Poet Ponders the Digital

When I read academic job listing for "Digital Humanities" the skills range from HTML coding to video editing. Some list audio editing. The jobs are so varied that you cannot pinpoint what the phrase means. Is my doctorate in rhetoric, scientific and technical communication sufficient? Often it is not. Some posts suggest an MFA or Ph.D. in media production. Starting January 2016, I am going to be working towards completion of my MFA in Film and Digital Technology. This feels like a last-ditch effort to revive my academic career, while also giving me more credentials to support my creative writing. With or without an academic revival, I'll benefit greatly from the courses and the exercise of creating and editing digital works. One of the frustrations I've had on the job market is that nobody seems to know what the "Digital Humanities" are or how to prove you have the skills to teach the courses. My age and my experiences are a serious obstacle on this...

I have been contemplating if online learning differs by discipline, especially after reading a few studies on the topic. One of the studies (Xu & Jaggars, 2013), found: The subject areas in which the negative coefficients for online learning were weaker than average in terms of both course persistence and course grades (indicating that students were relatively better able to adapt to online learning in these subjects) were computer science, the applied professions, and natural science. Are the STEM fields that different, in terms of pedagogy and goals, from the humanities? Of course, we could certainly argue that the sciences are often taught divorced from ethics and humanistic concerns, but the teaching methods, objects, and outcomes assessments are my primary concern when reading such studies. Do Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) work better in the STEM fields than in the humanities? The coding course I'm currently working through is offered by a Russian institution...

I tend to answer questions when asked, often without pausing long enough to consider the best wording — or even if I should answer. This semester, I'm teaching a course that uses Wikis to explore collaboration. The students are struggling with the Wiki format and some of the concepts. You'd be wrong if you thought users of Wikipedia understood how the system functions. I mentioned that installing and maintaining any content management system (CMS) was a good skill to have. A student then asked about job skills currently in demand. He was told by someone that some specific tools were in demand, while others were not. The tools and skills he was told are valuable are absolutely, positively not highly-valued based on a simple search of tech-focused job sites. And, of course, I said so. Sorry, but Visual Basic isn't going to land you at the top of the field. (There are still companies using VB for database applications, but C# is a better choice in my view.) And while ...

Is it a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) if there is a fee for credits? What should such fees be? Another post to follow with my own thoughts about MOOC designs and practices. UW to offer fee-based courses through Coursera | Local News | The Seattle Times I'll be posting about my own role in a MOOC project later this month.