Tooling Up for Digital Humanities

Cuauhtémoc García-García:

May 13, 2011: Pedagogy and Technology
I think this was a very useful lecture, mostly because pedagogy plays an essential role in my academic life. I use coursework on a daily basis, and as we discussed during the seminar, it has some limitations when it comes to blogging or other media related technology. In our particular case, one of the biggest problems in coursework is its lack of flexibility when compared with other websites dedicated to blogging. However, coursework allows one to have sensitive information like student names, emails, SUIDs, etc. while also being directly connected to other Stanford data bases like axess. I found very interesting the way we can use blogging to encourage student participation and engagement in class. Also blogging has endless possibilities as a teaching tool. However, one must use technology to facilitate learning, not to complicate it –implementing new teaching strategies can lead to confusing scenarios. One concrete problem, as discussed, is when the instructor is providing excessive amount of information in a high-tech blog that the students cannot cope with. In this example the students are asked to post a “thread” and provide comments about their colleagues’ work. This approach should work fine in a small class, but will be less useful for a class with a large number of students. What I liked most about blogging is the possibility of creating a Social Media Classroom that gives the students the ability to communicate their strengths in different settings and find their peers as their audience, etc. I think Stanford should upgrade coursework with the blogging capabilities that we find in commercial providers.