David Joseph Wrisley, Toolkit or Toychest?: the Digital in the Classroom

The Teaching & Learning Center invites AUP faculty to a hands on session which will put into practice some of the ideas laid forth in Thursday’s lecture. It will look at some simple, off-the-shelf tools for digital tasks, and move on to more complex (or even combined) tasks that are useful for collecting, analyzing and disseminating research data. The session aims to make participants aware of some of the emergent categories of tools for research & pedagogy, as well as to discuss the degrees of openness that they embody.  The session argues for the productive tension between the functional (the tool) and the ludic (the toy), suggesting that the digital does not simplify or merely quantify, but rather opens the door to critical play and reflection with tools.  Participants will try out basic functionality of some of the following environments and will discuss together how they might be integrated into critical classroom praxis: Voyant, TypeWright, FromThePage, Prism, Hypothes.is, Google Fusion Tables, TopoText, Odyssey.js, Palladio, NodeGoat, Sketchup, JSTOR analyze, Zotero, WordPress.org.