Talk session proposal:  I would like to propose a session to discuss and/or brainstorm ways to use digital history tools to encourage students to engage with the history of their local community. As a reference point for the discussion, I am directing a service learning project this spring in which students will use wikispaces to document the history of our local community. Some questions to consider might be: What kinds of creative uses might there be for building history pages with wikispaces? What other digital tools might be used to connect students to the community? Conversely, how best to encourage community interest in students’ work? How to develop a collaborative project that might involve other departments or disciplines? While my interest is primarily in student learning and collaboration, I’d be happy to bring these questions to a larger discussion of collaboration in digital history as well.

This session may fall outside the usual range of digital-humanities topics for a THATCamp, but so be it.

I’d like to convene a session on teaching history in fully-online formats– that is, when you may never meet your students in the flesh. At the urban public US university where I teach, there’s increasing pressure to bring more of our courses online, up to and including a fully-online BA in history. We’re encouraged to follow the Quality Matters standards for peer-reviewed best practices in fully-online course design. I was originally suspicious of Quality Matters, not least because of its Orwellian naming, but it’s been very useful for learning how to teach online.

So, how do you teach history online? 3 semesters ago, I walked into a job with a substantial online-teaching component and no prior experience. Frankly, I’ve been making it up as I go along, with the help of a staff instructional designer and my university’s Center for the Advancement of Teaching. Although my initial efforts were very rough, things have improved, and I’m now cautiously optimistic about online courses compared to face-to-face courses. I’d like to share some of what’s been working for me and hear from others about your experiences.

Some topics we might discuss include:

* How to use discussion forums, with or without instructor participation
* Assignments that work for teaching critical-thinking skills in history
* The challenges of self-directed learning; motivating students by teaching curiosity
* Journals and reflective assignments
* Designing assignments that are manageable to grade with a large student load (90+ students per instructor per semester)
* synchronous meetings (chat, Adobe Connect, Skype, etc) and when they’re most effective
* team-based learning (I’m not doing it, but I hear it can work very well online)
* peer-review assignments as a learning tool (via Turnitin.com or similar)
* mini-lectures and when they’re useful
* teaching strategies from MOOCs that we can adapt for smaller courses

So, who’s interested? Comment here with a little more information about how this session relates to you. If we do this, it’ll need to be in the morning, because I need to depart by 1pm for my flight home.

When we’re in the classroom, we can’t guarantee that all of our students will have laptops (unless we bring them laptops or reserve a computer lab).

If we want to teach digital history techniques to our students as part of their classroom experiences, how do we balance these constraints against our unbounded digital-history optimism?

I have a blog post that outlines one technique (www.kalanicraig.com/teaching-digital-humanities-with-analog-tools-the-iliad-and-networks/), but I’d like to get a discussion/brainstorming session going to see how others are handling the question of digital access as part of a digital-history curriculum.

(P.S. Dear session organizer: I will not be available to lead the session until 1pm, so feel free to nix this session proposal if necessary.)