Yesterday, we had a Tech N Talk on the effects of technology on student learning. Psychology professor Grace Baron and three of her students led a conversation about what they learned in a senior seminar in the Fall Semester.

My quick opening remarks went something like this:

There can be no doubt that we are now immersed in a digital environment. Whether you are actively using technology as a teacher or not, it is effecting teaching and learning. We have ubiquitous wireless on campus combined with 3G and 4G networks, which together essentially ensure that we have access to the Web just about everywhere and 24/7. Add mobile devices like iPhones to the mix and now we don’t have to be at our desk or even carrying a laptop to take advantage of that access. In addition, many of the new tools now take advantage of this networked environment, many that we’ve highlighted in our Tech N Talks: Diigo, GoogleDocs, onCourse, Voicethreads, blogs, wikis. They rely on a networked, connected environment for their success.

And this connected environment has really changed the way that faculty teach and students learn. onCourse provides access 24/7 to information about the course and in some instances a place to carry on conversations between classes. Class blogs can serve a similar function, but they also allow students to interact with those outside the classroom and give students experience with writing to external audiences. GoogleDocs, Voicethreads, Diigo, and wikis enhance opportunities for collaboration at times even erasing the boundaries that define authorship and ownership of a text. Access to information for research or even simply as fodder for discussion can now literally be in the palm of your hand. And modes of sharing information in academia have become decentralized; it’s no longer centered on the publishing industry or even on the academic paper.

Given this environment what are useful questions for faculty to ask? What do faculty members need to think about when teaching within this environment? Here’s what I came up with:

• How is my chosen technological tool helping me reach my pedagogical goals?
• Can my chosen tool change my goals? Do I want it to?
• What technical skills do my students need to be professionals within my discipline?
• How does the networked environment influence my discipline? Does it change the way we publish? Does it change the way we write? Does it change the way we communicate in general with others in our discipline? Does it change the way information in the discipline is created and consumed?
• How can I help my students navigate all of the information in this networked environment?

Professor Baron and her students went on to discuss their own and their discipline Psychology’s hopes, concerns, and fears about the effects of this digital environment. They were all heavily influenced by Nicolas Carr’s The Shallows, which they read in the class and while they acknowledged many of the benefits (social, intellectual,etc.) that technology brings, they also worried, like Carr, that today’s students are losing the capacity for deep reflection. Grace Baron argued that we need to build more of this kind of reflection about the effects of technology into the curriculum.

My own opinion? Being an academic technologist and a bit of an evangelist myself, I probably find myself falling into the “Never-Better” or the “Ever-Wasers” camps, which Adam Gopnik recently described in a New Yorker article which surveys the different books that are currently out there about the Internet (of which The Shallows is a part):

All three kinds appear among the new books about the Internet: call them the Never-Betters, the Better-Nevers, and the Ever-Wasers. The Never-Betters believe that we’re on the brink of a new utopia, where information will be free and democratic, news will be made from the bottom up, love will reign, and cookies will bake themselves. The Better-Nevers think that we would have been better off if the whole thing had never happened, that the world that is coming to an end is superior to the one that is taking its place, and that, at a minimum, books and magazines create private space for minds in ways that twenty-second bursts of information don’t. The Ever-Wasers insist that at any moment in modernity something like this is going on, and that a new way of organizing data and connecting users is always thrilling to some and chilling to others—that something like this is going on is exactly what makes it a modern moment. One’s hopes rest with the Never-Betters; one’s head with the Ever-Wasers; and one’s heart? Well, twenty or so books in, one’s heart tends to move toward the Better-Nevers, and then bounce back toward someplace that looks more like home.

But I think it’s important to note that this is a moment of change and transition, and we are both losing and gaining something in this moment — as we have done with almost every technology that was introduced. It would be foolish to try to stop it, because the benefits are very real. But we need to be cognizant about what we’re losing as well and try our best to identify and hold onto what’s valuable among those things that might be slipping away.

Over the last year, I’ve noticed several blogs pass into oblivion, either with or without an announcement…. Several of the blogs of people I’ve been reading for 5 or 6 years are either gone or on a very sporadic schedule.  Twitter and Facebook seem more popular….  My WoW guild is having an existential crisis of sorts….

