Exciting, all of it, but scary. On top of this, my mom is sick. (This is the part I’m compartmentalizing like crazy, because it would easily send me into panic if it were allowed to, and that’s just not helpful to anyone.)

On the plus sides, today was full of social goodness. Went to a brunch-and-Gattaca-showing, which was brilliant. Took a friend (and myself) shopping at a Russian supermarket. We were both sort of unreally happy with the experience, and talked and talked in the car both ways. Housemates were almost as pleased, and partook of the tasties. Then we watched Torchwood.

It’s pouring in every sense but the rainy. The weather is cool enough for sweatshirt and a scarf. All my nerve endings are at attention. Life’s edges are rather ill-defined, and frightening in this. Wouldn’t trade it, even if sometimes I need to be talked down from scraggly fear trees.

Some background first. The school I work at is a theological seminary existing within a Research I university. The students in it are all [post]graduate: Master’s- and doctoral-level. Some degrees are more vocationally oriented; others—more research-oriented. This refers to what the students do after they leave here; all of our graduate programs involve the usual amounts of traditional scholarship. Some also involve field work.

I aim for these to be one-off, two-hour workshops offered to every student near the beginning of their time here. There will be two different workshops, one for most of the Master’s-level students, the other for our advanced Master’s and all doctoral students. The topic list is more or less the same, with different areas of emphasis for each workshop.  For those people writing theses and dissertations, there will be an additional hour-long workshop touching on things like how to properly format things in MS Word (sigh; yes, really—nobody teaches them this stuff!), open access, authorship etc.

These might more rightly be called digital scholarship primers, I don’t know. In any case, “digital research methods” might be a misnomer. I actually don’t think that it is. Implicit in the topic list below is my belief that the use of digital resources that feed you information and the use of digital tools to directly create new knowledge are different skill sets, but both classifiable as digital research.  If you think I’m off the mark here, I’d welcome your reasoning—not to make you justify yourself, but to gain more perspective—and/or suggestions for other workshop titles.

Here’s what I have so far. What would you add? Do you see problems with my thinking that I’m not seeing?

• What digital scholarship is
  • not all scholarship that’s online is digital scholarship
  • not all digital scholarship is online
  • digital scholarship is not equivalent to digital publication
  • major communities in the humanities
  • digital theology, online and off
• Is this real scholarship?
  • you bet
  • but in many places it doesn’t count for promotion/tenure
    • briefly on the herarchy of knowledge production that informs your studies
    • this politics has no bearing on quality, either of digital or paper resources
  • peer review for online resources
  • ultimately YOU have to decide whether it’s worth your time
  • whatever you intend do after STH, you’re a scholar now
• Why do people bother doing it digitally?
  • some things you can’t do analog
  • knowledge dissemination/access
  • the digital cannot replace the analog, and vice versa
• How digital scholarship is done
  • Father Busa and the Corpus Thomisticum
  • semantic encoding
  • 3D imaging of artifacts
  • other [this is a big Other, of course. I’m looking to limit principal examples to ones most relevant to theology, but will also touch on examples from history, sociology, literary studies etc.]
• Why digital scholarship is relevant to you
  • some of it you can’t find anywhere else
  • it’s scholarship in your field. not knowing it is knowing your field incompletely.
• How to find digital scholarly resources
  • searching the internet: more than the Google search box
  • how to evaluate for trustworthiness
  • a special note on Wikipedia: not a scholarly resource BUT uniquely useful.
  • some points of departure (Voice of the Shuttle, Intuit, WorldCat, library databases)
  • there’s a difference between digital scholarly resources and digital tools that let you find analog resources
• How to interact with digital scholarly resources
  • a few resource examples (including History of Missiology)
  • how to know what questions to ask
  • how to evaluate quality
  • peer reviewed resources vs. not-peer-reviewed ones
  • some problems to watch out for
  • data often obscure, particularly semantic encoding
  • how to cite digital resources
• General notes on digital research
  • research is iterative
  • digital research can span vast amounts of information or a single text
  • you can not only utilize what’s already available but make your contribution, too
  • you can use social media for research purposes (here’s how)
• Resources available at BU
  • me
  • new initiatives going on right now
  • look for events around Open Access Week in October

It was a great time! I was heartened to see so many people thinking so creatively about classroom technology. Distance ed may not equate to using technology (networked or not) in the classroom, but there’s a lot of crossover, so I was asked to reprise a talk I’d given few months ago through the Center for Excellence and Innovation in Teaching.

