Leading Lines

In this episode, we speak with LaTonya Trotter, assistant professor of sociology at Vanderbilt University. Trotter is a medical sociologist, using ethnographic approaches to study how changes in the medical workplace alter how we think about illness and medical care. She was also a Junior Faculty Teaching Fellow at the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching, and she thoughtfully selects technologies for use in her teaching that align with the goals she has for her students learning.

Links:

• LaTonya Trotter’s faculty page, https://as.vanderbilt.edu/sociology/bio/latonya-trotter

• Her new faculty profile, https://news.vanderbilt.edu/2013/10/07/new-faculty-latonya-trotter/

• Junior Faculty Teaching Fellows at the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching, https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/programs/jftf/

• Teaching with Blogs, a guide from the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching, https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/teaching-with-blogs/

In this episode, Vanderbilt’s Associate Provost for Digital Learning John Sloop interviews Jan Holmevik, Associate Professor of English and Co-director of the Center of Excellence in Next-Generation Computing and Creativity at Clemson University. Holmevik was instrumental in a recent effort at Clemson University to provide all its students and faculty with access to Adobe’s Creative Cloud suite of photography, design, video, and web apps. In the interview, Holmevik talks about what it took to launch this project, both in terms of strategic leadership and faculty development and support, as well as the roles digital literacy has played in higher education in the past.

Links:

Jan Holmevik's faculty page, http://www.clemson.edu/caah/departments/english/faculty-and-staff/facultyBio.html?id=280

@holmevik on Twitter, https://mobile.twitter.com/holmevik

Jan Holmevik's Youtube channel, https://www.youtube.com/user/holmevik

More on the Adobe initiative at Clemson, https://campustechnology.com/articles/2016/04/26/scaling-up-digital-literacy.aspx

In this episode, Stacey Johnson interviews William Pannapacker, DuMez Professor of English and Senior Director of the Mellon Grand Challenges Presidential Initiative at Hope College in Michigan. Pannapacker is a Walt Whitman scholar, and a proponent and supporter of the digital liberal arts. In the interview, he talks about that work, and the program building he’s done at Hope to enable more faculty to teach with technology. He also talks about his own career and the surprisingly limited role technology plays in his own teaching.

Links:

• William Pannapacker’s faculty page: http://www.hope.edu/directory/people/pannapacker-william/index.html

• @pannapacker on Twitter: http://twitter.com/pannapacker

• Mellon Scholars Program: http://www.hope.edu/academics/mellon-scholars/

• Grand Challenges Presidential Initiative announcement: http://www.hope.edu/news/2016/academics/grant-to-support-faculty-and-students-in-interdisciplinary-exploration-of-grand-challenges.html

• Walt Whitman archive: http://whitmanarchive.org/

• Debates in the Digital Humanities: http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/

• Palomino Blackwing: http://palominobrands.com/blackwing/

In this episode, we speak with Katy Börner, professor of information science at Indiana University-Bloomington. Dr. Börner is the curator of a traveling exhibit called Places and Spaces: Mapping Science. The exhibit, now in its twelfth year, features print and interactive visualizations capturing science and how science is done. Vanderbilt is hosting the exhibit this spring. Leading Lines host Derek Bruff interviewed Dr. Börner while she was on campus.

Links

• Katy Börner’s faculty page, http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~katy/

• Places and Spaces: Mapping Science, http://scimaps.org/home.html

• Places and Spaces Vanderbilt exhibition, http://vanderbi.lt/izlte

• Student data visualization competition, http://vanderbi.lt/fl99v

• Information Visualization MOOC, http://ivmooc.cns.iu.edu/index.html

• Hans Rosling’s 2006 TED Talk, http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen

• Hans Rosling’s 2009 TED Talk, https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_at_state

This episode features an interview with Tim Foster, a graduate student in Vanderbilt’s Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Tim is an active member of the digital humanities community at Vanderbilt, and he has worked at the Center for Teaching, the Center for Second Language Studies, and the Vanderbilt Institute for Digital Learning. Last fall, Tim was on a panel at Vanderbilt that focused on teaching with Wikipedia, where he shared a class project in which he worked with his students to write for the Portuguese language version of Wikipedia. Derek Bruff spoke with Tim about this project, as well as a few of Tim’s other experiments in educational technology.

Links:

• Tim Foster’s graduate student page, https://as.vanderbilt.edu/spanish-portuguese/people/bios/?who=76

• @peregrinotim on Twitter, https://twitter.com/peregrinotim

• Nashville’s entry in Portuguese Wikipedia, https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nashville_(Tennessee)

• Wikimedia Foundation’s Wikipedia Education Program, https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Education_Program

• Wiki Education Foundation, https://wikiedu.org/teach-with-wikipedia/

In this episode, we feature an interview with Cassandra Horii, Director of the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Outreach at the California Institute for Technology. Leading Lines host Derek Bruff talked with Cassandra about a couple of the edtech projects her center is supporting at Caltech. Both projects involve making student learning visible in interesting ways. Cassandra also shared her “edtech manifesto,” a set of principles for helping instructors make thoughtful use of technology.