I have a couple of thoughts about what appears to me to be not a “death of blogs” or “death of the online world” moment, but certainly a moment of transition.

I also think the online world is being used for other things.  Gaming thrives, but older games like WoW are losing their appeal, especially for those who’ve been playing for a while…. Video has exploded, bringing our tv mentalities to the web.  So we pull up video on Hulu and watch for a 1/2 hour or hour and then we feel like we’re done.  And then there’s our phones and other devices, like the iPad and the Kindle, which offer other kinds of activities, most of which are disconnected.

I realize there are some people out there just now discovering all the wonders of the Internet, but for me, it’s starting to lose its luster.

It does seem like we are starting to see a shift in general these days away from active engagement with what’s online, back toward a more passive almost TV mentality — evidenced by the rise of Hulu, Netflix, YouTube, Pandora. And this is being reinforced by devices that get things from the internet, but don’t necessarily let you use engage in a back-and-forth fashion with the stuff you get: Roku, the iPad, the Kindle, even gaming systems like XBox and Playstation. I enjoy many of these new technologies myself, but I also can’t help wondering about this moment of transition. Are we losing something.

Wired Magazine recently announced the “The Web is Dead. Long Live the Internet.” (http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/ff_webrip/all/1). Many proclaimed that as too extreme… but maybe they have a good point.

To me, this construction serves as a good symbol for the upcoming year at Wheaton, especially for Library Information Services. We’re actively reconstructing how we get our work done as people change and/or take on new duties. We have a new leader adjusting to her new role and helping us set priorities for the coming year(s). Susan Wawrzaszek moved from her position as Deputy CIO and University Librarian at Brandeis University to Associate Vice President for Library Information Services at Wheaton on August 9.

We’ve “constructed” a few new things over the summer– making some significant adjustments to several of our core services for the new academic year, some of which we are still putting the finishing touches on! One change is the redesign of the Library website, which significantly improves how users access our resources and find information about Library happenings. It is a vast improvement over the old site in my opinion, but we also know that it isn’t perfect. We’ll definitely be using the feedback we get from our users to improve it and other websites within LIS over the course of this year.

We’ve also changed our Learning Management System’s architecture (we use Moodle) to allow for better navigation and archiving of online course materials. In addition, we upgraded to a new version of Moodle this summer, which brings new features to faculty and students. Over the course of this year, I hope to continue to look for ways to improve this service.

And LIS has implemented a new print management system on campus and introduced Multifunctional Printers/Scanner/Copiers. This new printing/copying system will continue to allow students to print for free, but will hopefully also reduce the amount of wasted paper on campus. With this change in particular, (but with the others as well) comes a whole set of needs and anxieties from our users as they adjust. And that’s where the real work starts for many of us. It is our role within LIS to construct a network of support that will ensure that our users can adjust to our changes as smoothly as possible.  We have documentation in place and will continue to make adjustments to it as we discover holes in it. We have already done some training, more will come. And as with most small liberal arts colleges, we will also provide a lot of one-on-one help.

I’m told that in a few minutes, they’ll be raising that beam up onto the Science Center. I plan to go out and watch. The framework is in place; now over the course of this year they’ll be filling in the rest of the building. I think the same can probably be said for several of the things we’re working on in LIS…

There are many names for what I’m interested in here, and I know that each of the names has a slightly different definition. The latter maybe closer to what we are interested in our merged Library/IT environment at Wheaton — a fluency for our students that involves a good understanding of how to gather and use information and communicate that information through various kinds of digital tools.

At Wheaton, at least, I can point to language that was used to describe the college’s strategic plan. According to this plan “the college community’s goal for 2014 ” is to be an educational institution that “develops global citizens prepared to lead in a complex world. Its transformational learning environment prepares graduates to live purposeful lives, be engaged in their communities, be scientifically and technologically literate, and act effectively to promote change.” (emphasis added)

Though we haven’t integrated technology literacy into the curriculum in a programmatic way yet, I think we’ve made some good strides in this direction. At the NITLE Instructional Technology Leaders confernce last March, I presented a five minute talk on all of our efforts and how I hope we can push forward in the coming years. I’m posting my Prezi from that talk below, along with some notes as a reminder to myself about what I hope to accomplish and perhaps as a way to start conversations with others!

