HASTAC Scholars in the News!

It’s the first event of the year for the new HASTAC Scholar Program, a joint venture involving Duke and other universities that explores how new technology is transforming the humanities. Speaking on a video blog or vlog, Rheingold told scholars that using electronic media in the classroom is valuable, but only if it helps students participate in learning about the issues that matter the most to them.

“I’ve been pushed by my students and my own growing understanding of what’s going on in my classrooms…to start with the questions that matter to them. And then help them use the media to go to the texts to try to find analytical frameworks and vocabularies and lenses that are provided by those texts to try to find pathways to answers…to try to find some skills that are useful in this world, for themselves.”

This is the type of discussion that HASTAC (the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) was created to promote. Co-founded by Cathy Davidson, Ruth F. Devarney Professor of English, HASTAC created the Scholars Program to help faculty and students share information about what they are doing on their campuses.

Five of the more than 50 new HASTAC Scholars are Duke students. Ga-Young Joung is an undergraduate studying biomedical, electrical and computer engineering, and computer science. Kylie Prymus is a graduate student in philosophy and a University Scholar, Rizvana Braxton is a graduate student in the Literature Program, and Lindsey Andrews and Patrick Jagoda are doctoral candidates in English. Duke is also proud to support Scholar Mechelle De Craene, a special education/gifted education teacher and graduate student at Florida State University who started the HASTAC on Ning community.

North Carolina Central University has also contributed two HASTAC Scholars to this inaugural group. Raeshawn McGuffie is working on a Masters in Library Science, and Jovanna Foreman is a Senior studying Computer Information Systems. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will additionally nominate a scholar from within its School of Library and Information Science.

The vlog-to-vlog discussion with Rheingold is the first event hosted by the inaugural group of HASTAC Scholars. Subsequent blog and vlog entries posted by the Scholars will analyze whether and how new technologies affect the quality of online discussions.

The Scholars will spend the year as part of a virtual community of students creating, reporting on, blogging, vlogging and podcasting events related to digital media and learning for an international audience. The HASTAC Scholars will also orchestrate a regular discussion forum on the HASTAC website featuring their own research and interests alongside those of leaders and innovators in the digital humanities, such as open source scholar Christopher Kelty and Brett Bobley, director of the Office of Digital Humanities for the National Endowment for the Humanities.

“Information posted by the HASTAC Scholars will be of interest to anyone in educational sphere who wants to learn about social networking tools, and how they can use them in the classroom in effective ways. We’re really trying to push the envelope and get past ideas about traditional learning,” says Erin Gentry Lamb, director of the HASTAC Scholars Program and a Ph.D. candidate in English at Duke. “For people in education at all levels, this will be a place for both ideas and discussion.”

HASTAC was founded and is primarily operated at the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University and the University of California Humanities Research Institute at the University of California, Irvine.