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Things I Found This Week: Dissertation Distractions Edition

Last updated on January 30, 2017

The best/worst part of a dissertation project involving social media and technology is the constant discovery of blogs, online journals, and tech tools for teaching and researching. After reading any book or article, after every discussion with a peer or scholar, I’m left with a lengthy list of new resources – which at the moment seem far more interesting and exciting than the harder work of sitting down to, you know, actually think, read, and write about my topic. For instance:

I’m itching to play around with Omeka and Scalar, two resources a fellow Drew student, Jessica Brandt, was good enough to alert me to.

Omeka looks like a more traditional blog/website platform, but it’s designed to assist scholars (amateur and professional) and institutions in creating top-notch online archives, exhibits, and narratives. The platform allows for beautiful image collections, searchable tags, interactive images, and customizable themes, fonts, etc. The software is free and open source and looks like a powerful story-telling tool.

(What Is Omeka from Omeka on Vimeo.)

Scalar is exciting for the way it allows scholars to structure their narratives in fully digital ways. The platform’s purpose, according to creators, is to give “authors tools to structure essay- and book-length works in ways that take advantage of the unique capabilities of digital writing, including nested, recursive, and non-linear formats.” Authors can create multiple paths through the same project, tag paragraphs and sections to create relationships throughout the “document”, and insert multimedia content related to the text portions of the project. My project could, I think, benefit from all of these possibilities and I’m excited to give it a test run once the topic is a little more structured.

(Scalar Platform — Trailer from MA+P @ USC on Vimeo.)

I’m also super tempted to enroll in one (or…all) of the online courses offered by Hybrid Pedagogy. The upcoming course topics are “The Flipped Classroom,” “Teaching with Twitter,” and “Learning Online” – all topics of interest to me and all for very reasonable prices ($250-350, with discounts for adjuncts and students). Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure that adding an online class to the mix of dissertation prospectus + two classes + training for half-marathon would turn out to be a little much… Alas. I’ll just have to keep an eye on the offerings in the Digital Pedagogy Lab in the future.

Two final resources/projects on my radar this week: Educause Review (my thanks to Gamin Bartle for this one), which looks to be full of all sorts of thoughtful pieces regarding technology and the digital age in and education, and the Wikipedia page for the feminist sci-fi film, Advantageous. The film is gorgeous and provocative and made my cyborg-loving self terribly happy. The Wikipedia page doesn’t do it credit – by which I mean the information is super basic. So I added a link for one of the actresses last night and today (or tomorrow or whenever I decide to neglect other work), I’d really like to add a plot summary or something about critical reception, and them maybe begin work on pages for Freya Adams and Samantha Kim. I’ve been meaning to make a foray into editing Wikipedia for awhile and this seems like a good place to start.

Leave a comment if you’re using similar resources or if you want to talk ed-tech, social media in the classroom, or dissertations. Or anything else. Now to the real work of the day for me – updating my class website to include the new syllabus and a list of topics for the semester’s portfolio project. (Will provide links for those once they’re ready to go…) I also need to finish off an e-book of last semester’s blog posts for my students – it’s the closest I can get to preserving their work for the moment and that task has been on the back burner for far too long.

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