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.

Folks who are interested in this workshop might want to have a look at the bibliography on our wiki. Just visit the site and request access.

On Friday, you’ll want to bring a laptop and an idea for a project you’d like to use in a course. We’ll spend the bulk of the time working on your assignments.

Technological power is political power in the modern world.  Yet many activists, humanists, artists, and disenfranchised social groups not only don’t wield technological power, they feel alienated from it.  What can we do—as academics, researchers, and citizens—to close this gap?

I’d like to have a discussion regarding our concerns about social/political disenfranchisement and its relationship with deep technological/empirical ability, and to work as a group to develop strategies for outreach and education that bring more diverse voices into the technological discourse. Success stories are welcome; bring your teaching tools, URLs, and syllabi!