Mapping Cicero’s Letters

Micah Myers describes the project ‘Mapping Cicero’s Letters: Digital Visualizations in the Liberal Arts Classroom’: A team comprising of classics faculty member, instructional technologists, and undergraduate students create digital visualizations of ancient Mediterranean travel narratives and investigate them as reflections of the geospatial and travel-related conceptions of ancient authors and audiences. The project therefore represents an ideal combination of content and method: its primary learning aims are increased student facility with tabular data, data visualization, ancient Mediterranean geography and travel, and late Republican Roman history.

Factors Contributing to Student Success in Online and Media Site Courses: A Preliminary Study

While online learning has been with us now as an educational, pedagogical device for a few years, there is scant research on the factors that contribute to success in this endeavour. This very brief exploratory investigation explores the thinking and perspectives and attributes of faculty, students (undergraduate and graduate) and instructional technologists via a brief Qualtrics survey. Preliminary results are discussed and implications offered.

Be an ally for accessibility: Tips for all librarians

Accessibility is a concern for librarians in digital as well as physical spaces, and we have a responsibility to uphold the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). However, regardless of legal requirements, librarians endeavour to make content available to everyone. People with disabilities are no exception. While some of the more complex accessibility issues should be left to instructional technologists and web developers, there are plenty of things that anyone posting content online can do to increase content accessibility. Here are five tips that we have found useful for creating guides, posting handouts in our Learning Management System (LMS), building online tutorials, or similar activities.

Shaping the Roles of Academic Librarians to Meet Emerging Demands of DH Scholarship

As digital technologies permeate research, teaching, and learning on academic campuses, librarians are increasingly expected to be conversant in the tools and resources used in digital humanities (DH) scholarship. They are also expected to play a role in managing DH projects and promoting them to their campus communities and beyond. This growing niche of support calls not only for expanding librarians' DH toolkits and knowledge, but also for novel and energetic collaborations with other college staff, particularly information technologists. This chapter considers ways to create and sustain partnerships between faculty, instructional technologists, and librarians in support of DH activities at a liberal arts college. By focusing on collaborative approaches to DH training, events, and project planning and management, the chapter provides a blueprint for creating a DH Team that capitalizes on the existing skills of librarians and instructional technologists and for fostering a culture in which librarians can acquire new skills to support DH scholarship.

Shaping the Roles of Academic Librarians to Meet Emerging Demands of DH Scholarship

As digital technologies permeate research, teaching, and learning on academic campuses, librarians are increasingly expected to be conversant in the tools and resources used in digital humanities (DH) scholarship. They are also expected to play a role in managing DH projects and promoting them to their campus communities and beyond. This growing niche of support calls not only for expanding librarians' DH toolkits and knowledge, but also for novel and energetic collaborations with other college staff, particularly information technologists. This chapter considers ways to create and sustain partnerships between faculty, instructional technologists, and librarians in support of DH activities at a liberal arts college. By focusing on collaborative approaches to DH training, events, and project planning and management, the chapter provides a blueprint for creating a DH Team that capitalizes on the existing skills of librarians and instructional technologists and for fostering a culture in which librarians can acquire new skills to support DH scholarship.

Budget Woes

A small group of technology application teachers and campus IT specialists exchanged ideas about how the latest round of budget cuts might impact their jobs and technology on campus in general. Issues brought up included how schools “can do it all cheaper” if more online courses are added, how dual credit courses–that count both for high school graduation requirements and college credits–are becoming popular among families with much smaller tuition budgets, how teachers have to wait for 6-8 years for new computers instead of 4-5, how campus Web sites are out-dated due to lack of maintenance fees, and how campus instructional technologists are too busy fixing obsolete computers and equipment.

Researching and Developing Serious Games as Interactive Learning Instructions

As serious games gain momentum in the academic arena, no doubt more educators and instructional technologists will begin considering the possibility of making their own games for instruction. As developers of instructional resources, instructional technologists need to steer clear of producing more ‘video’ games, and instead, developing more ‘serious’ games that incorporate both learning and assessment. The research community needs to learn from tested processes and best practices to avoid repeating old mistakes. The model for serious game making presented in this article has been used successfully for the creation of an award winning project, and will now be shared for the benefits of fellow researchers, educators, and instructional technologists.