While USC’s Scalar server was down due to university-wide network issues this past weekend, I installed my own instance of Scalar on my Reclaim Hosting domain and tested it out by creating this Digital Projects book. It’s an incredibly simple book that curates my collaborative projects and teaching and visualizes them neatly. If you’re interested in learning more about Scalar, check out the workshop I held at Whittier College on Teaching with Scalar.
Headline: In SPRING 2017 I will pair my Chican@ Literature class with Prof. José Orozco’s BORDER HISTORIES class. Get your CON 1 requirement filled, and come with us to learn about current realities at the border.
I have taken two separate classes on trips to the Mexican border, where we have visited with Andrea Guerrero to see her inspiring work at Alliance San Diego. Join us next Spring!
I have also now posted course descriptions and syllabi for my ENGL 302 Digital Creative Writing and for my ENGL 410 Senior Seminar: Capitalist Realism. I promise I make the application of critiques of economic theory to cultural studies breathlessly exciting.
If you are curious about “No Praise, No Punishment,” you can now see my Teaching Philosophy online.
Stay tuned to this space for an upcoming description of my Spring 2017 Screenwriting: The Television Pilot class.
(And once again, don’t forget to check out the portfolio of student work from Digital Creative Writing.)
Earlier this summer I led a short workshop on Whittier.Domains and building your web presence for Whittier College‘s Poet Seminar Series hosted by Kristin Wiberg and the President’s office. What follows are some notes and slides from the presentation I had planned (technical issues meant my flash drive was not detected by the podium computer, so I went straight into the Whittier.Domains tutorial. I’ll offer a bit more introduction here. And apologies for the generic Powerpoint theme. I was on a bit of a time crunch.
So first off…
Whittier.Domains is a web hosting service offered by Whittier College DigLibArts through the edtech hosting company, Reclaim Hosting. Reclaim Hosting was started by Jim Groom and Tim Owens at University of Mary Washington, as a project to give students, faculty, and staff control over their own digital spaces, content, and identity. Through Whittier.Domains faculty, staff, and students at Whittier College can get a free subdomain (site ending in .whittier.domains) or they can take advantage of reduced domain hosting (.com, .net, .org), roughly $20, including additional security options.
What you might want to use your domain for (and what can you use it for?) Well, you can use it for anything, almost! Reclaim Hosting already has over a hundred different open source applications integrated into it’s cPanel, where you’ll do most of your web management work. These tools include popular web building applications such at WordPress or Drupal, and tools for digital projects such as wikis, blogs, forums, and more. It’s robust and incredibly flexible. Some examples include:
Here we have the example of Professor Andrea Rehn‘s professional blog where she documents her teaching and research. Blogs can be used to record research, professional experiences, or personal hobbies and achievements (cooking, traveling, fiber arts, etc.). Depending on the topic of the blog, some might be more appropriate for affiliation with Whittier.Domains and Whittier College than others, and for those that are more personal in nature, we generally recommend registering for your own top level domain. If you’re ever confused, feel free to reach out, and I’m happy to consult with you.
One important use for your own domain space is making a digital portfolio. For faculty and staff, this is an excellent way to highlight and share your research, publication, certifications and expertise. Students can also use their domains to highlight their education, experience, sample work, resumes, etc. to supplement job applications. This is especially true for students interested in pursuing careers in writing, art, or in the cultural industries where they may be expected to compile a sample reel, gallery, or other form of portfolio. These sites can also cohere an individual’s identity across multiple platforms and link to one’s LinkedIn, Academia.edu, Twitter, Youtube, Vimeo, Facebook, and more. The example shown here is of the English professor Michelle Chihara who uses her site to share her published work.
If you are a leader in an organization or advising a student org, your domain can also be used to host the group’s website, which is handy for publishing research, announcements, keep track of events and membership. Above, we have a link to the Sustainability.Whittier.Domains site that students in an interdisciplinary class taught by Cinzia Fissore (many students also were members of the Sustainability Club). Students with no web design or coding experience put together this site while also taking a course and conducting field work.
I’ve been hosting course websites on WordPress for years, and I often recommend this instead of institutional Learning Managements Systems (LMS) for contingent faculty and graduate students so that you can retain access to the sites after leaving the institution. There are other valid arguments both in favor of and in critique of LMS, but I personally like having a customizable public space where I can arrange course materials, where students can publish work for wider audiences, and where students can engage with each other outside of the classroom. The site shared here is still under construction, but will be used for my Fall class, so for those who are interested, you can see as I post my syllabus, readings, and as students start to engage over the coming weeks and months.
