By Isaac Deville, Staff Reporter.
Did you attend camp this summer? No, not that kind of camp. This is THATCamp (or The Humanities and Technology Camp). This is an educational camp for like-minded individuals pursuing technology in the classroom. A place for students and instructors alike to learn different uses of technology in different classes, mainly the humanities. This year’s THATcamp provided a meeting place for technologists to train humanists in any given field in technology.
When Professors Laura Dull and Amy French started the meeting, they already had their Twitter account ready, with #DeltaThatCamp2016 projected onto the wall. Sitting in the class is a group of ten or more professors and students hoping to learn digital avenues for their life. The Humanists (Art, English, etc) are pursuing different ways to implement technology.
“The big thing I would say about technology in the classroom is play with it,” says Professor Dull. “And just be honest with your students. Make it clear that you’re not the expert. You’re going to learn alongside them. They’ll appreciate the honesty. They’ll appreciate the idea that maybe they can teach you something.”
Professor French supports a bottom-up approach. She says, “So it’s all about student learning and improving our own scholarship. Which is our own learning, because we are learners first so that we can teach students how to be learners,” says Professor French.
These “learners” call themselves digital humanists, and, in French’s case, digital historians. Everyone is different, depending on what your specialty is.
“Technologists are interested in the rules of the game,”Professor French says, “and a humanist is interested in why we play the game.” This leads to a grouping of questions posed to the class by fellow scholars. “Where should the digital novice start?” is one of the questions. “What is a novice’s plan of attack?” is another. Finally, there are the two other topics “Blogs in your class,” and “Effective Communication.” They have a list of sites that would help the novice: wordpress.com, tiki-toki.com, omeka.com, tumblr.com, weebly.com, and wix.com. The idea behind the meeting is peer to peer teaching for faculty.
After cycling through the different questions, Professor Amy French, Assistant Professor of History at Delta, explains why she got into technology as a humanist. “Somebody tweeted something at AHA about me, and all of a sudden my Twitter account was teeming with life. I was like ‘This is a powerful, powerful thing. What is this magic?’”
Other professors searching for this magic try to make digital epiphanies of their own. One professor, Judy Gonzalez of the Delta Drama Department, says “I was curious about learning more about technology. It’s been a number of years since I’ve done a webpage, so I explored some of the webpage sites like Tumblr and WordPress. I’d probably use those for my Delta Drama Department.”
Other faculty members also showed interest in the event. Honors Director Crystal Starkey says, “I’ve been interested in ways that we can expand our membership drive. [I’m trying to improve] our recruitment efforts and communicate with students, whether they be on campus or off campus.” She says further, “Technology is not my forte. I thought this would be helpful for me not only as a faculty member but also as a program director.”
Professor French, however, is skeptical about how non-faculty members use the internet, especially students. “They use instagram, they use snapchat. They don’t use this stuff, you have to teach them this stuff. They don’t use facebook and twitter, and you have to teach students how to do this stuff. They don’t use it because they have to be taught it.”
Professor French sees this as an ongoing learning process, that doesn’t have an end in site. “We are all pioneers. There is no schooling in it. There’s no digital humanities school. There’s no digital pedagogy school. The internet is still this wild west area and all of this is very much wild west stuff. The best way to survive the wild west is if we try to get together and build a support group for each other.” It was this they had in mind when they started THATCamp.
“The more and more you see of museums, authors, and libraries the more you see that humanist organizations are using technology and digital media to bring people into how they see the human experience,” says Professor Dull. Professor French highlights the Google Arts and Culture app which allows for interactive tours of different museums online. “The user is left to say ‘Hey, I’m going to go to that museum someday or visit that battle site someday,’” says French.
