OK, this post isn’t really about the second day of the Great Lakes THATCamp; it’s really about a few things I learned both days. But @jlknott made me laugh so hard over the weekend that I couldn’t resist having some fun with the post title.
I had the good fortune to be one of the campers at the Great Lakes THATCamp held at Michigan State University this past weekend, and organized by a marvelous team of people (scroll down to the “Who is Organizing…” section of the camp’s About page to meet them). In this post, I offer a few brief thoughts about what I saw and heard.
The first morning, I made it a point to attend a few sessions on things I didn’t know much about, so I attended sessions on:
- Geospatial tools. I was familiar with things like Google Maps and Google Earth, of course, but I’d never thought about all the other geospatial tools that are available, or the ways they might be used in scholarly work in the humanities.
- Archives. I’ve always appreciated how important it is to have materials that are easy to find–but I’d never really thought about the kinds of things archivists have to think about in order to make materials easily findable (and accessible!).
In the afternoon, I participated in a long but really fun discussion about teaching with technology and teaching technology. We had a lively chat about all kinds of things associated with those two broad topics–everything from trying to inculcate particular habits of inquiry in students, to getting them to see the larger point of using digital tools (e.g., collaboration and revision), to getting students to understand what they already know (even if they don’t know that they know it–how many realize that Facebook is a database?), to trying to teach students how to use tools in such a way that they’ll be able to figure out how to use other tools that we haven’t taught them to use.
The second day, I attended several sessions. Among them were:
- Online teaching. This is something we’re hoping to experiment with for some summer courses at my institution, so I thought it would be helpful to hear from folks who are already doing it. I wasn’t disappointed.
- Open courseware. Another fun discussion. What came up in the course of the discussion that really stayed with me was the way in which going the open courseware route can result in collaboration and in the cross-pollination of ideas. To give just one example: @betajames makes his course materials available online. One of the documents he’d made available for a gaming course he teaches got noticed and mentioned by a gaming magazine. As a result, traffic for that particular document went through the roof, and he got suggestions for better readings from someone in the UK. Isn’t this the kind of response to our work that we’d all like to see?
I left Great Lakes THATCamp energized and filled with all kinds of ideas–and there were many more sessions than the ones I’ve mentioned above.
Have you had similar experiences of coming away from a gathering energized and needing to process all the ideas you heard about? Do you have any thoughts on the kinds of topics mentioned above (which come from just a small sampling of the sessions)? Let us know in the comments.
The CC-licensed photo in this post is by Flickr user Micah Maziar.
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