I’ve taken recent thinking about slide presentations to heart, so looking at my slides wouldn’t yield anything particularly coherent: there’s little text on them. So I’ve inserted the slides here instead of putting them on SlideShare; click on a slide to see it full-size.  Alas, I haven’t figured out yet how to open the full-size images in the same page, with a gallery-like overlay (is there a WordPress plugin for this?), so—apologies—they’re set to open in a new window.

This gets long; here’s hoping the LiveJournal crosspost can deal with the more tag. If it can’t, sorry, LJLand—I don’t do this often…

WHY NETWORKED TECH?

A definition of social media is probably in order, and I like the one used by the European Commission in the EU Internet Handbook—social media are “tool[s] to communicate with specific target audiences.” Fair enough! But, the EC says, it’s more than that:

Social media cannot be treated as a traditional distribution channel. Social media are in their essence a two-way communication tool, and therefore you must know how to respond and what you want to do with the voiceback that is generated from users’ comments or reactions. Not following-up/responding to voiceback can have adverse and sometimes disasterous effects.

Thinking of education as a conversation, rather than a process of imparting knowledge from high atop a hill, this definition sounds about perfect.

But really, why use social media in teaching and research? Well, for me part of the answer is — because I am in the humanities, and that’s what humans are doing these days. Not only are educators increasingly converging on where their audiences and their colleagues are (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube), but all the ways in which people interact with each other (and with new knowledge) using social media — are themselves part of what we study. The notion that somehow this is what people do in addition to, or in lieu of, their real lives doesn’t make any sense. It is real life. And although less than a quarter of the world’s population is online, we can’t pretend the internet isn’t there. Like with telephony, we are never going back, only forward.

Also, consider this about obscurity. I think it applies to academics, and to education—and this will later lead me to talk about the reputation economy within which we operate:

WHAT I WILL TALK ABOUT

So, today I’ll focus on four categories of tools: blogs, microblogs (specifically Twitter), photo sharing sites (Flickr), and Google’s collaboration tools. These tools provide mostly for asynchronous communication: conversation doesn’t have to happen in real time. This seems to be a great advantage, simply because more people end up participating when it’s on their schedule.

So let’s move right on to…

WEBLOGS

Some people still think of them as journals, but they’re not so much journals as a publishing *and commenting* platform. Posts are normally chronologically arranged, with the most recent first. Different blog publishing platforms handle security differently, but most do allow you to only make posts available to certain people if you wish it. Blogs can have one or more authors. And, of course, most have syndication feeds, so I can “gather” the 55 blog sites I read regularly in one news reader, instead of having to visit the sites themselves.

WHY BLOGS

How do people use blogs in classrooms? Educators post writing prompts. Students write week-in-review posts; respond to readings; post the results of fact-finding missions they’re assigned. Students might also critique a website, be it a news site, a political site or an artist’s gallery. They might critique each other’s writing. In other words, they practice public rhetoric and social annotation of resources.

Like all forms of social media, blogs can act as personal learning networks. Students find topics that interest them, and post questions, which their peers then answer in comments.

On the research side, peer review has been conducted in blog comments, too.  A good example of that is Planned Obsolescence, a book by Kathleen Fitzpatrick.  It’s published using the popular platform WordPress, with the CommentPress plugin installed.    CommentPress allows readers to comment on an entire page, or paragraph by paragraph.  Comments can also be threaded, and become conversations—here’s a good example of that.  (Take a look at the comments on paragraph 2.)

