The theme of the Fifth 21st Century Academic Forum Conference at Harvard is
“Challenge 2030: Envisioning the Future of Education.”
http://www.21caf.org/5th-conference-at-harvard.html
The organizers encourage submissions that approach this theme from a variety of perspectives under three major topic tracks:
- Education & Workforce Development
- Information Technology
- Innovation & Entrepreneurship
The aim of the Fifth 21st Century Academic Forum Conference at Harvard is to encourage and facilitate research initiatives that address the future of education, the workforce, and life at large. Our conferences are attended by a global audience of academic researchers, practitioners, policy makers and others interested in addressing important issues affecting education and public policy.
Supporting the Changing Research Practices of Historians
December 7, 2012 Roger C. Schonfeld, Jennifer Rutner http://sr.ithaka.org/?p=22532
history as a field in transition. It is characterized by a vast expansion of new sources, widely adopted research practices and communication mechanisms shaped by new technologies, and a small but growing subset of scholars utilizing new methodologies to ask questions or share findings in fresh, unique ways.
Universal Design for Libraries and Librarians
Instructors: Jessica Olin, Director of the Library, Robert H. Parker Library, Wesley College; and Holly Mabry, Digital Services Librarian, Gardner-Webb University
Offered: April 11 – May 27, 2016
A Moodle based web course with asynchronous weekly content lessons, tutorials, assignments, and groups discussion.
Register Online, page arranged by session date (login required)
Universal Design is the idea of designing products, places, and experiences to make them accessible to as broad a spectrum of people as possible, without requiring special modifications or adaptations. This course will present an overview of universal design as a historical movement, as a philosophy, and as an applicable set of tools. Students will learn about the diversity of experiences and capabilities that people have, including disabilities (e.g. physical, learning, cognitive, resulting from age and/or accident), cultural backgrounds, and other abilities. The class will also give students the opportunity to redesign specific products or environments to make them more universally accessible and usable.
Takeaways
By the end of this class, students will be able to…
- Articulate the ethical, philosophical, and practical aspects of Universal Design as a method and movement – both in general and as it relates to their specific work and life circumstances
- Demonstrate the specific pedagogical, ethical, and customer service benefits of using Universal Design principles to develop and recreate library spaces and services in order to make them more broadly accessible
- Integrate the ideals and practicalities of Universal Design into library spaces and services via a continuous critique and evaluation cycle
Here’s the Course Page
Jessica Olin is the Director of the Library, Robert H. Parker Library, Wesley College. Ms. Olin received her MLIS from Simmons College in 2003 and an MAEd, with a concentration in Adult Education, from Touro University International. Her first position in higher education was at Landmark College, a college that is specifically geared to meeting the unique needs of people with learning differences. While at Landmark, Ms. Olin learned about the ethical, theoretical, and practical aspects of universal design. She has since taught an undergraduate course for both the education and the entrepreneurship departments at Hiram College on the subject.
Holly Mabry received her MLIS from UNC-Greensboro in 2009. She is currently the Digital Services Librarian at Gardner-Webb University where she manages the university’s institutional repository, and teaches the library’s for-credit online research skills course. She also works for an international virtual reference service called Chatstaff. Since finishing her MLIS, she has done several presentations at local and national library conferences on implementing universal design in libraries with a focus on accessibility for patrons with disabilities.
Dates:
February 29 – March 31, 2016
Costs:
- LITA Member: $135
- ALA Member: $195
- Non-member: $260
Technical Requirements:
Moodle login info will be sent to registrants the week prior to the start date. The Moodle-developed course site will include weekly new content lessons and is composed of self-paced modules with facilitated interaction led by the instructor. Students regularly use the forum and chat room functions to facilitate their class participation. The course web site will be open for 1 week prior to the start date for students to have access to Moodle instructions and set their browser correctly. The course site will remain open for 90 days after the end date for students to refer back to course material.