As researchers, it’s also important to have digital spaces to share information related to our research projects and programs. Here, I’ve shared the DigLibArts page, which most of you know is Mellon funded project that I help coordinate. WordPress is a valuable tool used by many academics and research collectives for hosting digital projects, academic bibliographies, reading groups, and more!
There are many more ways in which you can use your domain, and for some additional examples, you can check out the “Featured Sites” section of Whittier.Domains, or you can schedule an appointment with me.
A quick review of things to consider when starting with Whittier.Domains (or any hosting service, really):
Q. Should you go with a subdomain offered by the institution or a top level domain of your own?
A. This can be a complicated question and will depend greatly on how much, and to what degree, you want your digital identity to be affiliated with the institution. Questions of academic freedom and intellectual property become important in these considerations. If you go with a subdomain we do ask that you use the URL that corresponds with your name and that you be sensitive to the fact that you are in many ways representing your role as a member of the institution on the web.
Some cases where you might choose one over the other:
Q. What information do you collect from users? What are Whittier.Domains policies in regards to information privacy?
A. DigLibArts and Whittier College do not collect any user data from Whittier.Domains aside from keeping a general list of users (including username, email, display name, etc.). We won’t see when you’re logged in, for how long, or what you’re doing.
The administrators of Whittier.Domains can access all sites hosted through the program, but we won’t unless the individual asks for help troubleshooting, if someone makes a complaint, or if individual users have direct questions about their accounts. Honestly, there are too many accounts in the system for us to be monitoring the contents of individual accounts.
Q. What are characteristics of a good website?
A. Here are some general guidelines to consider as you work on your site. There are many more pointers that guide seasoned web designers and many references are available online. The following are suggestions:
Do |
Don’t |
|---|---|
| Do give us some information about you and the purpose of the site.Don’t Make visitors hunt for informationDon’t clutter your site with content (images, icons, clip art, banners, text) | Do make it clean and easy to navigate. When choosing a theme, err on the side of simple. |
| Do give us a way to contact you (i.e. contact form) | Don’t put your contact information on the site without encryption |
| Use high resolution, high quality images, and DO use CC images, and DO give proper citation, DO use your own photos or artwork. | Don’t steal images, or use them without proper citation, Don’t use stock photos or photos with watermarks |
| Do think about coordinating your color scheme, background, and fonts | Don’t use too many colors, contrasting fonts, or distracting images |
| Do make sure the content is up to date, concise, and engaging! | Don’t over do it! Most visitors to websites, make up their minds about whether they want to stay on the site or leave it within 10-20 seconds. It’s not enough time to read an essay, so think of ways to grab a visitor’s attention and point them toward more detailed information. |
Of course, there are many elements that go into making decisions for your website, whether professional or personal, and this is just the beginning. I encourage you to explore the Whittier.Domains, play and get your hands dirty in the platform, and reach out if you have any questions or want any assistance!
This May we took our ‘show on the road!’ Instructional Technologist, Kathy Filatreau and I traveled to Denmark with professors of social work, Paula Sheridan and Lisa Ibanez and 19 Whittier College students.
This study abroad course is designed to bring students to Denmark to research and understand how this country runs its welfare and workfare state. Our course was filled with site visits, lectures by invited guests, and a digital storytelling workshop that included faculty partners from Metropolitan University College in Copenhagen and a class of international students visiting from different countries throughout Europe. Together with our Whittier College students, the EU students worked in teams to create digital stories that reflected their collective thoughts on articles from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and how each relates to youth in their respective countries.
Over the last five years, Kathy and I have been working with the social work department at Whittier College to create various digital assignments including collaborative community resource maps, digital magazines, capturing community stories with digital presentation tools and digital storytelling. Thrilled with the success of seeing students actively engaged in this process of crafting personal narratives filled with evidence-based knowledge of what they have learned and how they will apply their experiences as emerging professionals, we wanted to share our pedagogy with international partners. These narratives juxtaposed with images, sound, and graphics can be powerful ways to communicate– in ways that perhaps traditional ‘papers’ cannot capture or translate.
