Workshop Recap: Technology Fellows Curricular Innovations I

A special thank you to the Technology Fellows who presented at our event last week. I think each presenter deserves his/her own blog post because the projects presented were so different and interesting. Here’s the first recap.

Ann Marie Davis (History) shared new assignments she is developing in collaboration with library, special collections, and instructional technology staff. In two classes, students will create online, publicly accessible digital exhibits using two new acquisitions in the Lear Center for Special Collections and Archives. The Cornelius Gold Diary chronicles the experience of a young man from rural Western Connecticut as a crew member on a ship traveling to China in the 19th century. The second collection, the Hasegawa Collection of Children’s Books, consists of ten translated Japanese fairy tales printed in the 19th century using traditional Japanese woodblock print and Western typography. Both collections are germane to course themes and through the creation of the digital exhibit, students will become knowledge producers instead of passive consumers of information, experience the work of a historian, and create a public product that will be shared beyond the classroom and beyond the College.

In order to create cohesive exhibits, students will analyze the primary source material, conduct their own research using library databases, write narratives for a public audience about the collection as a whole and the individual items contained, process digital images, learn about and apply metadata for the objects, and add their materials to the online exhibit software. Through the realization of the exhibit, students will work with a wide variety of technologies such as Omeka, Google Drive, and Mac’s Preview while learning about technology standards for web publishing, website design and discoverability.

You can find Ann Marie’s full presentation slides here. In the next post I will summarize Joe Schroeder’s (Psychology) presentation.