Registration Information:
Register Online, page arranged by session date (login required)
OR
Mail or fax form to ALA Registration
OR
call 1-800-545-2433 and press 5
OR
email registration@ala.org
Introduction to Digital Humanities for Librarians
Instructor: John Russell
Dates: April 4-29, 2016
Credits: 1.5 CEUs
Price: $175
http://libraryjuiceacademy.com/112-digital-humanities.php
Digital humanities (DH) has been heralded as the next big thing in humanities scholarship and universities have been creating initiatives and new positions in this field. Libraries, too, have moved to create a presence in the digital humanities community, setting up centers and hiring librarians to staff them. This course is designed as an introduction for librarians or library school students who have little or no exposure to DH and wish to be better positioned to offer DH support or services in a library setting. Participants will read and discuss DH scholarship, learn about frequently-used software, and think about why and how libraries and librarians engage DH. While I will encourage participants to explore more complex computing approaches (and I will support those who do as best I can), this course does not presuppose computing skills such as programming or use of the command line and will not ask participants to do much more than upload files to websites or install and use simple programs. Participants should have an interest and background in humanities scholarship and humanities librarianship and while the readings will focus on activities in the United States, our discussions can be more geographically wide-ranging.
Objectives:
– A basic knowledge of what digital humanities is and how it effects scholarship in the humanities disciplines.
– Exposure to core tools and approaches used by digital humanists.
– An understanding of how libraries and librarians have been involved with digital humanities.
– Critical engagement with the role of librarians and libraries in digital humanities.
This class has a follow-up, Introduction to Text Encoding
http://libraryjuiceacademy.com/133-text-encoding.php
John Russell is the Associate Director of the Center for Humanities and Information at Pennsylvania State University. He has been actively involved in digital humanities projects, primarily related to text encoding, and has taught courses and workshops on digital humanities methods, including “Introduction to Digital Humanities for Librarians.”
Read an interview with John Russell about this class:
http://libraryjuiceacademy.com/news/?p=769
You can register in this course through the first week of instruction (as long as it is not full). The “Register” button on the website goes to our credit card payment gateway, which may be used with personal or institutional credit cards. (Be sure to use the appropriate billing address). If your institution wants us to send a billing statement or wants to pay using a purchase order, please contact us by email to make arrangements: inquiries@libraryjuiceacademy.com
Introduction to Text Encoding
Instructor: John Russell
Dates: May 2-27, 2016
Credits: 1.5 CEUs
Price: $175
This course will introduce students to text encoding according to the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines. Why should you care about text encoding or the TEI Guidelines? The creation of digital scholarly texts is a core part of the digital humanities and many digital humanities grants and publications require encoding texts in accordance with the TEI Guidelines. Students in this course will learn about the use-cases for text encoding and get a basic introduction to the principles of scholarly editing before moving on to learning some XML basics and creating a small-scale TEI project using the XML editor oXygen. We will not cover (beyond the very basics) processing TEI, and students interested in learning about XSLT and/or XQuery should turn to the LJA courses offered on those subjects. Participants should have some experience with digital humanities, as this course is intended as a follow up to the Introduction to Digital Humanities for Librarians course.
Objectives:
- A basic understanding of digital scholarly editing as an academic activity.
- Knowledge of standard TEI elements for encoding poetry and prose.
- Some engagement with more complex encoding practices, such as working with manuscripts.
- An understanding of how librarians have participated in text encoding.
- Deeper engagement with digital humanities practices.
John Russell is the Associate Director of the Center for Humanities and Information at Pennsylvania State University. He has been actively involved in digital humanities projects, primarily related to text encoding, and has taught courses and workshops on digital humanities methods, including “Introduction to Digital Humanities for Librarians.” Interview with John Russell
Course Structure
This is an online class that is taught asynchronously, meaning that participants do the work on their own time as their schedules allow. The class does not meet together at any particular times, although the instructor may set up optional synchronous chat sessions. Instruction includes readings and assignments in one-week segments. Class participation is in an online forum environment.
