We have gathered together some assignments and courses that we admire in this partial list. We highly recommend the forthcoming volume from the Modern Languages Association (MLA), Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities, currently under open review, which provides different conceptual ways to engage with digital pedagogy as well as a multitude of tools and assignments. If there are assignment or classes that you admire, please link to them in the comments.
Courses
- “Digital History” class site: a history course focused on using digital methods and tools to study runaway slave ads. The “digital” is central to the course, and scaffolds the digital skills that students’ learn throughout the course.
- “The Rise of the Novel” class site: Includes 6 small assignments that teaches undergraduate students how to use digital tools to acquire, manipulate, represent, and analzye data from novels.
- “Intro to DH” Class Site: Includes syllabus, readings, and assignments for digitally mapping a literary text, distance reading poetry, etc.
- “Digital Ethnography” Class Site: Includes syllabus, readings, and assignments
- “Digital Tools for the 21st Century: Sherlock Holmes’s London” Class Site: Includes syllabus, readings, and assignments for using DH tools and methodologies in order to learn about 19th Century London and Holmes stories.
Assignments & Lessons
- “Using Prezi for Outlining Papers” Lesson Plan: This lesson leads students to synthesize their own rhetorical analysis with background research on their selected controversies using the visual-spatial format mimicked by Prezi’s software.
- “Digital Close Reading: TEI for Teaching Poetic Vocabularies” by Kate Singer: In this essay, Singer discusses digital encoding (TEI) as a method of teaching close reading to undergraduates
- “Extreme Searching: Multi-Modal Media Research” by Leah Shafer and Lisa Patti: Shafer and Patti provide an assignment sequence that introduces students to effective research methods through a series of engaging and collaborative tasks that lead to the development of a multi-modal research collection and a media project. Sequence includes a research screencast, which requires students to walk viewers through their research methods and choices.
- “Why do my Facebook Friends look just like me?” by Mark Marino: This lesson asks students to analyze the racial and ethnic diversity of their online networks, considering how its makeup affects the information they see on their feed.
- “Making Reading Visible: Social Annotation with Lacuna in the Humanities Classroom” by Emily Schneider, Stacy Hartman, Amir Eshel, and Brian Johnsrud: The authors introduce Lacuna, a “web-based software platform which hosts digital course materials to be read and annotated socially,” as a tool that can be used in undergraduate classrooms to engage students in actively and collaboratively interacting with texts.