Snapchat Field Trip Assignment

The Snapchat app is very popular, with about 400 million messages received on Snapchat daily.

Today, Time reported that colleges are sending snaps to prospective students, particularly athletes, in part because 77% of college students use Snapchat each day. Because of its widespread usage, I think Snapchat can be effectively used for low-stakes assignments in the college classroom, too.

This recent Buzzfeed post features Shakespeare and Edgar Allen Poe snapchatting each other, and is the inspiration for a field trip assignment.

Students should be paired, or grouped, and should imagine themselves as personages in dialogue with each other. This can be suitable for many different field trips, but let’s say it’s an Art History field trip to a museum.

One student should choose one artist who has a few works featured in the museum, and the other can choose another artist. These artists do not need to be from the same time period.

Each student will snapchat pieces of the artist’s work and imagine himself to be that artist, and, in the very short character space, he will put in some information about the art piece snapped or the artist’s philosophy. He can also draw with the app.

Below is an imaginary example since I don’t think the Sistine Chapel ceiling will be loaned out any time soon, between one student as Michelangelo and another as Georgia O'Keefe.

This fun assignment enables the students to search for and engage more with the art (etc.) at hand, as they can photograph the art from various angles or crop pieces in different ways for emphasis. They can also use whatever knowledge they learned about the artist in class (such as Michelangelo’s being Italian, and his interest in Neo-Platonism) as part of the dialogue.

Students can put themselves in the position of the artist they have learned about, and pretend to speak like them. The Georgia O'Keeffe above is a little more informal, while Michelangelo is as old-fashioned as space allows.

If you are taking a prolonged trip with students, or you oversee a study abroad program, something like this can be done over several days, particularly in cities famous for homegrown artists or architects whose work features prominently in the city or the city’s collections.

Scavenger Hunt Assignment with Pinterest

A scavenger hunt assignment done online can be fun and also help students see how the material they are engaging with is part of a larger discourse online.

For this assignment, students are to collect consumer goods that are related to the text being read in class, in this case, Moby Dick by Herman Melville.

Pinterest is a social media website that visualizes links, and can be a great tool for a scavenger hunt assignment. The instructor can create an account for all of the students to log into, or can easily add his students’ individual accounts to the board via these instructions. It may be worthwhile to survey the students to see whether they are already using Pinterest or not.

Students would then surf the web and pin their findings to the board. They can also comment about the items they are pinning, and if they are using individual accounts it would be easy for them to comment on each other’s pins.

The example board shows how easy it is for students to see the number of consumer goods, and even other books that are inspired by Moby Dick. It would be important to let students know not to pin different editions of the original book!

Before assigning this, you should make sure the material you are working on has a lot of products related to it online. Sites like Etsy typically have a lot of literary-minded products available if you also teach Literature.

This scavenger hunt lets students realize how their studies are relevant in an enjoyable way — reading classic literature keeps them in the cultural loop and lets them understand the inspiration behind some pop culture objects.

Programming Concepts for the Humanities: ArrayLists

In a recent post, I used Dante’s Inferno as an entry point to the concept of Arrays and machine counting in general (that is, that it starts with 0 instead of 1).

Arrays are fixed-length, like the Inferno is, but perhaps a creative individual would like to add or subtract circles of Hell. Say, she was really frustrated trying to parse through Dante’s text and does not find his language to be anywhere near as elegant as Latin poets, so she would like to add Vernacular Poets into the very pit of Hell.

In Java, for example, a programmer can import ArrayList:

import java.util.ArrayList;

Then, she will create her list of Sinners:

ArrayList myInferno = new ArrayList();

In the example above, she is using Dante’s original scheme, but she can certainly start from scratch. Once her Inferno is populated with Dante’s sinners, she will add her new Sinner category last:

Sinner vernacularPoets = new Sinner();
myInferno.add(vernacularPoets);

From here, she can make the Inferno as big as she would like.

Perhaps another creative individual actually is really touched by Francesca da Rimini’s speech in Canto V and he nearly faints after he hears it (kind of like Dante-Pilgrim). He may want to only modify the Inferno by taking the Lustful out, and letting Purgatory sort those sinners out in a more redemption-focused way.

He will achieve this by writing out the command

myInferno.remove(2);

What is great about the landscape of the Inferno, is that we know right away which circle we want to take out — the Lustful are in Circle 2 (or technically the third circle from the beginning), and it is easy to call that right up to remove in programming since it corresponds exactly.

After this command, his myInferno ArrayList will shift to look like this, with one last circle, and everything shifted down:

If Dante’s Inferno is too unfamiliar, we can also think about adding or subtracting Dissertation chapters – something all Humanities scholars should have some experience with!

Using ePortfolios for Student Projects

ePortfolios can be a great tool for bringing together a student’s work on the same (or a similar) topic or to collate the work of several individuals in a group project.

Sample Greenwich, London ePortfolio site

As Catalyst for Learning notes, 

Reflection helps students integrate and make meaning across learning experiences. And reflection is more powerful in community.

Creating an ePortfolio allows students to reflect on the work they are doing, whether it is in writing, image, or video, and an ePortfolio collects these disparate media into one stream-lined repository that can be available publicly. Because ePortfolios are viewable by a wider community (whether limited to the class, the college, or the greater public), students may take more pride in their work, and may gain from having additional feedback.

