Discussion of the Readings - ENGL 402, Week 14

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Battershill and Ross Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom.pdf

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Introduction

Claire and Shawna give an immediate, concise, definition of DH in the opening paragraph: "(DH—an interdisciplinary field that uses digital technologies and quantitative methodologies to further humanistic research" (Battershill & Ross 1).

"We see DH not as an exclusive or unified discipline, but rather as a constellation of practical ideas, technologies, and tools" (Battershill & Ross 2).

Instructors who use DH should aim to, "recapture an inspired and critical use of technology in the classroom...by integrating digital tools and methods that fit with [their] pedagogical goals" (Battershill & Ross 2-3).

What are the digital humanities?

"Like many foundational disciplinary queries ('What is literary studies?' for example, or 'What is criticism?'), defining the digital humanities is at once fundamental and complex" (Battershill & Ross 3).

Rather than finding the indeterminate nature of DH daunting or inaccessible, we should view the diversity of ideas and methods positively—"we'd like here to suggest that there are so many ways of defining this field that there is bound to be something of use in it for just about anyone who teaches today in a university classroom" (Battershill & Ross 3).

Here they cite https://whatisdigitalhumanities.com/

"For us, digital humanities simply represents a community of scholars and teachers interested in using of studying technology" (Battershill & Ross 3).

Key Concepts

What are we using this tool for? (Battershill & Ross 4)

• It can become slippery when we begin incorporating digital tools into the classroom for their own sake. We should consider the course content and objectives before determining whether the tools will actually enhance the students' engagement with the material.

"The purpose of combining specificity, clarity, and flexibility is to ensure that your digital content always connect to course objectives and can adapt in case of equipment failure or miscommunications" (Battershill & Ross 4).

"Connecting digital activities or assignments to these objectives can help to persuade a resistant student (or fellow instructor), and also provide insurance in case an exercise or assignment doesn't quite go to plan. If the students' efforts meet stated course objectives, then the activity is a success regardless of the outcome on the screen" (Battershill & Ross 4).

Battershill and Ross warn instructors against the common DH stigma of "crowd-sourced labor" but do admit there are plenty of digital projects students could benefit from working on. They remind us to refer once again back to the course guidelines—how is this experience or tool instruction meeting the requirements outlined in the syllabus?

Another way to reinforce the usefulness of digital interventions in the classroom is to assign reflection pieces and essays (Battershill & Ross 5).

"Reflection is particularly crucial with DH approaches because frustration is a common feeling attendant on digital humanities experiments...even the most well-prepared activity can fail, and when that happens, you will want to minimize the negative effects on students by giving them credit for their efforts. And, perhaps more importantly, you can productively turn the conversation to diagnosing the problem, whether by identifying a technological solution or by approaching the problem through other humanistic skill sets" (Battershill & Ross 5).

The Web Companion

Contains a linked table of contents, an annotated bibliography for each chapter, activity and assignment sets, and supplementary essays on "debates, issues, or concepts" (Battershill & Ross 9) not covered in the print guide.

Developing your own digital pedagogy

"We encourage you, essentially, to use this book in whatever way you find it most helpful...We recognize that we all teach with our own motivations and with our own styles, and this eclecticism is what makes conversations about the classroom so exciting" (Battershill & Ross 10).

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Chapter 7 - Creating Digital Assignments

This chapter discusses the creation of successful, digital, take-home assignments.

"The chapter begins by explaining the basic principles behind sound assignment design. In the next section, which makes up the bulk of the chapter, we provide a catalog of the many options available for creating digital humanities (DH) assignments" (Battershill & Ross 113).

General principles for creating digital assignments

1. Assign reflection pieces to "allay your own and your students' fears about new kinds of assignments...that use new digital skills" (Battershill & Ross 113)

"These kinds of papers also allow for reflection on broader issues around technology and its educations and social effects; by thinking about how and why we use digital tools and platforms, students can begin to articulate their own nuanced and critical relationships with the technologies that surround them in university and in their lives" (Battershill & Ross 114).