I have some other examples, particularly of classroom use, which I’ll be happy to share later with anyone interested. I will briefly mention Looking for Whitman, “A[n NEH-sponsored] multi-campus experiment in digital pedagogy,” not only because it’s a stellar example of the use of blogs for teaching, but also because it showcases the use of WordPress as something halfway to a content management system. So a blog doesn’t have to be just posts and comments: this one houses multiple self-contained projects, as well.

WHY NOT BLOGS

OK, so why not use blogs? Well, for one thing, they can be intimidating to some students, and to some instructors!

But also, because anyone with an internet connection can see most blogs, unless you password-protect yours, you have to be ready for unforeseen participation, including by people who are just looking to start an argument. (Although it’s worth noting that in order to participate in your discussion, someone has to first find the blog, and let’s face it, not many people will unless you advertise it. Plus, you can restrict commenting to registered users, close posts to new comments automatically after a certain period of time, and moderate comments. So there are tools for dealing with trolls, and more control than we often think of when we think of the wild wild internet.)

MICROBLOGS

So that’s blogs. Moving on to microblogging, and its most famous instance: Twitter. A quick overview:

• Anyone can get a free account and make posts.
• Each post must be 140 or fewer characters in length.
• You can follow people—or entities, like the Chronicle of Higher Ed, or the U.S. Supreme Court, or BU—whose tweets you’d like to read, and all of those tweets are aggregated on your Twitter home page.
• There are certain community conventions: for example, an @ sign and a username signals to that user that you’re talking (publicly but) directly to them.

WHY MICROBLOGGING

OK, so why use microblogging? For me, the initial use was for research, not pedagogy. A hash mark (#) with an agreed-upon abbreviation—called a hash tag—allows people to search for all posts associated with a particular topic.  Or a particular event! At this point I’ve virtually attended and contributed to three or four conferences to which I wasn’t able to travel. I’ve also tweeted conferences myself, giving others the opportunity to virtually attend.  Handy.

Another handy feature: you can have anyone’s posts sent to your phone via SMS. When the NEH Office of Digital Humanities posts something, I want to know right away, in case it’s time sensitive and about grants.

A youth pastor I spoke with likes the stronger sense of community that arises from using Twitter. The 140 character limit encourages concise and effective writing. One educator said, “Twitter offers a medium that helps those who hesitate and lose the opportunity to provide input during a classroom session.” So students can use Twitter to float ideas, post links to relevant materials, raising new topics if they’re reluctant to do so in class.

Note that scholars who have left studentship are also using Twitter to float ideas, post links to interesting new materials, ask questions of their colleagues. I got pointers to some valuable information from my Twitter followers even as I was preparing this presentation.

Here’s an example of someone using Twitter in teaching. Twitter content is more informative and less analytical than blog content, but some rudimentary analysis does go on — a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, or a short note explaining who in particular might benefit from a linked resource. This can translate into rich and concise information sharing. Of course, it can also degenerate into meaningless quips. David Silver, who teaches digital media courses at the University of San Francisco, draws students’ attention to the informative potential of Twitter by distinguishing between thin tweets (which provide a single layer of information: “Just read an interesting study on library funding”) and thick tweets (two or more layers, “XYZ study on library funding says libraries need more money, here’s a link“).

WHY NOT MICROBLOGGING

There are, of course, reasons to not use microblogging in academic settings. Students who don’t participate might end up invisible to their professors. There’s concern that students attending multiple courses that require the use of Twitter will be overwhelmed by the relentless stream of tweets they have to follow and process. There’s concern that, like so many social media sites, Twitter will be short-lived (although so far that doesn’t seem likely). Some people are wary of microblogging replacing face-to-face conversations in the classroom, and of the distraction of Twitter during classtime. Finally, like any networked technology, Twitter is only handy when the participant has a reliable network connection. What about students on field placements in rural settings?

Other concerns seem to be in the process of being addressed by the fact that Twitter recently gifted all its contents to the Library of Congress. These concerns revolve around the search feature, which only goes so far back, and the fact that tweets “expire,” so teaching past conversations suffers. We have yet to see exactly how the Library of Congress will choose to make tweets available, but the possibilities for data mining are pretty exciting.

