Join me to take a “field trip” to the Digital Hub, the College of Liberal Arts new Center for Digital Humanities. As soon as we have a group gathered, we can walk over to the Digital Hub and talk about its mission and its resources.

The Event Hall in Morgan Library has an installation of Google Liquid Galaxy, which is essentially a wall-size display of Google Earth. During this session, you can explore the world, and some interesting data layers, in this immersive setting. For those who are interested, you can try your hand at “flying” yourself and/or learn to make new data to overlays to use in your personal projects.

One of the toughest dilemmas in teaching digital practice is in balancing the teaching of digital tools with teaching the method of the humanities discipline being employed. Here is how I have come to think about this dilemma: I ask students to consider, when they are using a particular digital tool, what are they doing in terms of the historical method. I define the historical method using one of the most common articulations of what it means to do history, “What Does It Mean to Think Historically?” by Thomas Andrews and Flannery Burke, and enfold aspects of digital practice, such as inquiry, analysis, exhibition, preservation, and accessibility, into that structure. Below is how I visualize that relationship. In more deliberately connecting the digital with the methodological, I am better able subordinate the digital to the historical discipline and in doing so, create a better rationale for students engaging digital tools.

As of 2018 WordPress has around 60% of the Content Management System market. Though building a website may seem like a daunting task, WordPress makes this process very accessible. In this session we will jaunt through an intro to wordpress and website building. This is intended for a non-technical audience who is wanting to get started using WordPress, but does not know where to start.

Navigating intellectual property and copyright law is challenging, especially in the digital age. During this interactive session we will play a fun game of ‘Can I use this?’ Our game will help players understand content that can and cannot be used on digital platforms because of copyright regulations. We will engage in discourse about content bots and uploading copyrighted materials. We will also share resources and information about works already in the public domain, accessing Creative Commons, and understanding fair use. Our session will be a dynamic overview of intellectual property and how it plays a role in our digital lives.

While virtual worlds have been around for some time, the persistent, 3-D online versions became especially realistic and popular in the mid-2000s.  Many universities created virtual-world campuses and offered courses on those campuses.  Since roughly 2009, enthusiasm for virtual worlds in education has declined (a la the Gartner Hype Cycle); but increasingly accessible VR technologies and new virtual-world platforms may be leading to a renaissance.  The purpose of this talk is briefly to examine the nature of virtual worlds, focusing on Second Life, to describe how they have been used by educators in the past, and to speculate on what the future may hold.  This presentation is informal, based on twelve years of personal and professional experience.  Discussion is encouraged. 

In this proposal, I want to explore free digital tools that we can use in the classrooms (schools, undergraduate, graduate). We all know examples, so I think of this possible session as a way for all of us to interact. The idea is for all of us to take 5 minutes to present one free tool and to explain how we have used it, how we have evaluated the work of students. I can present 3 tools. The Clio, a mapping system, that I have used to make my student work on the history of beer and prohibition in Fort Collins. I can also present Poll Everywhere, a free alternative to I-Clicker. If interested, I can present omeka (assets and limits) to create virtual exhibit.

In this ‘play’ session, we will share and discuss various user-friendly digital tools for mapmaking and representing geographic features in the classroom. My contribution will focus on NatGeo MapMaker Interactive and the Palmer Drought Severity Index, but participants are encouraged to bring their own favorite (or less favorite) tools into play. This session complements GIS workshops by highlighting less technical options for mapmaking. If you consider yourself a relative newbie to mapmaking or if you’re interested in learning about tools ideal for non-specialists, including students, we hope you will join us.

In this session I would like to talk about the philosophy of modifying and re-imagining old media devices as tools for creative exploration. At the center of this session I will talk about the genesis of the Paik/Abe raster manipulator, a modified cathode ray tube television that uses electromagnets that animates the electron gun of the television to create swirling patterns and movements driven by audio oscillations from a sound source. I will talk about the history of this tool, how I and a couple of artists redesigned it to work on color televisions, and why finding new uses for old technology is so important in the age of environmental crisis. I will also bring the device, pictured above, for people to play with during the session.