Notes for the talk:

[Click 1] I hesitate to present this in a showcase, because this is not about a finished or flashy project or even necessarily a success. It’s more about where I hope Wheaton is headed with Technology Literacy/Fluency – Media literacy/Fluency (whatever you want to call it) with its students. We’re moving in good directions so far, and I hope my group can push us more in this area in the coming years. I’d also be curious from hearing from any of you who are already here and how you got there.

[Click 2] Why “technology literacy” at Wheaton? As you can see I have a number of reason, I am sure there are more. [Click 3] It’s right in our Vision Statement. In 2006, the President led the campus through Strategic Planning and this is where we are headed for 2014. [Click 4, 5, 6] Our accrediting organization, NEASC, also states in their standards that students should use technology as an integral part of their education. [Click 7, 8] Alumni have recently begun pressuring faculty members. In one case, we had a former student tell a faculty member that they wish they had had more experience with SPSS before going out into the real world. [Click 9, 10] The topic has also been coming up from time to time in Workshops and Lunchtime Tech N Talk conversations that we’ve been having with faculty on technology related topics. Should all students in the English department learn various Powerpoint methods like Takahishi or the Lessig method? Should all students have some time in First Year seminar devoted to Wikipedia? Should all Economics majors have experience with applications like Maple that allow them to visualize complex formulas?

[Click 11] So those are the pressures. Here are some of the attempts that have been made over the years… some of them recent and show promise. [Click 12] Several of these attempts spring from the brain of Jenni Lund, an instructional technologist at Wheaton who I am channeling through much of this presentation. [Click 13, 14, 15] She has tried things like student Peer Training (software training sessions held by students for students on specific software packages), Peer Tutors (called software tutors), and last year implemented a requirement for all LIS student employees to prove that they were proficient with basic productivity software.

[Click 16, 17, 18, 19] She is also responsible for our January Technology Immersion Program, which started in the 90s as a way for students to learn software outside of their regular class times during January break. It was resource intensive and only benefited a few students, so abandoned. We picked it up again this past January as a way to generate some revenue and tackle Tech Literacy again. We ended up offering two classes: web design and graphic design. The students did love the experience.

[Click 20] Apart from that one success, though, I think that we have found that students would rather learn the technology as part of their course work. I discovered recently that we ask Students on a Senior survey how they would prefer to learn technology and most would prefer it as part of the First Year Seminar or in their discipline. [Click 21] This works well in small pockets… Graphic Design at Wheaton has a lab section, for example, where students learn how to use Photoshop and InDesign and Illustrator.

[Click 21, 22, 23, 24] While this does happen in some isolated instance, it is not programmatically part of the curriculum. Except in one department… The Chemistry Department (along with every other department) was asked to come up with a Writing Plan. Something they struggled with, until they rephrased what was being asked of them… they were really being asked how to help students in their program communicate within the discipline.  So, they structured the progression through the major around this idea. And you’ll notice that technical skills are built into their plan. They need to know how to create a graph with Excel in the 100s. They need to know how to build a molecule with software at the 200-level. They need to know how to annotate a spreadsheet at the 300 level. This seems like the real way forward to me. Technology fully integrated into the curriculum and stated explicitly. In Chemistry they even have students use a textbook for the software.

[Click 25] So there are several challenges that we need to overcome before we have a real programatic approach to Technology Literacy: the economy, needing to have leadership on board with the idea, overcoming preconceptions that digital natives already know it all, and perhaps the biggest one for liberal arts colleges: overcoming the bias away from “practical skills based learning” as something that belongs to professional schools as opposed to the liberal arts environment.

[Click 26, 27] Next steps for my group at this point, would be to try to overcome that bias by doing things like

1. reframing the discussion so that it is also about critical thinking about tools that students are using
2. collecting better data. These are two questions I want to add to that senior survey to see if there are a lot of students who feel like they need to be better prepared
3. I’d also like to see us taking productive steps forward like actively working with faculty members as they create their communication plans in their departments so that technology is an integral part of the curriculum… and perhaps someday even expanding the basic Literacy requirement that we currently have within LIS into the First Year Seminar program.

[Click 28] And of course, while I am here, I hope I can hear other ideas from those of you in the room who have been making some good strides forward in this area already.