2. Limit students to one (new) tool or platform per assignment—ideally the same for each student.

"Staying focused on a minimum number of platforms allows you to give your students better, more focused 'tech support' and encourages students to gain platform mastery so they can help one another" (Battershill & Ross 114).

C and S have found that limiting students to one platform or a minimal set of choices makes their lives easier as well. Students may feel encouraged by projects that don't require them to write a research essay, however, often find it daunting to choose "both a medium and a method for themselves" and their project (Battershill & Ross 114).

3. Be flexible, but not too flexible It's ok to adjust your decisions for student needs on a case by case basis, but be wary of altering your syllabus for the sake of incorporating new DH methods or to appease your students' enthusiasm for current events.

"...be flexible, but remember that flexibility does not require disregarding hard-won pedagogical knowledge or devaluing well-formed assignments simply because they do not boast that new, shiny DH appeal" (Battershill & Ross 115).

4. Incorporating DH into assignments doesn't have to be "particularly complicated of avant-garde" (Battershill & Ross 115)

Sometimes the simplest method is the most effective.

"Encouraging students to post their work publicly by making it available online is, for example, a very simple way to incorporate DH in your classroom, but that does not mean it is not valuable. In fact, we would argue that public writing is at the very heart of the digital humanities" (Battershill & Ross 115).

Common Types of Digital Assignments

Using and evaluating digital editions and archives

Students could engage in class activities around exploring the usefulness and effectiveness of digital editions and archives, then they could use those skills to perform research for projects and essays assigned thereafter. More provocatively, students could research, annotate, curate, and reflect on a digitized object in some sort of "multistage assignment" or for a collective digital archive (Battershill & Ross 116).

Archival discussion and research topics: open-access, curatorial decisions, digital remediation, and users' experience of the archive.

Course specific social media groups or streams

Incorporating social media in the classroom works best when you gauge what platforms your students are already using and familiar with. C and S recommend instructors make a custom hashtag and ask their students to tweet their responses to the class readings using the class hashtag.

Also grouped under the "native digital" genre—"we want to to emphasize that graded assignments using social media (or otherwise interactive or peer-driven platforms) ask students to think carefully about how their everyday activities online are forms of writing that are structured b audience expectations and genre conventions" (Battershill & Ross 120).

"You would begin each class day by projecting the new content from our social media streams; simply type your hashtag into the Search bar on Twitter to see your custom 'stream'" (Battershill & Ross 117).

Most-frequent-word analysis

Using Voyant Tools (or something of the like) instructors can transform plain text sets into word webs, frequency charts, and other useful visualizations that can remediate students' relationships to their own composition habits as well as the writers they are studying.

Wikis

Easy to set up in their own right and frequently included in many learning management systems currently in use, Wikis allow students to easily contribute live, attributable, content that's publicly editable from anywhere with internet. Wikis promote the use of simple mark-up languages and, thereby, the spread of digital literacy.

Blogging

"Blogging offers students to chance to practice writing with a different voice and tone than they might use in a traditional essay. This option also allows you to ask students to explore the multimedia possibilities offered by a digital platform as they write and publish their blog posts" (Battershill & Ross 118).

Easy Content Management Systems for Blogging: WordPress, Wix, SquareSpace, Tumblr, etc.

Mapping

"Spatial trends underlay all humanities fields, not just history and geography, and digital maps can embed all sorts of data (images, videos, links, even spaces for public commentary) beyond pinpointing and connecting important locations" (Battershill & Ross 119).

Multimedia timelines

While digital timelines are great for engaging with chronological data in an interactive way, multimedia timeline generators can be used to display "any body of research of any argument that becomes clearer or more persuasive if [it] is ordered in a linear fashion" (Battershill & Ross 119).

