Digital Literacy Centre

This week the Digital Literacy Centre has been offering workshops on the Affordance of Social Media in the Classroom. The workshops are examining a number of typical Web 2.0 applications and the ways in which they can be used in the context of pedagogy. There is growing interest in the educational prospect of these kinds of tools and applications, and particularly since they are part of a Digital Generation’s common literacy.

Here is one example of an attempt to create a collaborative space for educators and students called the Social Media Classroom and Collaboratory (HERE). The Wikinomics blog (here) posted by Danny Williamson describes it thusly:

“The project, created by Howard Rheingold, describes itself as, “an invitation to grow a public resource of knowledge and relationships among all who are interested in the use of social media in learning.” The site is a series of Web 2.0 tools (it offers forums, wikis, blogs, chat, social bookmarking, microblogging, social video, curricular materials, resource repositories and an online community of practitioners – available as an install or SaaS) that help to facilitate collaborative, student-led learning across a distance. The value of this project is not simply the ability to slap a 2.0 paintjob on an existing system but rather as a means to enhance the learning process.”

Michael Eberle-Sinatra Associate Professor of nineteenth-century British literature at the Université de Montréal, President of Synergies: The Canadian Information Network for Research in the Social Sciences and Humanities, founding member of Nines (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship), and the vice-president of the Society for Digital Humanities, is at the Digital Literacy Centre’s Summer Institute teaching a course on Popular Culture and Digital Media: Representing Technology, Gender and Sexuality. On Thursday July 8, 2009, at 1 PM in the DLC, he will be giving a talk on Mixing Media and Humor in Joss Whedon’s Fray and Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along-Blog.

Read more about Dr Eberle-Sinatra and access his blog here.

Dr Stan Ruecker is at the Digital Literacy Centre’s Summer Institute this week talking about humanities visualization, an alternative strategy to data visualization, and performing workshops with Dr Teresa Dobson (Director of the DLC) on Digital Applications for Knowledge Visualization. One of the tools being examined is the Mandala Rich Prospect Browser.

Here is a site where you can read about and play around with a current prototype:

Mandala Rich Prospect Browser

“The Mandala Browser is a rich prospect browsing concept that allows users to explore a data set using multiple criteria. Unlike boolean searching, the Mandala Browser permits a more nuanced search by allowing users to determine the strength of each criterion. Its design allows enormous flexibility in terms of the number of criteria used, the number of items represented, and the types of items represented.” (From http://mandala.humviz.org/)