For about a year now, I’ve been using Ubuntu as my primary operating system for all of my work-related computing. For those who don’t know already, Ubuntu is one of many flavors of Linux — a freely available Open Source operating system.  By freely available, I mean just that: you can download it, burn it to a disk, and install it for free on just about any computer. Open Source software is a very cool idea in and of itself — companies and independent software developers essentially volunteer their time to develop a software product. And as the Open Source Initiative tells us “The promise of open source is better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility, lower cost, and an end to predatory vendor lock-in.” Ubuntu take this a step further; it differs slightly from other versions of Linux in that it is designed to be easy to use. Their target audience seems to be the everyday user, as opposed to those who want to run a server in a data center or who enjoy tinkering with the innards of their desktop operating systems. In addition, the developers are committed to totally free software. In some ways, Ubuntu feels like an ideology; their website reads almost like a manifesto:

We believe in fast, effective computing for everyone. Created by the open-source community and Canonical, Ubuntu is free to use and share, at home and in business.

The Ubuntu Promise

Ubuntu is free. Always has been and always will be. From the operating system to security updates, storage to software.

Ubuntu is fast to load, easy to use, available in most languages and accessible to all.

Ubuntu applications are all free and open source – so you can share them with anyone you like, as often as you like.

Ubuntu comes with full support and all kinds of services available worldwide.

With a promise like this, I couldn’t help but be intrigued. Their philosophy (and the Open Source philosophy in general) appeals to my left-leaning political views and the idealist who is still somewhere inside of me. I was also curious (especially given the recent downturn in the economy) about Ubuntu as an alternative to the two somewhat expensive OSes that we purchase at Wheaton. So, I turned in my Mac, got a Dell laptop from our Technical Support group here at Wheaton, and downloaded and installed Ubuntu alongside Windows XP (which came with the computer). When I boot up the computer, I can choose either Ubuntu (where all of my data and most of my applications live) or Windows.

The Ubuntu Software Center Application

For the most part, I have been happy with Ubuntu for the past year. Occasionally I  have had to run Windows on the computer — a similar situation to working with a Mac — but for the most part I’ve been able to work with the free software that either came with Ubuntu or that’s available for download through the Ubunutu Software Center application. I have been able to use Firefox and Chrome for browsers (where much of my work seems to occur these days), Tweetdeck for twitter (yes, AdobeAir runs on Linux), Open Office for productivity (Word Processing, Spreadsheets, Presentation), Empathy for Instant Messaging, GIMP for photo editing, even some minor video editing with Kino. There are even some nice helper applications like Gnome DO, which provides users with a nice search interface and a Mac-like Dock.

Alas, all has not been rosy with this free, “easy to use” operating system. In the end, the downsides are still a little too significant for me, and I have recently made the decision to return to a standard OS — a dual boot Mac/Windows machine. The problems?

1. Browser-based Applications: Ubuntu does not work with several of the browser-based applications out there: Elluminate being the most significant for me (an application that NITLE and several other professional organizations have been using for a lot of their online workshops recently), but the reporting tool (called WebFocus) for Wheaton’s online our financial system (Banner) did not work either. Netflix streaming and other sites that use the Microsoft video tool do not work either.
   

   What you get when you visit Netflix instant streaming.

2. Compatibility: The free software I listed above is mostly compatible with the software everyone else on campus is using. That doesn’t sound like a downside at first; “mostly compatible” sounds great. But it does wear on you after a while. Sure, Open Office can open Excel, Word, and PowerPoint files, but often the formatting was slightly off, sometimes making documents or PowerPoint slides hard to read. And certain features like pivot tables in Excel don’t quite work. The same would happen with files that I sent others when they opened them on their computers
3. Drivers: I could get by with those inconveniences, because I did have Windows available to me (after rebooting the computer), but the most troublesome part of Ubuntu for me has been the drivers — the little pieces of software that run in the background that make things like your screen, your keyboard, your touchpad or anything else attached to your computer work. Don’t get me wrong, Ubuntu has come a long way — most of the drivers work just fine with little to no effort. However, this is another instance where things being “mostly compatible” can become irritating after a while. It took me a long time, for example, to get my computer to wake up properly after the lid was shut on  it. And on a recent upgrade (to version 10.04), my video driver stopped working, so that the screen only displayed in low resolution and I lost my ability to print.
4. No tech support: This is not a problem with Ubuntu itself. Their site and forums are chocked full of information and helpful people. But it’s still an external site and I am still ultimately responsible for solving all of my problems on Ubuntu. Our small Tech Support group has its hands full trying to support Windows and Mac; understandably, they just aren’t at a point where they can take on Ubuntu too.