Textual annotation

By asking students to share their insights while reading a particular text by annotating that text in a public environment, you help students see each others' responses to course material. This can help inspire more meaningful in-class discussions later as students are already primed and know what to expect from their peers.

Text annotation browser plugin, Hypothesis.is

Image annotation

"Similar to text annotation and digital mapping, image annotation allows you to anchor various kinds of data (text, links, other images) onto a particular section of a digital image...Students could either annotate found images or create an image that they then themselves annotate" (Battershill & Ross 121).

Digital edition creation

Editing an edition, particularly one for web publication, is no small task. This is a dynamic and skill-building assignment that works well as group work. Determining the platform, argument, transmission history, and level of depth an edition will have contends with students' personal perceptions of how texts are made and collected. This assignment is only recommended if students have already spent a great deal of time working up the skills and methods required to construct an edition.

Digital archive creation

Simply put, digital archives are "visitable" spaces that exist to house digital objects. This assignment can be approached in a great number of ways and asks students to engage with objects and object descriptions in a variety of multimodal ways. Consider ways of connecting the archive your class creates to the community or to the university archives more broadly.

Writing effective assignment sheets

Bottom line: writing effective assignment sheets reduces the number of inquiries you receive (from both students and faculty) as the assignment progresses.

"...carefully organize your assignment sheet to introduce the right kind of information, in the right amount, at the right level of specificity, at the right time. Stipulating evaluation criteria before providing step-by-step instructions, for example, may induce anxiety and emphasize your grading process over their learning process" (Battershill & Ross 124).

A good assignment sheet should include:

1. A broad overview and rationale for the assignment.
2. Detailed technical and step-by-step instructions to complete the assignment.
3. Explicit evaluation standards and the weights of these criterion.
4. Where possible, examples of successful work.

Conclusion

"When the assignment involves digital humanities components, it will...ask students to understand course content in relation to digital cultures and apply it to digital platforms and technologies" (Battershill & Ross 126).

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Chapter 8 - Evaluating Student Work

The importance of explicit assessment criteria

"...being thoughtful, clear, and careful about your own assessment practices (and honestly reflective about how well they're working) can help you avoid confusion among your students" (Battershill & Ross 130).

"...rubrics will show students that your primary motivation while grading is process, rather than product—in other words, the the purpose of this assignment is to help them reflect on course content, gain digital skills, and think critically about humanistic content in unexpected ways" (Battershill & Ross 130).

While rubrics can be an effective means of communicating assignment expectations to students, "a poorly written rubric—one that does not reflect the true pedagogical value of a particular assignment, together with the labors necessary for success—leads to a kind of assessment gerrymandering as the instructor raises or lowers scores for various categories until the score that seems fair is reached" (Battershill & Ross 131).

Instructors who feel strongly against using analytic rubrics—"rubrics in which the instructor separately scores each grading criterion" (Battershill & Ross 131)—should experiment with holistic rubrics, or ones that only require assigning a numerical value to the assignment at the end of the evaluation rather than for each part.

Five Basic Rubric Functions:

1. The evaluation criteria
2. The numerical grading scheme
3. The characteristics of work meets the evaluation criteria
4. The stakes of error
5. The role that effort plays in assessment

Instructors might consider "Live Grading" for their students to "show them how [they] connect discrete traits to abstract criteria" (Battershill & Ross 134).

"To encourage you students to turn in the best work possible even while emphasizing the process during evaluation, you can instead ask students to turn in a rough draft or first version and then revise it for formal evaluation after the student has had a chance to iron out any difficulties" (Battershill & Ross 134).

C and S emphasize the difference between avoidable and unavoidable problems that can arise in DH focused projects. Technical glitches happen, but if a student has put in enough time and energy on the project to discover these issues early on then there is greater chance of addressing them and fixing them in time. A student who waits till the night before the project is due and runs into technical issues can't expect the instructor to grant them the same leniency as the first student whose effort spent on the project was obvious.

Competencies: A language for indicating success

The Competencies assessment approach is used in both educational contexts and the workplace.