PHOTO SHARING: FLICKR

And speaking of the Library of Congress, it’s been making great use of the photo sharing site Flickr. For those of you who haven’t played with it, here’s a quick overview:

• Accounts are free, unless you want to display more than 200 of your photos at any one time, in which case they’re about $25 a year.
• Users can post photos and short videos using any number of venues, including the website itself, standalone desktop applications, and smartphone applications.
• Uploads can have prose descriptions and tags associated with them, and parts of images can have notes attached.
• It’s possible to automatically cross-post uploads to a blog.
• People can tag their own creations as well as others’.
• Photos and videos can be organized into sets and collections.
• And there are groups whose members post on particular themes—everything from cats to artistic nudes to New York history—to volcanoes and the UK General Election.
• Finally, Flickr provides for easy copyright declaration: users can post all-rights-reserved, or attach Creative Commons licenses to their work.

WHY FLICKR

OK, so repeating the pattern: what does a photo sharing site offer to us pedagogically? Well, there’s often something to be said for inviting students to express themselves in a medium they don’t typically associate with classes, or with scholarship. Among the better-known photo sharing sites, Flickr is a particularly good venue because of the huge user buy-in, and also because its versatile interface can also be used to teach Web 2.0 concepts: social tagging, critique, conversation that takes place in and through comments, social annotation.

I’d like to show you just a few examples of how academics use Flickr.

• Here’s a good use of the notes feature. Calls attention to specific costuming details; asks guiding questions; provides links to more information.
• Another example of notes.
• Here’s some visual storytelling.  This sequence seemed to particularly grab the audience, each photograph so striking and beautiful.
• Or how about storytelling with the image title?

Distance education course participants might introduce themselves with Flickr: post photos of themselves and their surroundings, comment on each other’s posts, build community.

This website is also a great library. Thanks to Flickr’s integration with Creative Commons, it allows you not only to attach licenses to photos, but also to search for photos that you can use, say, in a slide presentation. Mine is far from a stellar example, but an important point is: Flickr has revolutionized the slide presentation, taking the focus off of bullet points and encouraging folks to synthesize their thoughts in imagery. Both students and seasoned scholars have already benefited from this, and conference presentations are less likely to lose their audiences’ attention now than they were ten years ago.

WHY NOT FLICKR

Everything has its down side. You do need special equipment to use Flickr, though these days not much: many of us have cameras in our phones, and those are more than adequate to convey an idea. And also, the visual is very different from the verbal, as a mode of interacting with the world. This can be a great thing, but like everything else, may or may not be appropriate for a particular course.

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

There are so many social media tools I haven’t mentioned. Virtual worlds, voice over IP telephony, wikis, social bookmarking sites, the list just goes on. And it can seem intimidating, no?

But it is our world.

And our academic world operates in a reputation economy. Or, that’s our hope, right? Eric Raymond, a programmer of open source software who also studies open-source communities, has said that by putting arguments on the network and making them available for hyperlinking, searching and discussion, people “homestead the noosphere.” Raymond’s homesteading paradigm comes from John Locke’s theory of property: if a piece of land is not claimed, you claim it by working the land, investing of yourself in it.

The hacker community Raymond describes is characterized by two main aspects: pragmatism and gift culture. This does not mean that there is no ownership: “[t]he owner of a software project is the person who has the exclusive right, recognized by the community at large, to distribute modified versions.” There are also rewards, the main among them being reputation, which in turn leads to a meritocracy. But the key is making your creations, the fruits of your knowledge, widely available. This is what social media let us do, and let us teach students how to do. This will serve them well in any job that involves making new things, knowledge among them.

Kevin Roberts, who made a ten-minute video called Teaching in the 21st Century, writes: “Teachers are no longer the main source of knowledge. We are the filter. Sure,” he says, “they can use Google. But has anyone shown them how to validate, synthesize, leverage, and communicate information?  How to collaborate and problem solve with information?” Yes, we can do all that without using social media. But that’s a lot like dancing about architecture. The internet’s status as the container of human knowledge will only increase and solidify; we have the means and the opportunity to filter, discuss, analyze and add to this body of knowledge directly, in the midst of it.

