Abstract

What skills does a graduate student need in order to disseminate knowledge and establish a professional profile for current and future job market? One answer is to offer a course designed to teach graduate students basic skills in online research tools and domain administration. The context for doing so should ideally be experiential, active and problem-based, so that students learn to collaboratively troubleshoot their way through the use of web tools. The key skill outcome for such a pedagogy of trial-and-error is that students develop an orientation towards technology and the online environment rather than mastery of any given platform, tool, etc.

REL502 was designed with the above in mind, where humanities graduate students do not specifically learn "digital humanities," but rather learn how to conduct themselves as online scholars. Essential elements of the course design to fulfill its pedagogy was to host the course on a public website rather than inside an LMS, to have students purchase a domain of their own rather than a textbook (which, by the way, they fully control like a hard-copy book) and to introduce a limited number of platforms in order to pursue novel research questions about the state of the discipline (religious studies).

To distill the outcomes of the presentation for teaching and learning in higher education, the presentation will:

• Outline an active pedagogy in the context of a graduate-level course.
• Explain why graduate students are well-served to learn general skills in online presence.
• Show how graduate students may learn about online research tools by reflecting on the state of their discipline.
• Explain the choices in course design that lead to using non-enterprise-level platforms so that graduate students can take with themselves whatever they create.

There will not necessarily be an engagement of the audience beyond an openness to discuss any element of the course that interests the audience. In other words, I do not plan to use any online tools (polling, etc.) but rather focus on explaining what happened, what went well and how the design principles could be applied in other contexts of graduate teaching and learning.

Examples from recent literature: 

1. Crafting an Online Academic Persona
   “The academic online: Constructing persona through the World Wide Web,” Kim Barbour and David Marshall
   “Digital Professionalism for Graduate Students: How to Use Twitter, Blogging, and the Rest of the Web as an Academic,” Amanda Visconti
   “How to Maintain Your Digital Identity as an Academic,” Kelli Marshall
2. Building an Academic Website
   “Personal academic websites for faculty & grad students: the why, what, and how,” Alex Bond
   “On Professional Websites,” Jonathan Sterne
3. On Scholars in Public
   “The Absent Presence: A Conversation,” Brian Croxall and David Perry
   “Curating in the Open: Martians, Old News, and the Value of Sharing as you go,” Trevor Owens

Objectives

• Explain why graduate students are well-served to learn general skills in online presence.
• Show how graduate students may learn about online research tools by reflecting on the state of their discipline.
• Explain the choices in course design that lead to using non-enterprise-level platforms so that graduate students can take with themselves whatever they create.

Presenter

Nathan Loewen, UA Religious Studies
Dr. Loewen is both assistant professor in the department of religious studies and the Faculty Technology Liaison for the College of Arts and Sciences.