So, I am leaving Ubuntu behind… at least for now. For the most part, it works as an operating system. I lived on it for a year with few problems. The developers have come very close to their goal of “fast, effective computing for everyone.” I think I just need to give it a little longer to bake before I adopt it as my full time OS again.

It also bodes well for the Open Source movement in general that a desktop/laptop operating system like Ubuntu is so close to being ready for prime time. At Wheaton, we can see how well the movement is doing in other venues as well: we are adopting more and more Open Source tools. Examples include Moodle (AKA onCourse for Learning Management), WordPress (for blogs, but also our new web editor/content management system), MDID (our image database),  and SubjectsPlus (a library subject research guide). With that in mind and especially after quoting Ubuntu’s manifesto-like promise, I almost want to shout out loud: Viva La Open Source!

First off, Wheaton is about to get a new Associate Vice President for Library and Information Services (and I’m about to get a new boss)! This is great news, because this position has been vacant for about a year now and while we have certainly been able to keep the trains running and even been able to make some good progress in certain areas, it will be nice to have some leadership within LIS again that will help us focus on addressing the top issues for both IT and Libraries.

This is also on my mind, because it’s been covered in a number of venues recently.The current issue of the Educause Review, for example, gives a “Top 10″ (11 actually, because two of them tied for 6th place). Here they are:

1. Funding IT
2. Administrative/ERP/Information Systems
3. Security
4. Teaching and Learning with Technology
5. Identity/Access Management
6. (tie). Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity
6. (tie). Governance, Organization, and Leadership
7. Agility, Adaptability, and Responsiveness
8. Learning Management Systems
9. Strategic Planning
10. Infrastructure/Cyberinfrastructure

This list is pretty good, though not entirely surprising, and I must admit I find some of the categories a little too broad. The article does a decent job of outlining the major questions under each topic, though. I for one am happy to see “Teaching and Learning with Technology” and “Learning Management Systems” featured so prominently in this list, as they are near and dear to my professional heart. And I would agree with what I think Issue #6b and Issue # 7 imply:  IT organizations (and merged organizations like those at Wheaton) need to develop better ways of prioritizing their projects and services in a time of fiscal austerity and in an environment of technological advances which require our organizations to remain “agile, adaptable, and responsive.” As the article puts it:

Keeping one foot in the present and the other in the future is the charge to which IT organizations and leadership must answer. Cloud-based applications and services, such as Gmail, as well as sophisticated consumer technologies, such as smartphones that rival the features of laptop computers, are entering campus technological environments at unprecedented rates. As more stakeholders seek the flexibility, functionality, and convenience of these new devices and systems, IT organizations must strive to meet their evolving needs and expectations. Such changes in behavior not only impact traditional IT support models but also challenge deeply rooted institutional policies, business processes, and operational practices.

Finally, I started this blog post a while ago (and let it sit in draft form for far too long), as a way to digest a recent conference I attended in June: the annual conference of the Consortium for Liberal Arts Colleges. Bryan Alexander addressed this question by looking to the future. In his a keynote entitled Liberal Arts Campuses in 2015: five visions, he lays out five potential scenarios for IT in the liberal arts in 2015 based on current trends:

Digital Balkanization.  Silos are the norm, as an increasing amount of content and software  are located in separate platforms.  Academic life reflects this in many ways, directly and otherwise. (opposite of Open World, below)

The Long Great Recession.  The American economy remains flat, never recovering fully from the crash of 2008.  Campus budgets have flattened in response, and academic life has changed in other ways.

The Open World. Open content, open access, and open source are the norm.  (opposite of Digital Balkanization, above)

A World of Points.  Gaming is the world’s leading culture industry.  At the same time, our normative behaviors and interactions are shaped by gaming practices and role-playing.  Academia has started changing in response.

