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2011 October

13

Oct
2011

In Meetings

By Charlie Edwards

Oct 18: DH in the Classroom: Shannon Mattern & Mark Sample

On 13, Oct 2011 | In Meetings | By Charlie Edwards

Please join us on Tuesday October 18, 2011, when we are excited to welcome two innovative practitioners of “Digital Humanities in the Classroom” – The New School’s Shannon Mattern, and Mark Sample, of George Mason University.

Details are below; we look forward to seeing you there!

Time & Place: Tuesday October 18, 2011, 6:30-8:30pm, Room 6496, CUNY Graduate Center


Shannon Mattern, “Beyond the Seminar Paper: Setting New Standards for New Forms of Student Work”

By exploring how new technologies might function as teaching tools or platforms on which students can demonstrate their learning, we expand the means and ends of education. With this increasing openness of pedagogical forms comes the responsibility to justify our choices and develop new forms of criticism and modes of assessment. Using several of my own courses as examples, I’ll address the challenges and potential benefits of holding students, and ourselves, accountable for the choices we make in our classrooms and advising relationships. I’ll focus on the value of (1) student documentation of their learning process, and in particular (2) students’ justification of their chosen methods and modes of presentation; (3) collaborative development of criteria for evaluation; and (4) connecting our work in the classroom to larger public problems and public institutions.

Suggested readings:

 

Mark Sample, “Building and Sharing When You’re Supposed to be Teaching”

My pedagogy can increasingly be summed up in five words: “Make things. And share them.” I will talk briefly about my move toward assignments and projects in the undergraduate humanities classroom that emphasize making—as opposed to simply writing. I will also address the sharing aspect of these projects, which I see as a critical intervention into the enclosured experience most students have in higher education.

Suggested readings:

 

Shannon Mattern is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies and Film at The New School and was, from 2006 to 2009, director of the Masters in Media Studies program. Her research and teaching focus on relationships among media, architectural, and urban space. Her book, The New Downtown Library, was supported by the Graham and Mellon foundations and published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2007. She has also published in several edited volumes and in journals including Space and Culture, Public Culture, and the Journal of Architectural Education. Her classes, which regularly involve the use of digital media, have resulted in the creation of exhibitions and installations and, in Fall 2010, thanks to the support of an Innovations in Education grant from The New School, a prototype of an open-source mapping tool for scholarly urban research. She is a recipient of The New School’s 2011 Distinguished University Teaching Award.

Mark Sample is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at George Mason University, where is he also an affiliated faculty member with GMU’s undergraduate Honors College, its Cultural Studies doctoral program, and the Center for History and New Media. His research focuses on contemporary fiction, electronic literature, and videogames. His examination of the representation of torture in videogames was recently published in Game Studies, and he is working on a collaboratively written book about the Commodore 64 home computer. Mark has work in Hacking the Academy, a crowdsourced scholarly book forthcoming in print by the digitalculturebooks imprint of the University of Michigan Press. Mark has recently remixed the entire text of Hacking the Academy as Hacking the Accident. Mark is also an outspoken advocate of open source pedagogy and open source research. In recognition of his commitment to innovation in teaching, he was the recipient of George Mason’s 2010 Teaching Excellence Award. He is a regular contributor to ProfHacker, a feature at the Chronicle for Higher Education that focuses on pedagogy and scholarly productivity, and he also writes for Play the Past, a collaboratively edited scholarly blog that explores the intersection of cultural heritage and games.

This event is co-sponsored by The CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative and the CUNY Digital Studies Group, in partnership with The Center for the Humanities at The Graduate Center, CUNY.

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