Links:

• Cassandra Horii’s staff page: https://www.teachlearn.caltech.edu/about/cassandrahorii

• @cvhorii on Twitter: https://twitter.com/cvhorii

• Caltech’s Center for Teaching, Learning, & Outreach: https://www.teachlearn.caltech.edu/

• SKIES, a collaborative learning platform developed at Caltech: https://www.skieslearn.com/

• The POD Network: http://podnetwork.org/

In this episode, we feature an interview with Kathryn Tomasek, associate professor of history at Wheaton College. Kathryn is interviewed by Cliff Anderson, Associate University Librarian for Research and Learning at Vanderbilt. Last summer, Cliff met several of Kathryn's undergraduate students at a private seminar that she held in the lead up to the 2016 Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations conference in Krakow, Poland. Kathryn’s work focuses on transcription and mark-up of historical texts, and she and her students are active in TEI, the Text Encoding Initiative.

In the interview, Kathryn discusses her experiences getting started with text encoding, the value of teaching all students how machines talk to each other, and the role that text encoding can play in helping students engage in the kind of close reading that’s critical for historical analysis.

Links:

* Kathryn Tomasek's faculty page: http://wheatoncollege.edu/faculty/profiles/kathryn-tomasek/

* Kathryn Tomasek's website: http://kathryntomasek.org/

* @kathryntomasek on Twitter: https://twitter.com/kathryntomasek

* Wheaton College Digital History Project: http://wheatoncollege.edu/digital-history-project/

* Encoding Historical Financial Records: http://www.encodinghfrs.org/

In this episode we feature an interview with Steve Baskauf, senior lecturer in biological sciences at Vanderbilt University. Steve coordinates the introductory biological sciences labs, trains and mentors the undergraduate and graduate student teaching assistants for those labs, and designing and assesses inquiry-based lab curricula. However, this interview focuses on another aspect of his work at Vanderbilt: biodiversity informatics. Steve has developed Bioimages, an online image database with over 10,000 annotated plant and ecosystem images, and he has created mobile-friendly tree tours of the Vanderbilt campus. We talked with Steve about the semantic web, linked data, and the challenges and opportunities of creating and using machine-readable datasets.

Links:

• Steve Baskauf’s website, https://my.vanderbilt.edu/baskauf/

• @baskaufs on Twitter, https://twitter.com/baskaufs

• @vutrees on Instagram, https://www.instagram.com/vutrees/

• Vanderbilt Arboretum tree tours, http://vanderbilt.edu/trees/tours/

• Bioimages website, http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu/

• Linked Data and Semantic Web working group at the Vanderbilt Library, https://heardlibrary.github.io/semantic-web/

In this episode, we feature an interview with mathematician Paul Dehaye. Dehaye is known as the instructor of a 2014 massive open online course (MOOC) about massive open online courses that was mysteriously cancelled one week in. Dehaye is interviewed by John Sloop, Vanderbilt’s Associate Provost for Digital Learning, who met Dehaye at an Open edX conference last summer. Dehaye shares his perspective on that 2014 incident, and he comments on the role of for-profit companies in higher education, the future of online education, and the still untapped potential of MOOCs.

Links

• Paul Dehaye’s website, http://paulolivier.dehaye.org/

• Paul Dehaye’s faculty page, http://user.math.uzh.ch/dehaye/

• @podehaye on Twitter, https://twitter.com/podehaye

• “The Mystery of the Missing MOOC” on Inside Higher Ed, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/07/08/massiveteaching-mystery-captivates-confuses

• Paul Dehaye’s July 4, 2014, blog post about #Massive Teaching, https://old.etherpad-mozilla.org/pr8ZtLXODg

• George Siemens’ July 9, 2019, blog post about #MassiveTeaching, http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2014/07/09/congrats-to-paul-olivier-dehaye-massiveteaching/

• "MOOC Platforms, Surveillance, and Control," Paul DeHaye's essay in the Sept-Oct 2016 issue of Academe, https://www.aaup.org/article/mooc-platforms-surveillance-and-control#.WEc-iX1vncg

In this episode, we feature an interview with Zoe LeBlanc, a sixth-year doctoral student in history at Vanderbilt University. Zoe studies networks, ideas, and spaces in modern history, and her dissertation examines the role of Cairo, Egypt, as a hub for anti-colonial activism in Africa during the Cold War. Zoe has been a graduate fellow at the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching, the Vanderbilt Institute for Digital Learning, and at the Vanderbilt Center for Digital Humanities. She helped launch a “Conversations on Digital Pedagogy” series at Vanderbilt, and continues to build and enrich the digital humanities community at Vanderbilt and elsewhere. We talked with Zoe about her experiments in digital pedagogy, her approach to using educational technology, and her career path as an aspiring digital historian.

Links

• Zoe LeBlanc’s website, http://zoeleblanc.com/

• @zoe_leblanc on Twitter, https://twitter.com/zoe_leblanc

• HASTAC, https://www.hastac.org/

• HASTAC at Vanderbilt, https://my.vanderbilt.edu/digitalhumanities/hastac-scholars/

• Vanderbilt Center for Digital Humanities, https://my.vanderbilt.edu/digitalhumanities/

• Twitter in the Classroom, a Conversation on Digital Pedagogy, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_WwQChezJA