How does Web 2.0 affect digital humanities scholarship and teaching? Tonight’s Digital Humanities forum, hosted by the Center for History and New Media, addressed that question, and raised others, with presentations by Bryan Alexander, Dan Cohen, and Edward Maloney.
Presentations
Bryan blogs at Infocult, Dracula Blogged, and Liberal Education Today. Bryan gave a very succinct and informative overview of various Web 2.0 services. The web is now in the second stage of media development outlined by Janet Murray. The first stage is where new media imitates older media (cinema imitated theater, the web imitated print material). The second stage explores what new things are possible. Specifically, Bryan highlighted the power of microcontent, rather than sites or documents as a whole, and the ability for users to create and critique that microcontent(videos, podcasts, blog posts, commenting). Bryan applauded the collaborative authoring and editing (wikis) and mashups. Web 2.0 is user-centered, thrives on user-generated content, and is mashable and sharable.
Dan gave a brief presentation on Zotero, the Firefox plugin for academic research and citation. Regarding Web 2.0, Dan sees lots of power and potential in collective intelligence and harnessing the power of group activity. So, one of the goals for Zotero in 2007 is storing user information on servers (as opposed to the user’s local machine) and aggregating tags, scholarly annotations. Essentially, we want to capitalize on the power of the “long tail” of digital scholarship.
Finally, Edward questioned why education course management lags so far behind other technological developments. Services like Blackboard are dated almost a decade in terms of the technology and culture of the web today. Even more problematic, he argued, is that current college and university course management focus solely on the course, as opposed to the student and instructor. Edward is part of a project called the “Digital Notebook,” where students and teachers can keep all their materials created in college, research notes, papers, etc. This kind of college/university application would be student and instructor focused, as opposed to Blackboard.
Overall, really great stuff.
Questions
- Portability of Social Networks and “Identities”
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The first question that came to my mind was: How should we, as “Web 2.0″ scholars and teachers, manage all our “identities” and accounts? How can we effectively combine Flickr, YouTube, del.icio.us, Odeo, Wikipedia, Ma.gnolia, Digg, Blogger/WordPress/TypePad, Newsvine, Google, Upcoming, Bloglines, Technorati, and other Web 2.0 services effectively?
One of the biggest problems I see with Web 2.0 is that, while new services pop-up almost everyday, managing accounts on those services can be a hassle. Web 2.0 is great for social networking, but only within the app itself. Others, like Jeremy Keith and Derek Featherstone, have discussed at length the difficulties with connecting personal information and data across social apps, specifically lists of contacts and friends. Portability and sharing of data across applications seems like the next big issue the social web should tackle, and humanities academics would do well to get involved.
- Teaching Students How to Use Web 2.0 Services
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Resident teaching-and-learning scholar Mills Kelly asked a very interesting question: How do we teach students how to use the technologies they’re already using to learn?
It’s not as simple as you might think. Students are already familiar with Flickr, and a good portion of my own students have Facebook or MySpace accounts, and most are familiar with Wikipedia. But how do we integrate this stuff students already use into teaching and learning? We have to teach an academic understanding beyond simple technical proficiency. We have to teach technical proficiency, too.
Where to Go from Here?
For digital humanists, a few things we need to understand and do: We need to teach students new ways of using social applications and services. We need to see value in collaboration across social networks. We need to understand how Web 2.0 applications work, even at a basic level. (That is, it seems beneficial to me to understand what RSS is, how APIs work, what folksonomy and tagging involves, among other things.) We need to have conversations with the designers and developers that build and use these services. Finally, we need to stop talking about how Web 2.0 will help our scholarship and pedagogy, and actually start using it.
Update: Mills beat me to the punch, and posted some nice notes of his own..
>> How do we teach students how to use the technologies they’re already using to learn?
Most students learn when they are having fun and are motivated to learn, and one of the things we are exploring over here is combining the psychological factors of video games and learning material and assessments. Web 2.0 and its collaborative features will drive these new applications
[...] *: Incidentally, do read these excellent writeups from Jeremy at Clioweb and Mills at edwired on a recent forum, Scholarship 2.0: What Web 2.0 means for Digital Humanists. [...]
Quite true, Sophia. I realized from assignments I gave this past fall that students were more motivated to learn when the assignments were fun and interesting.
I’m hoping that “fun” can be redefined, however. Finding funny clips of 1950s television on YouTube is “fun” because they seem so foreign, but I also want the rather serious analysis of those clips to be fun too.
Thank you for the post and questions!
A couple of responses:
Multiple sign-ins – it might be worth having a Web 2.0 pair of logins, which each person uses across a series of platforms. Or tweaks logically according to the platform. I do find myself relying on my own browsers’ cookies.
There’s a larger issue on this score, which is how students (and faculty, staff) maintain identities *through their work* over time. Should we set up new accounts and identities for each project? for each class? or instead watch users develop online personae over longer periods of time, across multiple projects and classes, using microcontent to address classes (departments, tags, etc)?
Can you tell us more about the Digital Notebook project? Is it something that would enable me to take all the filefolders of handwritten notes of 10 years in graduate studies (hey, that first degree was supposed to be terminal!) and manage it electronically. Something of a recovering Luddite (lived in a developing country in the 90s, so am still catching up), so please explain in detail if you can.
Bryan: Thanks for the responses! As far as maintaining identities “through their work,” I initially had the idea that I would keep my own various online identities separate. But this became impossible as soon as I started blogging. I felt the same way when I signed up for Facebook. I wanted to keep that separate from my professional identity, and from my blog identity. Then I thought “what’s the point in doing that?” I decided to embrace a broader online personae. Now, I import my blog’s feed into my notes on Facebook, so my students (who are my “friends” in Facebook) can read my blog in Facebook if they wish. I’m not sure that students would want to do the same thing: import class-related stuff into their Facebook notes. I didn’t address this in class, but my initial impression is that students like boundaries, even though my being their friend in Facebook may break (or at least bend) that boundary.
Regarding managing multiple services: I’ve been wanting to write my own program for a while to gather all my “stuff” or data floating about in various apps: del.icio.us, bloglines, flickr, technorati, newsvine, iusethis.com, upcoming, etc. I kinda already do this now with RSS feeds: I subscribe to all my stuff.
Biryanilady: Sure! The Digital Notebook is not on the web yet, and from what I gathered it would be for Georgetown faculty and students (I could be wrong about this) From what I gathered at the presentation, the Digital Notebook is a way to manage various materials across classes and projects, and plans to integrate numerous APIs from various web applications. I believe it woudl allow yuo to manage all those handwritten notes in electronic form (once you made electronic versions of them). However, a couple of tools from CHNM would let you do that now: Zotero, which Dan presented and which requires the Firefox browser, and Scribe a note-taking database program created by Elena Razlogova.