{"id":21551,"date":"2018-08-29T11:35:22","date_gmt":"2018-08-29T15:35:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/edc\/?p=21551"},"modified":"2021-08-13T10:08:56","modified_gmt":"2021-08-13T14:08:56","slug":"blog-on-failing-gloriously-at-experiential-learning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/tls\/2018\/blog-on-failing-gloriously-at-experiential-learning\/","title":{"rendered":"Blog: On failing gloriously at experiential learning"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Shawn Graham, Associate Professor, Department of History <\/em><\/p>\n

I\u2019m the digital humanities guy in the history department. But, I don\u2019t know what these things \u2013 \u201cdigital history\u201d or \u201cdigital humanities\u201d \u2013 are, what they look like, what they\u00a0could<\/em>\u00a0be.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the line with which I start almost every course I teach around here. After all, I trained in Roman archaeology (if you need a specialist in Roman ceramic building material, a.k.a. bricks, I\u2019m your man). What\u2019s exciting for me is that when I admit this to my students, it suddenly makes for a whole lot more engagement. Granted, there\u2019s a lot of panic, too. Who knows where we\u2019ll end up? In this post, I want to share with you where we went, as an example of what experiential learning can be. And it mostly depends on the instructor letting go. As Jesse Stommel says,<\/p>\n

Start by trusting students. #4wordpedagogy<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2014 Jesse Stommel, Twitter (@Jessifer) April 30, 2016<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Therefore, I spend a lot of time gaining my students\u2019 trust first, and trusting that it will be reciprocated.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou want us to\u00a0what?<\/em>\u201d they say.<\/p>\n

\u201cFail gloriously. Swing for the bleachers. Do something you haven\u2019t done before. Go big or stay home,\u201d I say. \u201cAfter all, if I don\u2019t know what DH is, then maybe we can figure it out together.\u201d<\/p>\n

In my recent iteration of HIST 3812: Digital History, I decided to take this in a new direction. The focus would be on\u00a0making<\/em>. Critical making, if you will. Students were immediately concerned: \u201cWhat if it doesn\u2019t work?\u201d<\/p>\n

An entirely reasonable question. After all, we\u2019ve done a good job of disciplining students, of getting them to swallow unquestioningly the conventional markers of what counts as \u201cscholarship.\u201d It has to be perfect; only the prof (if then) will see it. Essays? Yes. Failed 3D prints? Not so much. In public? Are you mad?!<\/p>\n

But in digital work – as in archaeology – it\u2019s when things\u00a0break<\/em>\u00a0that we see the fabric within, the stages, steps and assumptions that came together in a certain time and space, an assemblage of social, economic, cultural and technical factors (see Croxall & Warnick on \u201cFailure\u201d<\/a>). Teasing these out can only be done through destruction (archaeology destroys what it studies, often). And it takes a lot of eyes and a lot of collaboration. Digital history, like archaeology, is a team sport.<\/p>\n

The idea then, in HIST 3812, was to explore what the digital turn in historical scholarship did to how we see\/craft\/consume the past. We achieved this through a series of modules. The first one began with physically scanning some kind of historical artifact into a 3D model. Each module afterwards progressively abstracted that data in new ways, culminating in a final return to the \u201creal world.\u201d\u00a0You can watch a video teaser of what the course is about<\/a>, or check out the course website<\/a> and the course FAQ<\/a> (which evolved over the term).<\/p>\n

This course blended face-to-face meetings with public-facing digital work. In particular, I required students to keep \u201cfail logs\u201d of everything they tried and all of the digital bric-a-brac they created while working through these experiments in public Github repositories (with due processes in place for privacy and security concerns).<\/p>\n

Each week, students were required to annotate readings using the Hypothesis web annotation tool<\/a>. This allowed threaded conversations at the level of individual words or concepts\u00a0on the page itself<\/em>, whether PDF or HTML. In the second meeting of the week, students would arrive with \u201centry tickets,\u201d or the most compelling thing they\u2019d annotated, written down on good ol\u2019 3 x 5 index cards. These would become the basis for a student-directed in-class discussion or lab session. The students would share what they found compelling with someone they didn\u2019t know, reading the card to them. Then each pair would explain this to another pair. Then these small groups would explain to the rest of the class. The quality of these discussions was the best I\u2019ve observed yet as a prof.<\/p>\n

With time, the students saw – and led each other to see –\u00a0that it was this\u00a0process<\/em>\u00a0that mattered most, rather than the finished product. The process showed them what assumptions, what flaws, what biases are built into digital work. The process showed them that doing academic work was not a zero-sum game, but a real dialogue. But what finished products!\u00a0Some created 3D print mashups of commemorative statues in Ottawa, reflecting on how memory changes; others focused on our relationship between what is real and what is fake. For an example of a final project by one student, please see Alexis Mawko\u2019s Lessons from Wharhol<\/a> (posted with permission). This video shows her completed hologram projector<\/a> (!) in action.<\/p>\n

What I found most rewarding happened at the end of the course. The students knew that the final day would involve an \u201cexit ticket,\u201d an elaboration of the familiar entry tickets. I asked them as a group to figure out what they learned in this course, and to tell me. I then sat back and let them figure it out. In 1.5 hours, they ended up writing a 4,000 word essay using Google docs. I tweeted about it. The editors of Active History<\/a> (an important voice in Canadian digital history) saw the tweet, and two weeks later, the exit ticket was published in their Beyond the Lecture: Innovations in Teaching Canadian History<\/em> series:<\/p>\n