And it’s more than just an opportunity; at this point, it’s an obligation if we’re to understand our students. Roberts asks, “how would you answer questions like, what is the most efficient tool for this project?, or what are the newest ideas and innovations I need to keep up with?” Now, “How would your students answer these questions? Have you asked them?” Without knowing their frame of reference—both in theory and in practice—it’s hard to teach them effectively. The understanding most BU students have of even such basic scholarly concepts as authorship, the editing process and reflection is radically different from the understanding that a person who doesn’t use social media would have. Roberts says, “we need to rethink the tools we use and the types of problems we ask students to solve.”

One of the people who have best used social media tools in a university setting is Michael Wesch, a cultural anthropologist at Kansas State. Let me just show you a short segment of a video he and his students made, titled “A vision of students today.” [I only showed the part between 1:01 and 2:15, but the whole 4m44s video is worth watching.]

This video showcases collaborative use of Google Docs, the last tool I promised to tell you about. And it also makes an elegant case for educators making an effort to connect with students using their tools, their language, their mindset. All kinds of knowledge work are being done using social media, so that’s—partly—where we need to be.

Thank you.

N.B.: if you’re a staunch vegetarian who is nauseated by the discussion of preparing meat, you might want to skip the rest of this post.

I’ve got to say, thinking that I could easily cut up a whole duck, just because I know fairly well how to do the same thing with chicken, was erroneous. Duck skin is rather more strongly attached than chicken skin is; plus, I couldn’t figure out how to partition it. Ethan’s googling powers saved me, of course; what I’d failed to understand is that the duck is both more fatty *and* more bony on its back than chicken. So I decided to save some of the bonier parts for a soup (to be made tomorrow) and soon I had three containers. The contents of one of them will be rendered, and will make for a good cooking medium for potatoes, fish, what have you.

I’ve got to say, I’m pretty proud of myself for not throwing away any part of the bird, which had admittedly been cleaned before they sold it to me. Its meat is providing us with two meals each, and we’ll have soup and cooking fat besides. Not bad, for a generally wasteful world.

So, here’s the recipe I made. It comes from Alexandra Greeley’s Asian Soups, Stews, & Curries, which I really must return to Mrs. Zogathon someday soon. Next time I make this, I’ll use more ginger, galangal and lemongrass, and will add some fresh chili peppers. This was surprisingly mild.

If you don’t know where to get certain ingredients, check to see if you have an Indian and/or Southeast Asian grocery store nearby. You can always resort to places like Whole Foods, but their herbs are both expensive and not as good. Also, for the love of all that’s holy, don’t use the Thai Kitchen brand of coconut milk. Use Chaokoh instead. Have four cups of it on hand.

Get a 4- to 5-pound duck, clean it and cut into serving pieces (or you could just get duck legs, I guess).

Prepare your herbs and spices. Throw all of the following in one bowl:

     1 stalk lemon grass, trimmed and thinly sliced;

     shred 3 kaffir lime leaves;

     one 1″ piece fresh ginger, peeled and chopped;

     two Indonesian bay leaves, crumbled (I used regular Western bay leaves);

     1 tsp’s worth of galangal root, minced;

     1 tsp ground coriander;

     1 tsp freshly ground black pepper;

     1/2 tsp ground cumin;

     1/4 tsp ground turmeric;

     salt and sugar to taste.

Take 8 shallots and 4 garlic cloves, peeled and rouhly chopped. Put them in a blender or small chopper, add just enough water to process, and blend until smooth. This she calls “curry paste,” why, I don’t know.

Heat 1/3 cup of vegetable oil over medium-high heat. Add the onion-and-garlic paste and stir around for 2-3 minutes, until it’s fragrant. Add all the other spices, stir well and cook for about 5 minutes. That’s what she says, anyway; I cooked for about 7-8. Add a bit more oil if the mixture is too dry.

