in profound ways as scholars use digital tools and platforms to rethink their assumptions about what can or should happen in higher education classrooms. In digital humanities courses, scholars help students use data-mining to examine large textual corpora, with the goal of interrogating assumptions about literary genres; in composition and rhetoric classes, students examine new rhetorical modes employed in networked spaces of communication such as Twitter; scholars in multiple disciplines use online platforms to connect their students with one another; and literature scholars help students use digital tools to collaborate on the kinds of projects that were once the domain of solitary scholars.

Format

After a brief introduction to the panel’s rationale by the co-presiders, the audience will be invited to visit each presentation station where each roundtable participant will discuss a particular term in the context of teaching and learning and then demonstrate pedagogical artifacts drawn from actual courses, classrooms, and projects.

At each station, attendees will also be invited to contribute their own examples of effective digital pedagogy artifacts by tweeting to the hashtag #curateteaching, which will be shared in the active conference twitter back-channel, projected live at the front of the room during the session, and posted to Github (https://github.com/curateteaching/digitalpedagogy) and the MLA Commons after the session. Tell us your definition of “digital pedagogy”

Practices

1. Interface | Draft Keyword for Peer-to-Peer Review

Kathi Inman Berens (@kathiiberens) will share artifacts that represent a broad range of pedagogical interfaces, defined as the space where learners, curricula, digital environments and teachers constitute each other dynamically.

2. Multimodal | Draft Keyword for Peer-to-Peer Review

Virginia Kuhn (@vkuhn) will present artifacts that demonstrate how our ways of teaching must shift to foster critical engagement with the extra-textual (sound, image, video) registers of meaning, especially in digitally networked multimodal texts.

3. Video | Draft Keyword for Peer-to-Peer Review

Jason Loan (@loanage) will share artifacts that demonstrate the range of video-based digital pedagogy moving from an audio-visual version of the textual writing process to “post-cinematic” video influenced by the participatory, ubiquitous video of smart phones, social networks, and gaming, as well as algorithmic composition, and interactive sensor-based video.

Perspectives

4. Failure | Draft Keyword for Peer-to-Peer Review

Brian Croxall (@briancroxall) will explore four different tiers of failure within a classroom that depends upon technology, showing how moments of failure create opportunities for engaged learning.

5. Queer | Draft Keyword for Peer-to-Peer Review

Edmond Chang (@edmondchang) will explore the digital as a constellation of spaces, practices, and protocols that can be both liberatory and regulatory, both queer and deeply normative. Queer digital pedagogy is about finding, creating, and playing with multimodal and polyamorous questions, algorithms, archives, and artifacts, analog and digital, flesh-to-flesh and virtual.

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