The Trouble with Testing

Also posted at DML Central: http://dmlcentral.net/blog/monica-bulger/trouble-testing It’s obviously summer because my news alerts are no longer steadily reporting concerns about education, our children’s future, the problems with teachers, etc. Perhaps now, then, is the perfect time to address the issue of testing and its troubles, while a little distance might provide perspective. So, why do…

The benefits of removing human bias

“It’s the great thing about code,” he said of computer language. “It’s largely merit-driven. It’s not about what you’ve studied. It’s about what you’ve shipped.” –Jade Dominguez quoted in NYT, 27 April 2013 Gild, a San Francisco start-up, is taking the Money Ball approach to identify potentially overlooked talented programmers. As reported in the New…

Adapting Social Science Methods to Humanities Research

Today I will be co-convening a session with Ray Siemens at the Modern Language Association’s annual conference on the topic of using and adapting research methods typically associated with social sciences to research in the humanities. Our panelists include colleagues Eric Meyer (OII), Lindsay Thomas and Dana Solomon (UC Santa Barbara), James Kelley (Mississippi), and…

Talking to each other: the challenge of interdisciplinary work

Today I’m giving a lecture about learning environments that promote interdisciplinary dialogue in Internet Science. After 10+ years working in an interdisciplinary space, I take for granted how much easier it has become, I forget the many times I sat through lectures that were like a foreign language where every third word made sense. I…

EngageU: Challenges of assessment & public engagement

Funding bodies are increasingly requiring evidence of impact for higher education efforts in outreach and public engagement, yet measuring this impact is challenging. A review of current practice combined with interviews of public engagement experts in the UK underscored the degree to which outcomes of public engagement and outreach efforts are often not immediately visible,…

Child protection study underway

Vicki Nash and I were successful in our bid to the Fell Fund to examine how risk and harm are used in literature addressing children’s use of the Internet. Vera Slavtcheva-Petkova, a recent graduate of Loughborough University, joined us in December and has been making swift progress through the mountain of relevant literature. To date, we…

Teaching & Learning with Digital Tools in the Humanities

During graduate school, I participated in an experimental seminar, “Literature+: Cross-Disciplinary Models of Literary Interpretation,” taught by Alan Liu. He asked students to form groups around topics of their choosing and perform analyses using digital tools on their materials. Most students shared similar research interests and organized their projects around a content-based theme. Our group…