Add in the duck pieces, and make sure they’re thoroughly coated in the spices. Pour in the coconut milk (mix it up first if it’s separated; it’ll be hard to mix with all that meat in the pan). Reduce heat and simmer, stirring occasionally, for 1.5-2 hours. If the sauce gets too thick and/or shallow, add some water. For garnish, fry up some shallots and/or garlic until crunchy. Honestly, I skipped that last part.

Mmm, tasty. Do make some sticky rice to sop up all the saucy goodness. Make sure you stir the sauce before spooning it onto the rice; some of the herbs and roots stay crunchy, and in every tender bite there’s a little explosion of flavor.

In other news, my Italian class did marvelously well on their exam, all things considered. (They are a good and genial group, but this class is their very lowest priority. We do what we can!) The average grade was 7.5 percentage points higher than the average quiz grade! I’m duly impressed, and they seemed pleased too. We did the simple past today, their first Really Tough Topic, and they did well. I dare say I’m proud! And to think that I’ll have children someday. If that’s how it’s gonna be, at least sometimes, then I’m all for having children. Because, you know, I need convincing to have children.

G’night. Let me know if you make the duck; I’d be curious to find subtle but tasty variations.

Despite the lack of updates, it’s been an eventful month. I gave a talk at a brown-bag seminar at, well, Brown; and it went remarkably well. Ethan moved here from Seattle, which consumed us logistically for a week or two but, oh, is worth it. Both my work and my personal well-being are much improved.

Entirely selfishly, I am giddy to have access to both a ricemaker and a breadmaker now. Oh, and a wok. These implements of culinary creation, coupled with finding a couple of excellent Southeast Asian markets around Providence, have rather shaken up my daily diet in the best of ways. Incidentally, as long as you stay away from Thai Kitchen brand anything, I cannot recommend mamster’s Thai curry highly enough. Actually, here: take a look at his other food writings. They are as amusing as they’re informative.

E. and I have successfully (“victory!!”) collaborated on writing a paper abstract, which was submitted too late to be considered for a conference session, but we’ll find a venue for it. We continue to talk about the logistics of Roland^HT and I am hopeful for the project, if a little frustrated by not dedicating quite enough time to it. This last one should improve now that the exciting double-appointment, Italian-and-Comp-Lit faculty search is over. Amongst the applicants are a couple of really excellent women, and I fervently hope that one of them will join us.

I have begun to teach Italian to RISD students. They’re a trip, complete sweethearts, and that priceless combination of razor-sharp and willing to throw themselves into conversation in a language they barely know. It’s a really fun gig, and although it’s technically a distraction from what I should be doing (*cough* dissertation *cough*), it’s actually great for my own morale.

Tomorrow evening, I go in for a sleep study. That’s exciting! Perhaps we’ll find out why I become sleepy, regardless of how rested I am, if I sit in one place for too long. Becomes a bit of a problem when spending long hours at a computer, or, say, driving to Boston…

The weather had been improving until the weekend. Saturday it rained and rained; Sunday it was sunny and gorgeous; and today, it is snowing again. But the days, they are getting longer; and my mood is definitively on an upswing. We’re full of activity over here. I keep noticing little things and mentally filing them in the “to blog” category, and… well, you know.

Earlier this morning, right around 6:30, a skunk waddled across our neighbors’ backyard. It was light already, so either it spaced on the whole hide-in-daylight thing, or it was rabid. Cute.

I really, really didn’t.

There’s thesis work to do. There’s a lot going on at other-work, too (the stuff I get paid for). I need to clean my apartment I need to iron my shoelaces I want to read the New Yorker and curl up and do nothing and sleep and traipse in the woods and stop overloading my brian and do not want to tutor.

Right. Two successful hours later, I am jumping with glee like a mad squirrel. I was made for teaching, and cannot wait to teach Italian twice a week next semester to brilliant young artists. They will undoubtedly be blasé, and some of them will care nought for homework, but it’ll be good to get some practice on non-Brown students (who are on crack in their own sweet way, hyper-responsible and sometimes more demanding on the teacher than the teacher is on them). Plus, RISD exposure specifically is never a bad thing. And, teaching! I get to create knowledge and get them to speak another language. How good is that?!