Lightning Talk
Ryan Alexander Hunt
Biography
Ryan Alexander Hunt has an MA in Medieval Studies from the University of York (UK), and works as an English teacher in Hosan Elementary School in the Republic of Korea. He is currently experimenting with different techniques for involving younger students in the digital humanities.
Abstract
My paper will examine the challenges, successes, and failures I’ve encountered while attempting to engage young, non-native English speakers in digital humanities projects. In addition to the obvious language barrier, an experiential barrier exists between my students and myself influencing how we perceive of and interact with technology. Because my students have never existed in a world without the modern web, they experience it differently than I do – this experience gap alters how my students and I use it and will influence the future development of the web.
I have involved my students (ages 9-12) in three different digital humanities projects: a timeline of the popular video game Starcraft made using Facebook’s timeline feature, a Wikipedia entry about their school, and a digital humanities-themed summer camp called “Digital Adventure.” More than my successes with these projects, the failures have been valuable for showing me how not to engage young students in the digital humanities. In my paper I will provide overviews of each of these projects, describing how they were intended to work, how they actually worked, and what I, and my students, learned from each experience.