NiemanLab: Bunk aims to set history free with a site that doesn’t feel like a textbook. “Bunk, which takes its name from the 1916 Henry Ford quote that ‘history is bunk,’ launched in beta earlier this month. “A big part of this project is amplifying what’s already out there online,” said Tony Field, the site’s editor. ‘There’s so much great work being done online by scholars already. That includes blogs, conversations on social media between historians — there’s a very active community of historians on Twitter — not to mention all of the great digital archives all over the place, and digital humanities work based at universities and elsewhere. We were very interested in what it would mean to try to harness all of that energy and make it accessible to a broader audience of people who aren’t, say, historians on Twitter.'”
teaching resources
Chronicle of Higher Education: Using Digital Archives to Teach Data Set Creation and Visualization Design
Chronicle of Higher Education: Using Digital Archives to Teach Data Set Creation and Visualization Design. “Although less common perhaps, archives can enhance introductory humanities and first-year composition courses aimed at non-liberal arts majors. This semester I designed assignments centered on Visual Haggard (VH), a digital archive that I edit intended to centralize and improve access to the illustrations of popular Victorian novelist H. Rider Haggard. These multimodal assignments encouraged undergraduates to practice critical thinking, writing and communication, and visual and digital design—all course goals for first-year composition seminars at Georgia Tech. At the same time, students actively collaborated with me on the project by composing public-facing descriptive metadata tags demonstrating close reading as well as well-designed charts and graphs visualizing this data.”
EdSurge: Teachers Can Now Use IBM’s Watson to Search for Free Lesson Plans
EdSurge: Teachers Can Now Use IBM’s Watson to Search for Free Lesson Plans. “IBM’s famous Watson computing system—which defeated Jeopardy champ Ken Jennings in 2011—is coming to education, if not quite the classroom. As part of a new IBM philanthropic initiative, the supercomputer is helping to power a searchable database of open educational math resources designed for teachers in grades K-5.”
Storybench: How to convert a Google Doc to RMarkdown and publish on Github pages
Storybench: How to convert a Google Doc to RMarkdown and publish on Github pages. “Professors across the country are scrambling to tidy up their syllabi. But how to best share them with students? I’ll be publishing my ‘Digital Storytelling and Social Media’ syllabus on Github using a simple website publishing format called RMarkdown. The good news is, if you can type your syllabus into Google Docs, you can build a site like this…”
Arizona State University: ASU partners with public libraries to advance citizen science
Arizona State University: ASU partners with public libraries to advance citizen science. “Arizona State University aims to position public libraries as key facilitators of citizen science, a collaborative process between scientists and the general public to spur the collection of data. Through a new grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), researchers from the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and ASU Library will develop field-tested, replicable resource toolkits for public libraries to provide to everyday people contributing to real research, from right where they are.”
FBI: Free Cyber Safety Program Redesigned for New School Year
FBI: Free Cyber Safety Program Redesigned for New School Year. “The FBI’s Safe Online Surfing (SOS) Internet Challenge—a free, educational program for children that teaches cyber safety—has been redesigned for the 2017-2018 school year, with new graphics and updated content. The new SOS program, created for students in third through eighth grades, covers age-appropriate topics, such as cyberbullying, passwords, malware, social media, and more. The program also provides teachers with a curriculum that meets state and federal Internet safety mandates.”
The Next Web: A glossary of basic artificial intelligence terms and concepts
The Next Web: A glossary of basic artificial intelligence terms and concepts. “Defining the nature of what AI is, and what it’s going to do for Joe Public, is difficult. Advances that will affect the entire world are often complex and take awhile before everyone understands what’s happening…. In the next few years everyone is going to want to understand some basic terms about AI, because you’ll be seeing it all over the place as every gadget made in the near-future is going to have some form of artificial intelligence baked in.”
