Teaching Kids to Make (THATCamp Report)

I like the THATCamp Junior idea and am looking forward to hearing more about it. 

One of your asides about bringing THATCamp’s ethos into the classroom has been preoccupying me lately: how can you do this, and teach DH in the same course? The course I’m teaching next year on Hamlet in the Humanities Lab will close with a THATCamp; are others doing this successfully in higher education? Can you share ideas? 

Sorry of this tangential to your post, Brian.

I’m interested to hear more about this class. The description you’ve linked to is interesting. In particular, are you closing with a regional THATCamp that your students will attend? Or is it a Camp-like event for the students? I’m not familiar with anyone else linking a class to a THATCamp yet, but I certainly don’t know everything that is happening in this space.

As far as bringing the THATCamp ethos into the classroom more generally, it’s not something that I’ve tried to do so much as that I’m planning to do this coming year when I teach what will be my first explicitly titled digital humanities course. More broadly speaking, I believe that you could say classes that develop syllabi as a partnership between students and a professor partake of the THATCamp spirit.

The camps create a good number of collaborative resources! I enjoyed reading some of the documents that I accessed through the links you posted. Thanks!

The unfortunately and regrettably named “University of Louisiana” system is largely a group of formerly regional State Colleges, several of which were once Normal Schools. These include what were originally Northwestern State College at Nachitoches, Northeastern State at Munroe (which did however and does have the State Pharmacy School), McNeese State, and several others.  Also included is what was University of Southwest Louisiana, now U of L at Lafayette, and Louisina Technical University at Ruston.  The best of these were probably Southwestern at Lafayette and Tech at Ruston. USwL at Lafayette once had a significant French speaking component

The Flagship and land and sea grant university is Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, located in Baton Rouge. It is not a “branch” and a diploma from the Baton Rouge Field reads “Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College. It does NOT read  *”L… S… U… and A… & M…  College at Baton Rouge.” 

 Until the New Orleans branch was set up as LSUNO and now called University of New Orleans, LSU had only two other branches, very small, and I think primarily agricultural and agr extension, one at Alexandria and the other at Eunice.   More recently LSU opened a major branch, LSU at Shreveport, which as best I am aware is quite thriving, and probably did meet a real need. 

The “University of Louisiana” institutions are primarily undergraduate but most if not all offer a number of Master’s and some doctoral degree programs.  

Can Louisiana afford two systems?   Yes, and she probably needs two.  She needs some regional public colleges (whether they all need be “universities” or not is another matter) and LSU does not need to be lumped with the regionals.  But can Louisiana afford that many regionals in the U of La system.  No.  And doesn’t need that many.  Not with decent highways and even several interstate highways.  It still takes a while driving Baton Rouge to Shreveport and Monroe and Ruston are sort of not near nuthin’,

I’d be glad of some others who know Louisiana and her HE systems well to answer here too. I obviously know and care about both the State and especially LSU since she is my Alma Mater and that of my wife and a niece, but I do not not live there and though I try to keep up, I’m sure there are others who may be more immediately on top than I am.

You’re welcome.  And BTW, one partial error abov e..  It’s “Munroe” Falls, Ohio, and “Munroe” Tavern in Massachusetts, but in Louisiana it’s ‘Monroe’.  I got it right above once but missed it the first time, and the editing fact of this commenting program doesn’t seem to work any more.

I’ve posted some brief thoughts about my work with Hackasaurus here:
http://publics.hackinghistory.ca/2011/06/23/digital-humanities-for-grade-6/

It describes a brief and largely successful effort to get kids to hack on google maps to create a rudimentary historical narrative.  It was pretty cool, actually. 

More importantly still, create an e-textbook licensing model for libraries!  So far, no producer of e-textbooks allows libraries to license their textbooks for multiple simultaneous users.  We got funding a bit over a year ago to buy textbooks, specifically, and after extensive research, not one of the textbook publishers we called (and we called over a dozen) would allow us to have a library license.  They offered such idiotic suggestions as “Why don’t you just buy a copy for each student in the class?”  Sure, right – we want to buy 800 copies of a $250 biology textbook that will be used for 1 term each year, and which will be replaced by a new edition every 2 years.  Sure, libraries have unlimited budgets, and we’re all just looking for something – anything – on which to spend all that money – NOT.  We have a lot of digital books – something like 50,000 at last count – but these are only rarely books that are being used as textbooks for classes.  Our student body is largely quite poor – the average family income for our students is below $50,000, and we’re in NYC.  So we would love to be able to help the students more financially, and having textbooks in the library would be a good way to do this.  But we are reluctant to buy many print texts because our already-badly-cut collections budget simply has virtually no room for these, and they are also among the most mutilated and stolen items in the library.  And no one will sell us e-textbooks in any sort of useful way.  So what’s a library to do?  We advocate.  If I could get licenses for multiple simultaneous users of e-textbooks for the 50 most expensive textbooks used by our students and faculty, this would do a tremendous service.  I know publishers don’t really like libraries – really, they don’t, despite their protestations to the contrary, because for some reason, they think every single student or faculty member would buy every book or journal article or subscription if they couldn’t get it from the library.  So we cut into their profits.  But they’re wrong – many students will simply not buy what they can’t afford, and will try to make do some other way, by sharing textbooks, copying a chapter or two here and there, or just trying to manage without it.  The libraries are good customers, and we NEED to be involved in the e-textbook world.  But we’re never, ever going to buy a copy of a textbook for every student.  We can’t afford it, and that’s completely NOT our mission.  We aren’t supposed to replace the bookstore.  Any publishers out there listening?

One of the reasons ebook sales at our college bookstore have not grown as much as they could is that we can really only sell an ebook when it matches exactly with an adopted printed textbook.  Many of our adoptions we now receive from instructors (especially for large introductory classes that use traditional textbooks) are for bundles (consisting of a textbook and other printed or electronic materials) or a customized version of the textbook (plus or minus what is in the standard textbook).  Publishers increasingly market textbooks this way to get a step up on the competition and also to discourage the resale of their textbooks as used books (as the used books wouldn’t contain the other materials in the bundle or the customized version).  However, this has also discouraged or restricted the sale of their textbook’s ebook versions as well as they do not contain these materials either.

Another factor is that some of these bundles include a ebook version of the textbook, so students are being offered the use of a ebook along with their printed book.  Thus in a sense they are paying for both (even if it is marketed by the publishers as being free with the purchase of the book).  The sales of these ebooks though are somewhat hidden in with the sales of printed books.

The college textbook publishers (if there were any at the conference) shouldn’t have been surprised by the results of this survey, as it is a result of their own marketing strategies.