"Rockwell and Sinclair define competencies as being 'used to describe what students can do, not what you are going to teach' (187) and 'to describe outcomes as behaviors...in accessible language' that students will easily understand (188)" (Battershill & Ross 136). "...Rockwell and Sinclair distinguish three types of multimedia competencies: technical competencies, academic competencies, and other competencies. This final category includes social, theoretical, and applied skills, such as teamwork, interdisciplinarity, and awareness of broader theoretical or social issues" (Battershill & Ross 136).

The categories are broken down further into "core" and "elective" competencies: "the dividing line between core and elective competencies might separate goals that each student must meet versus elective goals that students may choose, depending on their interests" (Battershill & Ross 136).

"Beyond the question of managing students' emotional responses to your assignments, though, judging the work instead of the student is important because DH is a very project-oriented, collaborative field: stress that it is the output, rather than a particular individual, that displays evidence of competency" (Battershill & Ross 137).

Involving students in evaluation processes

Bringing students into the evaluation process empowers them and reduces their anxieties about how and what they will construct as their digital projects.

C and S recommend sending out a survey to your students at the start of the course to gauge what experience and skills they bring with them. They suggest, of course, using a Google form to set the bar for the types of digital interactivity that can be expected in a DH focused classroom.

"In DH it's important to evaluate each student based on what they learn and what they gain in your course, even if they begin at different levels" (Battershill & Ross 138).

Instructors should tailor their surveys to reflect the course material and technologies the students will encounter throughout the semester.

"You might also ask more general questions about the students' interest in technology and even in DH. For example, have they taken a course that uses digital tools? Do they know the term 'digital humanities?' Do they have any technology-related hobbies? Do they have a favorite social media platform? Have they ever created a website or blog?" (Battershill & Ross 138).

Thinking beyond the rubric

"Iterative learning emphasizes that education is a never-ending process" (Battershill & Ross 140).

Therefore, we must focus our efforts on cultivating process-oriented evaluation strategies that take into consideration all that the student has learned in the time it takes to complete the assignment.

"For example, in process-oriented evaluation, you would devote the lion's share of your labor giving students detailed, written feedback during the proposal and draft stages of an assignment, thereby giving them the greatest opportunity to improve their work before its final submission" (Battershill & Ross 140).

Tanya Clement is cited next for her "multiliteracies" concept, defined as "diverse modes of learning that are all 'skills that require critical thinking, commitment, community, and play'" (qtd in Battershill & Ross 140).

C and S stress the importance of showing students how their practical, digital skill-sets can be used practically in and out of the classroom.

"Conversely, ask students to identify skills they have learned in other courses or as a part of their own extracurricular experimentation, and to apply them to assignments in your course. This is particularly fruitful for group assignments, as students can teach their peers techniques that you do not have time to teach" (Battershill & Ross 141).

Coping with failure during assessment periods

There are often events that arise and complicate the success of DH projects and this can be distracting and disheartening for students. Instructors should stress to the student that mastery of the tool or platform is not the only graded criteria on their rubrics and assignment sheets. Competency can sometimes be assessed by a student's conceptual understanding of "how the tool works and what it is meant to accomplish" (Battershill & Ross 142).

Students' failures are not the only ones warned against in this chapter; the instructor is bound to make errors as well and those need to be turned into teachable moments to show students the importance of patience and resiliency when dealing with digital technologies.

"Modeling resistance—the ability to bounce back from failure—is one of the most valuable lessons we can impart to our students, even though being vulnerable in front of them is often uncomfortable" (Battershill & Ross 142).

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Questions:

After the readings, how would you define digital humanities?

Which of the tools and sample assignments given could you see yourself using in the classroom? Would you modify them in any way?

What are some of the benefits of asking students to do public writing? What are the dangers?

Did you see other pedagogical theories present in the methods C and S describe? If so which ones?

What DH strategies did you see present in my "Why We Cite" mini-lesson?