We are the editors of The American Yawp (americanyawp.com), the first and only open US history textbook produced through massive collaboration. We are in the early stages of thinking through “The American Yawp Atlas,  a compendium of both static and interactive maps designed for the US history survey. Come help us think through the process and produce a series of documents.

Too often textbooks use maps simply as decoration. What issues, themes, or events in the survey require spatial representation? Is a textbook the best medium to represent the spatial history of the United States? Creating databases is often the most difficult and time-consuming aspect of GIS work. What data resources are already available to help produce maps suitable for the survey?

We have three goals for this session. Through open discussion, we hope to

1.  Produce a wish-list of maps.

2.  Identify resources for the production of maps suitable for the survey.

3.  Sketch the draft of a white paper on best practices in the pedagogy of spatial history,

We have a fourth goal as well, as we are always looking to meet and collaborate with those interested in democratizing history through digital tools. Come share your ideas, questions, and concerns.

JOIN OUR GOOGLE DOC AND SHARE YOUR IDEAS. 

The last decade has seen a large proliferation of online archives, giving more researchers more access to more primary sources than ever before. At the same time, researchers often are no longer physically handling materials, and are instead relying on digital facsimiles. While this shift has opened exciting new areas of research, it has also changed how the concept of “primary sources” is first presented to undergraduate students.

This talk session would focus on pedagogies for introducing primary sources to new undergraduate researchers. For instance, should such an introduction still include bringing materials into class or arranging a visit to a library’s special collections? Or is viewing a scanned document enough of an experience? In the event physically handling materials isn’t possible, what alternatives exist for giving students a better understanding of what it means for something to be an “artifact”?

EDIT (8:00 PM, Jan 3): Unfortunately I will need to withdraw this session or pass it off to someone else. My flight has been delayed and I will not make it to Denver until at least 3 pm tomorrow (Jan 4). If someone else likes the idea and wants to take it up, let me know! Happy to collaborate/send some ideas your way to help this conversation happen.

This could be a teach, talk, or play session – or some combination of all three, depending on what’s most useful.

Teach: In summer 2016, I participated in Hybrid Pedagogy‘s Teaching with Twitter online course (led by Jesse Stommel) and my students and I used Twitter as a tool in a World Civilizations course during the Fall 2016 semester. If an intro to teaching with Twitter would be useful, I’d love to share what it took to get started, how I worked Twitter into the class, and how students responded to the inclusion of Twitter in the class.

Talk: Discuss pros/cons/potential uses of Twitter together. A chance to brainstorm how Twitter can support pedagogy and class/student goals, what rules might need to govern Twitter in the classroom, and how issues like accessibility, student privacy, and cyberbullying can come up when using Twitter.

Play: Set up “disposable” Twitter accounts for anyone without an account then play around. “Play” could include a Twitter chat online, setting up Tweetdeck, composing Twitter essays, or mining Twitter for hashtags and accounts that might be useful to us as teachers/professionals.

For any of the above options, it would be useful for participants to have access to a phone, tablet, or laptop with internet access.

The past year has brought us many examples of the need for students (well, for the public), to be able to evaluate sources, to identify how and why knowledge is produced in all of its many media and forms, and to suggest the ways in which verifiable, authoritative sources can be produced using the tools of scholars.

The focus of Digital History and Digital Humanities on consumption, analysis, and production of knowledge in many digital forms allows practitioners and novices to address and help demonstrate to students and the public how digital production works and why we should be skeptical of it.

That’s not a simple process however.  As Mike Caulfield of Washington State University, Vancouver, has been writing lately (such as in “Yes, Digital Literacy. But Which One?“), curriculum for information literacy is not new, but that such programs are not sufficiently grounded in either specific content areas or the structures of the Web to keep up with the blizzard of problematic content.  And as my colleague at UMW, Kris Shaffer, has noted in a recent article (“Truthy Lies and Surreal Truths: A Plea for Critical Digital Literacies“) the issue isn’t just misinformed content, but intentional misleading content.  As he notes,  “The future of digital culture ― yours, mine, and ours ― depends on how well we learn to use the media that have infiltrated, amplified, distracted, enriched, and complicated our lives.”

So, I propose a session in which we talk about strategies to address issues of Digital Fluency (or Fluencies) at our schools and in our departments, to share existing resources on Digital and Information Fluency, and to describe what an idealized curriculum would address.