By Kelly J. Baker - Chronicle Vitae. Everywhere I look, I’m hearing Chicken Little stories about the decline and fall of the humanities: There’s a decline in majors! (On second thought, maybe not.) A decline in funding! A decline in women’s enrollment! Our fate as humanists is a constant topic of debate and consternation. Mark Sample, a visiting associate professor of digital studies at Davidson College, has even created a Twitter bot, @SaveHumanities, which offers machine-generated insights—“we need to quit being so damn pretty,” “we need to make our own cryptocurrency,” “we need a more awesome story”—on how to save our supposedly dying discipline. See more...

By Robert Elder - Chronicle Vitae. Opponents of MOOCs and the "adjunctification" of higher education ended 2013 riding high on a wave of righteous indignation and schadenfreude. First, there was the acknowledgment by Sebastian Thrun, founder of Udacity, that his company will retool itself to focus on corporate education in light of its well-known failures in the higher education sector. Next, there was the heartbreaking story of Margaret Mary Vojtko, an elderly (and, it now appears, mentally troubled) adjunct at Duquesne University who died a lonely death after the job she loved was slowly reduced to nothing. See more...

By Jamie Stark. It’s no secret that good learner-centered teaching is meaningful and interesting, requires active participation from learners, uses different methods to incorporate all students’ preferred learning styles and is differentiated at an appropriate level. Vygotsky (1978) stated that learning is achieved by the active construction of knowledge supported by various perspectives within meaningful contexts; making meaning. His constructivist theory is that students learn through social interactions and their culture; that we socially interact and communicate with others to learn the cultural values of our society. This theory is often associated with connectivism. Stephen Downes points out that connectivism (and other theories like constructivism) shares a core proposition, that knowledge is not acquired, as though it were a thing. It’s knowledge that is distributed across a network of connections, and therefore that learning consists of the ability to construct and traverse those networks.
But let’s rewind here. Connectivism, whether you believe it’s a new theory on learning or merely a pedagogical view, was only introduced in the early 2000’s. Ryan Tracey, author of the E-Learning Provocateur website, does a great job of detailing the changes in pedagogical theories and how we have moved into the digital age. More...

By Timothy A. Lepczyk. I’m looking forward to a moment in the future. That moment is when the word “digital” is dropped from “digital humanities.” This semester I’m teaching an introductory digital humanities course to undergraduates at Hendrix College and one thing we’re doing is teleconferencing with DH scholars across the country.
The learning objective is to expose my students to the many different ways digital humanities scholarship is done, to let them see the paths people have taken, and for students to imagine their own way in digital humanities scholarship, if they decide to pursue it. When speaking with our guests, one trend I’ve noticed is that they don’t care about labels. “Digital humanist” and “digital humanities” seem to be terms more useful for those on the outside to describe this technological encroachment. Is a writer a different kind of writer if she uses paper and pencil versus word processing, or publishes her own work online with multimedia? The questions being asked by digital humanists are inline with questions humanists have asked before. The only difference is using digital tools to help them in their task. More...