To provide an example of an ePortfolio in action, I have put together an ePortfolio site that shows a project based around the London town of Greenwich. Tech-savvy students can utilize CSS in designing their ePortfolio site, while those less comfortable with technology can rely on the basic tools available in the editor. 

The project was broken up to explore different aspects of the town – Museums, Culture, Education and the Prime Meridian – in the links going across beneath the banner. In some of these sections, there is a further subdivision of sections. 

The home page shows the integration of video (above) and some text, but students can choose to just include video, or just text, for example. 

Sample Museum page

The image above shows the use of both image and text, as well as the further subdivision of topics along the left division (“Museums” >> “National Maritime Museum” and “The Fan Museum”). There is also a link under the image (underlined “Cutty Sark”), showing that students can redirect to different websites for additional information or to cite their sources.

Students can creatively design their banners, make videos, take photographs and write informational or reflective texts, and then collect all these items together online.

If this were a group project, one student, perhaps, would be responsible for “Museums” while another student would be responsible for “Culture.” Because the ePortfolio is cohesively designed, no contribution will look out of place, even if one student decides to create a video, while another includes a series of images. 

City or neighborhood ePortfolios are particularly apt for History courses, for example, as students studying London (as in this example) can create projects on neighborhoods. As an undergraduate, I worked on a website on the Greenwich Village neighborhood in New York City, and we included different historical cultural categories as part of our approach.

Many of the projects you are doing in your classroom can be easily converted into an ePortfolio project, such as a collection of poetry in a Creative Writing course, descriptions of minerals with photos in a Geology course, or reader responses to texts in a Literature course. 

ePortfolios can be a meaningful first step toward a more technology-integrated course, providing many of the benefits that come with technology in the classroom without the need for extensive course redesign or technical expertise.

Sample Greenwich, London ePortfolio site

Free Resources for Web Development

Knowing some web development beyond blogging can be useful for creating a web site for teaching, to deploy digital humanities research, or to create a web-based assignment for students.

Thankfully, the web has a lot of free information available to teach both students and educators to learn how to create web sites.

Dive into HTML5 is an artfully designed book (online and in paper) that explains background and concepts of HTML5.

W3Schools is a useful reference guide as well as learning tool. They have sections for HTML, CSS, JavaScript and the jQuery library. Their “Try it yourself” practice spaces are useful to test things out before committing things to your own page.

Eloquent JavaScript is an online book to teach JavaScript, which is useful for web programming, but is also a great start for learning programming in general. It is clearly written with example code throughout.

W3C’s CSS Articles and Tutorials have a lot of collected information about how to utilize CSS in your web design.

This article about responsive web design has good information for creating a flexible site that can be rescaled for browser windows on a desktop or laptop, as well as for mobile devices.

The New Boston has video tutorial sets on HTML5, XHTML and CSS, and CSS3.

Dev.Opera features many articles in web development topics for personal use, and is updated by users.

Don’t Fear The Internet is specifically designed for visual creative types, and is accessible to most non-tech people. It features a series of fun videos as well as documented information of what the videos cover.

As an undergraduate, I created a NYC neighborhood website as part of a group project, and a web development assignment for any course can be empowering for students if they have the right tools to guide them. Having a public dimension to the work they do in the class (if it is permissible) can add a new level to their college experience and a larger audience can add motivation to do good work that they may later want to share with friends online.

Programming Concepts for the Humanities: Arrays

I recently looked at the article “Programming with Arduino for Digital Humanities” in the Journal of Digital Humanities, in which researchers look into the best methodology for teaching programming to humanities students. They find a good option in using Arduino so that students receive more physical feedback for their programming efforts. Kazushi Ohya writes :

As far as our experience goes, humanities students seem to struggle to envision existence of computational world in their mind. Typical topics of programming patterns appearing in structured programming such as assignment, iteration, condition, and flow control are not difficult for humanities students to understand the formats and abstract behaviors. The problem they face is to know the need of learning the patterns or the ways to use them as substantial components making up the whole code in actual programming.

While Arduino sounds like a good viable option for humanities students, it may not be the most likely model for digital humanists to work with when they are trying to build in their field.

It is true that humanities students are often out of practice in terms of mathematical concepts, but they do understand patterns and structure. A student of medieval literature must always think about the form and structure of a text, as pieces are often very ordered based on religious concepts or a system of 10.

I propose meeting humanities students halfway and using concepts they are familiar with to teach programming.

For example, Dante’s Inferno serves as a perfect array:

Although Dante’s Hell is often cited as having 9 circles, it technically starts at Circle 0 where the Neutrals march under a banner stung by insects (therefore the Inferno is comprised of 10 circles). 

Like the Inferno, computer logic is based on a number system that starts with 0, which can be confusing for a beginning programmer, and by bringing in a concept that a humanities student would know, the gap in knowledge can easily be bridged.

Inferno serves as an array, a set that holds different types of Sinner Objects as discrete data items.

Sinners[] inferno = new Sinners[10];

Or we can say an array of Strings for starters:

String[] inferno = {“neutrals”, “pagans”, “lustful”, … “treacherous”};

Or, we can also think of it as holding Integers with each circle being an int:

int[] inferno = new int[10];