Imbrication Nation.  In a world where networked mobile devices are the norm, augmented reality is now mainstream.

Take a look at his blog post about it on the NITLE site, which also links to his Prezi presentation, for more. It’s a great way to think about how these trends and perhaps even how our actions as IT leaders could affect how we interact with information in the future at our institutions.

In addition to this and other great presentations and conversations that occurred at the conference, there was a really interesting thread on the CLAC listserv right before the conference started, subject line “What’s on my mind.” This conversation gave me a good view into what CIO’s at small liberal arts colleges from around the country are thinking about. I probably should not directly quote the content from that listserv, because I’m not sure if it is for public consumption. But I think I can at least summarize the major topics that arose from both that conversation and the conversations at the conference — at least from my point of view. In no particular order they were:

1. Exploring alternatives to traditional technologies: There were several questions about use of Voice over IP (VOIP) instead of analog phones, whether cable TV was necessary in the dorms given content now available over the web, and whether wired connections to the internet in the dorms were necessary anymore.
2. Data security: In this category, there were concerns about keeping certain kinds of data private and controlling access to information through effective forms of identity and access management.
3. Mobile Devices: The iPad was in many people’s hands at this conference, and I think it and other mobile devices were on people’s minds. Do we provide them? Do we provide content for them? Will they replace the laptop?
4. The Future of the Learning Management System: Many small colleges have now moved to open source LMSes. Some are still thinking about it. Some are wondering if other technologies (e.g. blogs and wikis) will one day supplant the LMS.
5. Handling high demand for services with a small(er) staff: Some institutions have had staff reductions, others because of their size had a small staff to start with. But we are living in an increasingly rich technological environment and our user community have increasing expectations for our services. How do we meet those needs and manage expectations?
6. Getting value out of the ERP: ERP (Enterprise resource planning) software (e.g. Banner or PeopleSoft) is integral to a colleges’ business operations. But this software is also hard to use and expensive to maintain. How do we get the best value out of these systems? And what do projects like Kuali mean for small colleges?
7. Funding replacements: How do we continue to fund replacing desktops, infrastructure, and classroom technology when our budgets are shrinking?
8. The Cloud/Outsourcing: Do we look to cloud services like those that Google provides to save money and improve services? Do they really do both of those things?
9. Managing Projects: How do we set priorities for our projects in IT? And how can we both plan well and be agile?
10. Managing relations with other departments: More and more IT organizations need to collaborate with other departments on campus. Contact with the Communications department, who are now managing web sites, is one obvious example where this is happening… but it’s occurring in other places as well.

As I finish up this blog post, I am realizing that it is probably an overly ambitious one. I’m sure I haven’t covered everything. Perhaps I’ve done too much! But blogs don’t need to be the final word, right? I wanted to at least make sure that I captured what I’ve been hearing and thinking as I move forward into a new year and under new leadership within our merged organization. I’m sure this is a question I’ll be returning to again and again, and that we’ll be returning to as an organization.

What do I mean by Digital Humanities? I don’t mean just doing Humanities scholarship using a computer. Typing up a traditional paper in Word doesn’t count. Posting a pdf of a paper to the web doesn’t really count either (though I will admit that that act does bring up interesting questions about how you define the word “publish” nowadays — a related but separate topic).  If we think of Humanities as the study of the human culture and the human condition through the analysis of artifacts (texts, images, video, arctitecture, sculpture, and so on) in the human record, Digital Humanities simply extends that definition to include using digital technology to assist in that analysis. Usually this involves digitizing these cultural artifacts — often in the name of preservation — but also, as Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth point out, to facilitate and enhance scholarly analysis of those artifacts:

Yet many disciplines have gone beyond simply wishing to preserve these artifacts, what we might now call early forms of data management, to re-represent and manipulate them to reveal properties and traits not evident when the artifact was in its native form. Moreover, digital humanities now also concerns itself with the creation of new artifacts which are born digital and require rigorous study and understanding in their own right.

Susan Hockey says something similar in her essay that chronicles the history of Digital Humanities in the same book and notes that it brings together the methodologies of the sciences and the humanities:

by its very nature, humanities computing has had to embrace “the two cultures”, to bring the rigor and systematic unambiguous procedural methodologies characteristic of the sciences to address problems within the humanities that had hitherto been most often treated in a serendipitous fashion.