The digital storytelling assignment is rigorous! Students go through a series of writing and peer review sessions before a final narrative is formed. It’s an exercise in the economy of writing and communication forcing them to be concise in the usage of their words. Digital stories are typically three minutes in length and students must also learn to use visuals that correspond to their recorded words. We coach students on techniques to capture photos on their mobile devices for use in their digital stories. For students that want to use work created by others we explain the use of creative commons licensed media and the responsibility of properly giving attribution for borrowed work.
This academic process of combining personal narratives with stories of achievement have produced compelling student-produced digital stories that are too good not to share! With student permission, we have compiled an online archive of digital stories created by Whittier College students here.
Taking the Show on the Road
When we designed the digital storytelling assignment for study abroad in Denmark we had to keep in mind that we didn’t have a whole semester to work on it like we normally do. We had to scaffold the assignment in a way that made sense to our Danish partners and the classes they were teaching. We would also be working with a group of students from an international community that we wouldn’t meet until the day of the digital storytelling workshop. The success of our project was based on what we did know:
Digital Storytelling is Relatively Low-Tech
Editing the Digital Story: Yes, we needed wifi to create projects. But we were prepared to go offline if necessary. We checked with our Danish partners in advance to make sure all of our students would have access to an internet connection. We use the web-based video editor WeVideo because of the collaborative editing options and assigned administrators can manage student accounts and projects. It also makes digital stories easily shareable. Our Whittier College students were asked to create accounts in advance to save time and avoid tech hiccups before our workshop.
Photos for the Digital Story: We scheduled a field trip with a local photography expert while in Denmark who explained technique and use of lighting. Our photography expert had a very nice DSLR camera with multiple lenses but we had cell phones. We shifted our lessons to iPhone/cell phone photography (which has become quite popular). Most students have cell phones with cameras that take great photos! They are portable and the photos can be easily transferred into WeVideo through a free app.
Recorded Audio for the Digital Story: We purchased $15 microphones on Amazon to record student narratives on our cell phones.
Sharing the Digital Stories: At the end of our workshop day, we shared student digital stories in class. The advantage of using technology to create these stories is that the finished products can be saved in multiple platforms and they are easily accessible. The playlist for our Denmark digital stories is here.
We also did quite a bit of pre-planning before we left the country. We met with the Whittier College students who would be joining us on study abroad nearly six months before departure. On various dates we discussed the digital storytelling project and what the expectations would be. As plans and events were confirmed we communicated this with our students. We also wanted to make the topic they would be writing about in their digital stories simple but meaningful. As I explained before, we didn’t have a full semester to work on this so it was important to create a writing prompt that our students were exposed to and could discuss with a group of international students. We required the stories to only be a minute in length. We had to keep them short but meaningful. We also created an agenda for the workshop that included breaks and lunch schedules to make sure we were on task as needed. As the day progressed during our workshop, we noticed that some students completed their stories ahead of time while others required more time. Perhaps this was because of varying levels of skill or experience but our thoughts in debrief were to ask these students to help others who required more assistance.
What We Hoped for But Didn’t Expect
Students bonded! They wanted more in-class time together to talk and discuss their ideas. It really sparked discussion and engagement. They cheered each other on as we introduced each story for viewing. They also hung out after class socially. On the day of the last meeting a class party was organized and all of the students attended. Surely they’ve found ways to keep in touch via social media.
We see the value of digital storytelling in teaching and learning. Students learn to use technology in meaningful ways to create and communicate powerful stories of awareness, discovery, and reflection. As educators, we see the need to build critical thinking skills in our students. In her study, Digital Storytelling for Reflection and Engagement, Catherine Boase states “The process of constructing a story requires numerous cognitive strategies to come into play, such as comparing, selecting, inferring, arranging and revising information. Making a digital story is a process that is interesting and valuable in its own right. Intellectually and emotionally, creating a story involves cognitive processes of reflection, evaluation and creation, while technically the production of a digital story can require some degree of new media literacy.” Cognitive processes of reflection, evaluation and creation–this is the strength of the digital storytelling assignment! If telling stories are a way to transfer knowledge then we are all partners in teaching and learning. Digital storytelling also fits the High-Impact Educational Practices that we strive for. I am grateful for the opportunity to take our digital storytelling assignment into a study abroad course and to share our pedagogy with international partners. I am especially thrilled to showcase the collaborative work we do here at Whittier College and DigLibArts!
See and read more about Digital Storytelling in our study abroad course at http://denmarkds.soniachaidez.com/
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