In the context of a humanities classroom, students can engage with ideas and culture in a hands-on way as they figure out how to arrange and interpret digital objects. Curating digital material into meaningful collections has become a critical skill, not just for libraries figuring out how to organize and preserve digital content, but also for each of us trying to deal with information overload and filter failure in our own lives.
I propose a session in which we discuss how digital curation, broadly conceived, can be used in teaching. Our goal will be to assemble a collection of assignment case studies and tool reviews that can be shared with the larger group.
Participants will be invited to share:
- Assignment Case Studies: What are good examples of assignments that involve organizing digital content, and what challenges can they sometimes present? For example, a case study could feature an assignment based around student-contributed content that requires an instructor to figure out ways to manage it so that it serves a pedagogical goal and doesn’t just end up becoming an overwhelming mass of disjointed material.
- Tools: What tools are good for creating digital collections in a classroom setting? This could included tools for curating social media and other web-based content (Storify, Scoop.it, Diigo, etc.) or other tools that draw on library resources (Artstor, for example) or digitized primary sources. For example, at Boston College we are using MediaKron, a tool we developed to help faculty collect and organize multimedia content for teaching that has created new opportunities for students to gather material as part of the learning process.