So, getting back to the title of this blog post… why do I think it’s on the rise at Small Liberal Arts colleges and universities? When I look around, I see Digital Scholarship centers appearing like the ones at Occidental College and the University of Richmond. Hamilton College has started a Digital Humanities Initiative. At the University of Puget Sound, the Director of the Humanities program, Kent Hooper, teaches a class to undergraduates entitled Digital Humanities. Here at Wheaton, faculty have started a Digital Humanities working group. We also have several digital humanities projects underway — a few that use methods from the Text Encoding Initiative to digitize and analyze texts, others that involve contributing to projects like the Diderot Encyclopedia translation project and the History Engine, and one using Lexomics — an approach which uses Computer Science and statistics to look for patterns in Old English texts. And as I write this, our college Archivist (Zeph Stickney) and an Associate Professor of History (Kathryn Tomasek) are attending and presenting a poster at the Digital Humanities conference in London.

The National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education (NITLE) has taken notice and has gathered a group of faculty members, librarians, and technologists together from Occidental College, Willamette University, Hamilton College, and Wheaton to plan a series of online seminars, which (according to Bob Kieft, College Librarian, Occidental College):

will showcase a variety of projects and issues in digital scholarship, [will address] these important themes:

• connection to the undergraduate curriculum,
• collaboration between faculty, technologists and librarians, and
• strategies to cope with limited resources on liberal arts campuses.

And I’m sure there’s a lot more going on! This seems like a significant shift to me, because Digital Humanities used to be primarily within the purview of larger research institutions, because (as the last bullet above implies) these projects have been too expensive and large an undertaking for small colleges.

So, as a leader of a group at Wheaton focused on technology for research and instruction, part of my job is to figure out how to encourage and facilitate collaborations between faculty, technologists, archivists, and librarians and to work with others to find ways to make Digital Humanities projects manageable and sustainable. The IMLS-funded project that I am working on with colleagues from multiple small colleges aims to address this goal for one kind of Digital Humanities scholarship. “Publishing TEI Documents for Small Colleges” (a project still in need of a better name — any suggestions?) is attempting to help scholars, archivists, librarians, technologists, and students working on encoding scholarly texts with TEI-compliant XML find good, sustainable ways to store, represent, analyze and provide access to those materials online. We can all create the XML documents, but individually we don’t have the resources to build effective tools to store and use them. The way forward in our view is through collaboration between institutions — in this case through a shared service. And I think that will need to be the model for other kinds of Digital Humanities projects (video, GIS, image archives, and so on) occurring at small institutions (and even large institutions!) as well. If we want to ride this groundswell and succeed with Digital Humanities at our individual campuses, we need to look more toward sharing our resources.

For the most part, this thought process still holds true… but I think it’s also changing, or has changed. Sure, face-to-face time is great, maybe even preferred, but so is getting the information when I want it, on my own terms, 24/7.  DVRs, online services like Netflix, radio podcasts, YouTube, 24/7 shopping on Amazon, the web itself — these have all taught us to expect access to information on-demand, when we want it, and where we want it. I’m sure face-to-face will always be the preference, but 24/7 information sure is a nice substitute.

So, when two faculty technology liaisons (Jeanne Farrell and Diane Demelo) said they wanted to do some screencasts for faculty about Moodle, my first reaction was … sure, I guess, but  who will watch it? Faculty want to learn directly from you, right? But then I remembered many faculty members who told me they had tried Moodle on their own and several others asking me over the past year whether we were recording our Tech N Talks, so they could watch them later. Many of our faculty members want to learn things on their own schedule, and — influenced by their experiences with the web — they want access to this kind of information 24/7. So, if you take their environment into consideration, screencasts make perfect sense. These screencasts aren’t quite a substitute for the personalized attention that we will continue to give, but I think they do address many of our faculty’s needs.

We’ll see. I’m curious to see how well they are received.

Here are three that we just started with. These are addressing new features available in our instance of Moodle after an upgrade. For those who are interested, these were recorded with Jing, which you can download and use for free. We bought the $14 per year license, because we wanted to post to YouTube (instead of http://screencast.com/) and edit the video. But I have used the free version of the software and have been quite satisfied with it. Enjoy!