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Spatial Data Analyst & Curator
University Libraries / U-Spatial
University of Minnesota
Overview
The University of Minnesota Libraries and U-Spatial (https://uspatial.umn.edu/) seek a knowledgeable and proactive Spatial Data Analyst & Curator to advance the Libraries’ efforts in the areas of geospatial projects, geospatial data curation and management, and digital spatial humanities. Residing in the John R. Borchert Map Library, the Spatial Data Analyst & Curator works under the management and direction of the University Libraries, which holds institutional responsibility for supporting the products and processes of scholarship through the collection, provisioning, and preservation of information resources in all formats and media. As such, the work of the Spatial Data Analyst & Curator uses a life-cycle data management approach to serve the specific needs of the spatial data creator/user community while ensuring that processes and methods employed are strongly aligned with enterprise strategies and systems.
Required Qualifications include a Master’s degree in library/information science from an American Library Association accredited library school, GIS-related field, or equivalent combination of advanced degree and relevant experience, as well as experience with geographical information systems, including/especially Esri’s ArcGIS software, experience with scripting languages, such as Python or JavaScript, and experience with metadata creation, schema, and management.
For complete description, qualifications and to apply, go to: http://z.umn.edu/ulib362
The University of Minnesota is an Equal Opportunity Educator and Employer.
—
Ryan Mattke
Head, John R. Borchert Map Library
University of Minnesota
S-76 Wilson Library
309 19th Ave South
Minneapolis, MN 55455
Email: matt0089@umn.edu
Web: http://www.lib.umn.edu/borchert
Phone: 612.624.5757
ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8816-9289
The death of the digital native: four provocations from Digifest speaker, Dr Donna Lanclos
https://www.jisc.ac.uk/inform-feature/the-death-of-the-digital-native-23-feb-2016
educators need to figure out what they need to do. Are you trying to have a conversation? Are you simply trying to transmit information? Or are you, in fact, trying to have students create something?
Answer those pedagogical questions first and then – and only then – will you be able to connect people to the kinds of technologies that can do that thing.
The ‘digital native’ is a generational metaphor. It’s a linguistic metaphor. It’s a ridiculous metaphor. It’s the notion that there is a particular generation of people who are fundamentally unknowable and incomprehensible.
There are policy implications: if your university philosophy is grounded in assumptions around digital natives, education and technology, you’re presupposing you don’t have to teach the students how to use tech for their education. And, furthermore, it will never be possible to teach that faculty how to use that technology, either on their own behalf or for their students.
A very different paradigm is ‘visitor and resident‘. Instead of talking about these essentialised categories of native and immigrant, we should be talking about modes of behaviour because, in fact, some people do an awful lot of stuff with technology in some parts of their lives and then not so much in other parts.
How much of your university practice is behind closed doors? This is traditional, of course, gatekeeping our institutions of higher education, keeping the gates in the walled campuses closed. So much of the pedagogy as well as the content of the university is locked away. That has implications not just for potential students but also from a policy perspective – if part of the problem in higher education policy is of non-university people not understanding the work of the university, being open would have really great potential to mitigate that lack of understanding.
I would like to see our universities modelling themselves more closely on what we should be looking for in society generally: networked, open, transparent, providing the opportunity for people to create things that they wouldn’t create all by themselves.
I understand the rationale for gatekeeping, I just don’t think that there’s as much potential with a gatekept system as there is with an open one.
There are two huge problems with the notion of “student expectations”: firstly, the sense that, with the UK’s new fee model, students’ ideas of what higher education should be now weigh much more heavily in the institutions’ educational planning. Secondly, institutions in part think their role is to make their students “employable” because some politician somewhere has said the university is there to get them jobs.
Students coming into higher education don’t know much about what higher education can be. So if we allow student expectations to set the standard for what we should be doing, we create an amazingly low bar.
The point of any educational system is not to provide citizens with jobs. That’s the role of the economy.
Universities are not vocational
Institutions can approach educational technology in two very different ways. They can have a learning technology division that is basically in charge of acquiring and maintaining educational technology. Or they can provide spaces to develop pedagogy and then think about the role of technology within that pedagogy.