Digital Jumpstart Workshops - October 20 - 21, 2022

The Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities and the Center for Teaching Excellence are proud to announce the Fall 2022 Digital Jumpstart Workshops, “Digital Storytelling in the Classroom.”

“Digital Storytelling in the Classroom” is an intensive two-day series of hybrid workshops, panels, and a keynote presentation, all aimed at equipping teachers at the University of Kansas to integrate the tools of the digital humanities into their classrooms. Workshops will be offered in-person and available via zoom. The Workshops are open to the University of Kansas and other institutions in the region.

“Digital Storytelling in the Classroom” provides three levels of support for KU teachers who want to integrate digital humanities tools into their classrooms.  

1. Instruction. Workshops will cover a range of student-friendly technical tools, from text-mining with Voyant, to creating branching, non-linear narratives with Twine, to creating online maps, to documenting historical sites, to much more. See schedule for details.  
2. Support. Any workshop attendee who uses a digital humanities tool in a 2023 KU classroom will have the support of the IDRH and the CTE as they teach the course and implement the tool. Support entails pre-assignment and mid-term consultations as well as a measure of troubleshooting.  
3. Funding to use digital humanities tools in the classroom. Through the generosity of the Center for Teaching Excellence, a selection of workshop attendees will receive $500 stipends to support implementation and evaluation of a digital humanities tool in their classroom in 2023 (spring, summer, or fall). Because of limited funding, applicants will be selected competitively. Learn more about Digital Jumpstart Course Funding.

Keynote presentation
Shawna Ross, Associate Professor of British Literature and the Digital Humanities, Texas A&M University

Co-Author of Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom: A Practical Introduction for Teachers, Lecturers, and Students (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017). 

"Rethinking the Synchronic Classroom: Concepts and Templates for Balancing the Analog and Digital in Course Construction"

In the wake of the Covid pandemic, instructors have been forced to react to quick shifts in course delivery mode. One opportunity presented by this crisis is to rethink all our classes as intentional blends of asynchronous and synchronous events, as well as of analog and digital means of learning. This talk will not only explain how and why you might want to experiment with course construction in this way, but also provide a series of formulae that model how to combine the synchronous with the asynchronous, and the analog with the digital, in ways that further your course objectives.