Project Demo
Biographies
Tessa Joseph-Nicholas is the Director of Digital Arts and Humanities Projects and Lecturer at the Department of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she teaches courses on digital culture, cyberculture, and cyberethics. Her current research interests include American digital culture, regionality and digital poetics, Internet celebrity, instructional technology, and methodologies for teaching programming concepts to humanities students.
Elliott Hauser is a PhD student in Information Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Information and Library Science. He is interested in understanding and developing tools for subjective, conflicting, and uncertain datasets, including those used in academic and scientific research, and in developing tools and technology to deliver benefit to data-based research and analysis outside academia.
Abstract
We would like to present the design and mockups of an online tool we plan to build—the Coursefork. The Coursefork will link a database populated with units of instructional content—slides, lesson plans, texts, exercises, prompts, assignments, videos, and more—with a graphical course development interface. Graphical representations of these instructional content units will be drag-and-droppable into the interface to form and populate a course schedule or syllabus, which can then be shared with students as a web site or simply used as the instructor’s personal reference. Interactive features will allow registered users to contribute their own content and suggestions to the database.
The increasing interest in digital humanities strategies has increased the demand for creative instructional materials among scholars engaged in this deeply cross-disciplinary area of practice and study. Unfortunately, disciplinary boundaries frequently dictate the way programming, digital media, and digital culture are taught and understood. For that reason, in its first iteration, Coursefork will focus on gathering, curating, and offering digital humanities/culture/ethics and computer science/information science content. We hope that this approach will encourage instructors and scholars across the disciplines to adopt a more interdisciplinary approach to learning about and teaching these subjects, as appropriate. Ultimately, however, we hope that Coursefork will grow to include content from all the disciplines.
Our presentation will describe the needs and issues we hope to address with this tool, discuss our strategies for building and populating our database of materials, share our mockups, and invite conversation and feedback.