TWT2013-+Lipstick+on+a+Pig

=TWT2013- Lipstick on a Pig: Can Technology Actually Help Us Teach the Humanities Better?=

Whereas content-driven math and science instruction seem to lend themselves naturally to an online approach, many remain skeptical that the same holds true for humanities education. Given that teachers of English, history, philosophy, and the arts pride themselves on teaching more ‘subjective’ skills – good writing, critical thinking, and creative problem-solving – direct teacher-student contact and face-time would seem absolutely indispensable. One corollary is that “online” or “tech” enhancements, while interesting, are essentially seen by many humanities instructors as unnecessary bells and whistles. In this discussion panel, I would like to dispel that common perception by pointing to several areas in which tech can be more than mere window dressing for the humanities. Among the topics addressed here are: search engine literacy as a higher-order form of research; digital portfolios as a means of self-monitoring and overall tracking; “social media”-style peer assessment; and the hyperlinked world of the Internet itself as requiring a new kind of rhetoric and a new episteme.

Participants will have a more expansive (and nuanced) understanding of themselves as humanities educators, while also leveraging the ideas and experience of other participants to think of new ways to engage technology to their students’ benefit.

Some links:

__THEORETICAL IMPLICATIONS:__

[|What is a 21st Century Liberal Education?] [|The Challenge of Creating a Liberal Arts Education for the Online Learner] [|Who Needs the Humanities at 'Start-Up U'? [Stanford]] [|Who Killed the Liberal Arts? (and why we should care)] [|What Is a 21st Century Education? (more generally)] [|A Critique of Technocentrism in Thinking about the School of the Future (Seymour Papert)] [|What are Digital Humanities?] [|Humanities in the Digital Age] [|Franco Moretti on "Distant Reading"] (an application of the idea is also [|here]) [|Networked Knowledge and Combinatorial Creativity]

__PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS & EXAMPLES:__

[|Digital Portfolios in the Age of the Read/Write Web] [|Shakespeare Word Frequencies]

[|Eliot's "The Waste Land" as hypertext] [|Ekphrastic poetry: The Poet Speaks of Art]

[|Subtext - An App for Social Reading] [|Figment] (online collaborative community for reading/writing)

[|The Cell phone novel] (also [|here])

[|Scoop.it] and [|Paper.li] -- online newspaper curation platforms

Grading apps:[|Essay Tagger] and [|Essay Grader]

Presented by:

Gary Schmidt Friends Academy (LI) gschmidt@post.harvard.edu Twitter: @revdrschmidt