Kairos Praxis Wiki. Last modified 25 May 2013.

This is an extended blog post come wiki entry on using the increased social media presence in classrooms, to the advantage of the professor and to fulfil learning objectives. Swartz seeks to address students’ concerns that what they learn in a classroom will never be relevant to their real world experiences, by looking at social networking sites as part of her teaching on language and identity construction. Swartz discusses how the use of electronic media as a teaching tool has its own set of problems; including keeping students focused on the examination of these sites as texts and to analyse them as such. She deems that the most important lesson that can be conveyed to students is why they want to use the session to check what their friends are talking about online: that language construction, meaning and the evolution of these, does not occur in a vacuum. It is just that social media now makes this easier to see than it had been historically. Social media can also be used to investigate representation of identity; a topic that particularly interested Swartz’s students. Writing assignments for this class revolved around comparing how social media has changed writing, and how online writing choices can be impacted by the inclusion of visual images. Swartz concludes that she was pleased in the way that the use of social media as a teaching tool, allowed her students to think about the changing nature of language. Swartz states that she aims to evolve the activities within the class to include looking at how writing online may alter for an individual depending on what persona (public or private, social or professional etc.) that they are imbuing their text with.

Heather Froehlich blog. 19 March 2014.

Here Froehlich elaborates on the challenges faced in her ‘Textlab’ class. This blog post focuses more on the Computer Science students and the issues which they faced. This begins with an account on how the students taking Computer Science as their degree course, may have ceased studying English, or indeed any Arts and Humanities subjects, at age 15. Thus they found it challenging to interact with the English texts during the course and to interact with the English students, to whom the reading of Shakespeare was second nature. Froehlich found that during group work, the Computer Science students took a very basic entry-level DH approach to the texts that they were given to analyse; presenting word frequency diagrams for example. Yet they lacked confidence in producing any kind of explanations as to why variations in word frequency may occur. This is an intermediary blog post with Froehlich theorising over what the final projects may teach her about her students and the teaching of this course. Again, following up on her findings would be of interest.

Heather Froehlich blog. 29 January 2014.

This is a blog post on the author’s involvement in an interdisciplinary DH course called ‘Textlab’ at the University of Strathclyde (near Glasgow, UK) where the departments of English and Computer Science collaborate. The learning aim is to teach English students digital skills, and to give Computer Science students experience in aping their skills practically to a ‘real’ scholarly scenario. Froehlich uses this detailed and accessible blog post to explore the learning curve of the English students during the course, as well as what she learned and changed as a teacher of this course. The first step was in teaching English students computer coding, so that they had some understanding of the mechanics of the wider project. The English students struggled with this as they generally had very little coding experience. Froehlich describes how she dealt with the confidence issues of these students, and how practically she found it best to approach problems that arose when a student has no comprehension of how to engage with the computers. Froehlich sees her role as helping her students to understand not only what they are doing, but why. Her further experiences of this course would be interesting to follow further.