Maybe you should get a reality show for that, you know, superpower.

Thank you for not only attending the presentation but also sharing the process with your academic community. One addition that I would like to add which became the basis for this project was “context”. Creating a parody of “The Office” was not an arbitrary decision. The students viewing the videos were all seeking degrees in healthcare administration which prepares them for roles in management, specifically office setting, upon graduation. Putting all of the marketing concepts into a context (office setting) that students could understand and relate with is what led to the engagement piece.

I must admit that the picture you have posted makes me appear as if I am sleeping as opposed to mediating which is what I was doing if anyone asks

Thanks again Mike you did a great job of covering the process.

Garrick

-Jeff

I felt they could have done a much better job explaining what advantages they found in creating/using Omeka versus other site-building products.

The great thing about Omeka is that it is a) open source and has a very active community b) very flexible in terms of design and feature extensibility (works more or less like WordPress) and c) is designed by and for historians/humanists to perform a specific task (digital collection, interpretation and exhibition of primary sources and other historical/cultural objects). Unlike CONTENTdm or other extremely expensive and complicated proprietary platforms, it can be customized by anyone with a moderate level of programming/design experience. Thus with very limited time and resources we were able to deploy the platform more or less out of the box and then make customizations based on use study, teacher requests and evolving instructional goals. Plus it is fairly easy to use from a teacher/student standpoint.

Additionally, I would have liked more of a description of the project from the student perspective. How did they go through the course? What did their activity consist of? What were the results?

I cannot speak to how individual teachers have used the site in their classrooms but can say that the teachers in our TAH workshops have really embraced the technology. They have gone around to various archival collections, identify compelling images/documents and uploading them to the site. We task them with meeting our metadata standards when adding materials so that their students (and other users) can understand, cite and re-find the original objects. By adding the object to the archive, it becomes available for the entire user community to use in posters and exhibits. So far, most of the exhibits and posters have been created by university-level students and participants in our teacher workshops, but the end goal is to use the items to contextualize the primary source images and begin a discussion about historical thinking and image analysis. Many of the exhibits are constructed as image–>prompt. If you look at http://csudigitalhumanities.org/exhibits/ you’ll see a lot of teachers asking questions like “what does this mean or what does it say about topic x?” and so on. So not just presenting but discussing. We just added comments to the exhibits and don’t have many yet but that will be one way to collect student responses to both the images and the content of the interpretations.

This is a project that aims to teach the teachers as much as it teaches the students. I hope this adds to the overall picture. It can be hard to include all you want to include in a single session, or a blog comment for that matter, so feel free to follow up with me, or the primary investigator, Mark Tebeau ( http://marktebeau.com/ )

Let me give a shout out to posterous.com, which is similar to tumblr, but with the advantage that it can also post to different services like Twitter, Facebook, Wordpress, etc.