On February 5th, we here at the DRC will join educators in celebrating Digital Learning Day, a day dedicated to making sure students have the opportunity to learn, play, and create in digital environments. As I’m sure many of our readers will agree, it’s imperative that today’s students be given opportunities to acknowledge and build their digital literacy and digital composition skills, and yet many students find themselves in learning situations that ignore the importance of digital tools and technologies in their various disciplines. In an attempt to raise awareness about the importance of digital learning, Digital Learning Day invites…
Author: Liz Homan
Welcome to the first post of the DRC Fall Blog Carnival! We are looking forward to many interesting posts about the creative things people are doing with digital and digitized data in the humanities and social sciences (and we’re still scheduling posts if you want to contribute!). I’m going to get us started with a few words on my use of three digital tools for examining network data, which surrounds us on a daily basis. Use Facebook? You’re generating network data. Twitter? Data. Email? Network data, again. We’re surrounded by, and members of, thousands of networks. Some of these are…
Tools abound these days to streamline (or, sometimes, complicate) the collection and analysis of data. Some digital data tools even make the impossible possible, allowing us to visualize phenomena we have never been able to capture or analyze before. These digital tools are transforming, for better or worse, the way we do research as digital scholars. Whether grappling with “big data” or conducting in-depth case studies, digital technologies are shaping the way we interact with and therefore come to understand the data that informs our policies, dissertations, and digital projects. A personal example: my dissertation research examines teachers’ social networks,…
When I started my doctoral program, I considered blogging a thing one did when one had little else to do. Blogs were for people who posted recipes or had grand adventures climbing mountains or traveling the world. Or it was for my teenage students, who all had Tumblr accounts. I was not one of these people. Thus, I did not blog. During the first year of my doctoral program, my teacher friend started a blog with her colleague called The Paper Graders, an ironically-titled blog about many things educational, digital, and pedagogical. Intrigued by her decision to blog about her…