Workshops

Explore Bucknell’s newest makerspace, the Electronics Maker-E! Equipped with a wide range of tools and high tech devices, the Maker-E is a creative space for learning about and working on electronics, programming, and similar projects. More information is available at: http://makere.blogs.bucknell.edu/

Daniel Lynds (St. Norbert College)

This workshop will leverage basic data visualization methods to present social media engagement for #BUDSC16. Measuring hashtag engagement using data visualization is becoming a phenomenon across disciplines and fields, often being integrated with Social Network Analysis. Whether exploring activity of students in a learning environment, engagement of brands with users, actors in a network, or a multitude of other contexts, data visualizing affords us unique areas for collaboration and conversation. This workshop will leverage several approaches of data visualization to present social media engagement for #BUDSC16.

Using hashtags generated for #BUDSC16, this workshop will run before, during, and after the conference while datamining from the various hashtags emerging therein. Participants in this project will use data visualizations to tell stories about their experiences with conference themes and events. During the workshop the main hashtags of the conference will be explored, primarily via twitter, in a hands-on interactive fashion giving participants both theoretical and practical contexts. We will create a unique hashtag in the workshop and watch it grow in a visualized form.

Working in a shared slide deck, participants will openly share the work they make in the workshop. This will be a truly unique experience for participants new to the data visualization field. Those attending the workshop would benefit most if they have Gmail and Twitter accounts prior to the workshop.

Daniel Lynds is an Instructional Technologist currently working at St. Norbert College in the Digital Humanities. With a Bachelor of Fine Art and a Masters in Education Technology, Daniel collaborates with people on making their work as impactful and open as possible. His primary research interests lie in visual storytelling, social network analysis, open education, and cultural theory.

As an editor at Hybrid Pedagogy, a critical journal/community/conversation/study, Daniel finds himself constantly engaged with scholarship from international voices focused on the connectedness of learning, teaching, and technology in culture. This work feeds his interests in collaboratively building sense making in the humanities and beyond. He believes in people and their ability to critically examine their paths in the ever complex landscape of knowledge abundance navigation.

Daniel is also an interdisciplinary artist and general noise maker. Many of his creations can be found at daniellynds.com

Christopher Gilman and Jacob Alden Sargent (Occidental College)

In the 2013-14 academic year, Occidental College launched a media display and web-based content sharing system called Global Crossroads. The centerpiece of a major campus renovation, the display system comprises 10 video screens, which are distributed in a 2-story media wall. It allows students, faculty, and staff of the College to author multimedia scholarly projects comprised of individual content resources.

At our BUDSC15 panel presentation “Who’s Listening? Creating Intentional Publics” we received strong interest in developing capacity for sharing and deploying the Global Crossroads system at other institutions. This led to a pilot of an inter-institutional course collaboration with Heidi Knoblauch at Bard College and subsequent working group to convene at this summer’s ILiADS conference at Hamilton College.

We propose a “works in progress” session to further develop inter-institutional collaboration by focusing on ways the Global Crossroads system, as well as other platforms, can be a means for sharing scholarly content across institutions, using the course, rather than a digital project, as the basic unit of connection. We situate this approach within a more general provocation: student work within digital projects is often either too constrained to be meaningful as a form of intellectual expression, or it lacks the sophistication to be presented to wide audiences. In addition, projects require work flows and management processes that add a layer of complexity to curriculum design; and idiosyncratic course structures make iterative improvements in digital pedagogy difficult.

We suggest that inter-institutional collaborations may be fostered by focusing on inquiry-based course collaborations around the collection and analysis of primary digital resources shared between institutions with common course goals, student learning activities and work products. Our presentation is intended to solicit interest in further collaboration on designing a unified template for an inquiry-based course involving undergraduate research in the curriculum, the fundamental elements of which would include: topic constraints, source materials, methods of inquiry, and sequenced processes of critical analysis and production.

Christopher Gilman is Associate Director of the Center for Digital Liberal Arts and Affiliated Faculty in Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture at Occidental College. His work centers on the design and development of programs, curriculum, learning spaces and infrastructure for integrating digital methods into scholarly practice. Gilman has a PhD in Slavic languages and literatures and significant professional experience in both K12 and post-secondary education. His research interests include the intellectual history and cultural practice of semiotic theory, Russian and Western Avant-gardes, visual and material culture and innovative pedagogies.

Jacob Alden Sargent, Associate Director Center for Digital Liberal Arts, earned his BA in music and sociology from Bates College and his PhD in sociology from the University of Virginia. He leads the College’s Instruction and Research team in scholarship technology, developing, planning, and delivering academic and informational technologies for the liberal arts context. Sargent publishes on labor and technology in knowledge and culture industries and teaches courses on higher education, public sociology, social movements, and new media. Previously he served as a faculty fellow at the University of Virginia’s Teaching Resource Center, where he was also a lecturer in sociology.