BNN Symposium

On May 25, the BNN Symposium will feature Paul Courant and John Unsworth. Drs. Courant and Unsworth will speak at the MIT Faculty Club in Cambridge on “The Hathi Trust, Google Books, and the Future of Research.”

In this talk, two luminaries of the national Digital Humanities landscape will discuss the recent formation of large-scale, collaborative digital libraries and the challenges and opportunities they pose for researchers seeking to use and study their collections.

Dr. Courant will explain the interconnected genesis of the Google Project, the HathiTrust, and the Digital Public Library of America, and Dr. Unsworth will describe the various challenges facing the new kinds of research these vast digital collections should enable.

Each speaker will take questions after his presentation, and audience members will be encouraged to work in groups over lunch to generate more developed lines of inquiry.

On June 14, the BNN Symposium will feature Veronica Diaz. Dr. Diaz will speak at Four Points Sheraton Hotel and Conference Center (Norwood, Massachusetts) on “Mobile Teaching and Learning: Engaging Students and Measuring Impact”

The ELI’s research on mobile learning brings together a collection of best practices, case studies, and research on mobile technologies’ potential to engage students and enhance learning. Using your own local mobile learning initiatives or pilots (so please bring any information you have on your work in this area), we’ll review and apply strategies and methodologies to help measure the impact of mobile tools on teaching and learning. As we review these approaches and measurement frameworks, participants will consider their challenges/opportunities in these areas and what research might be useful to advance their mobility work.

What to bring: laptops and your mobile technology initiative plans.

On December 6, the BNN Symposium will feature Kathryn Tomasek. Dr. Tomasek will speak at University of Massachusetts, Amherst on “Beyond New Media: Digital Scholarship and the Liberal Arts.”

Digital innovations have been contributing to dramatic revisions in the practices of teaching, research, and publications in disciplines in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Natural Sciences for at least the past five years. And whilst the implications of such innovations may have once remained marginal—especially to humanities disciplines—they are becoming ever more pervasive. These changes go far beyond the effects of social media and new devices.

Participants will consider the implications for their own institutions, bringing home an outline of steps towards achieving an environment supportive of digital scholarship at their home institutions.

Questions to consider will be based on Jeannette Wing’s 2006 article on computational thinking and an Cathy Davidson and David Theo Goldberg’s thoughts on the future of learning institutions in a digital age.

On March 7, 2011, Dr. Gregory Crane spoke at the College of the Holy Cross (Worcester) on “Libraries and the Transformation of the Humanities: What Role Will Libraries Play, and What Can I Do About It?” for the BNN Symposium. Watch the video:

On December 6, 2010, Dr. David W. Lewis spoke at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, on “Academic Libraries Today: Crucible of Creation in the Context of Disruption.” Watch the video:

On November 12, 2010, Dr. Gardner Campbell spoke at Brandeis University, on “New Media and the Learning Revolution.” Watch the video:

On March 7, the BNN Symposium will feature Gregory Crane. Dr. Crane will speak at College of the Holy Cross (Worcester) on “Libraries and the Transformation of the Humanities: What Role Will Libraries Play, and What Can I Do About It?”

The shift to a digital space makes possible the rise of a new republic of letters, one in which not only professional scholars but our students and members of the general public have a major and essential voice.

Libraries have a wonderful opportunity: to become centers of intellectual production, enabling students and faculty to create new kinds of scholarship that are more useful in the present and can be better preserved and maintained over time. But to play this role, libraries need to become centers of expertise where students, faculty, and the interested public can learn how to create true digital documents.

Dr. Crane will follow up a presentation on this topic with a hands-on “master class” where attendees will be invited to share and discuss their own ideas for building libraries that can participate in a “new republic of letters.”

The second presentation of the BNN Symposium will feature David W. Lewis. On December 6, Mr. Lewis will speak at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, on “Academic Libraries Today: Crucible of Creation in the Context of Disruption.”

A national leader in strategic thinking for academic libraries, David W. Lewis will lead a thought-provoking, two-part, interactive workshop designed to engage attendees in the creative thinking needed to envision the future of academic libraries. In the morning, a hands-on exercise will encourage participants to think imaginatively about what the academic library of the future should do and what it will look like. An afternoon talk will discuss the dynamics of disruption based on the work of Clayton Christensen and other thinkers and will explore how the disruptive environment we are living in can be expected to effect academic libraries, and in particular, textbooks.

The Boston Library Consortium (BLC), Northeast Regional Computing Program (NERCOMP), and the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education (NITLE) are pleased to announce the first presentation of the BLC-NERCOMP-NITLE (BNN) Symposium, a collaborative speaker series focused on the future of teaching, learning, and scholarship. Additional speakers in this series will be David Lewis on December 6th and Gregory Crane on March 7th.

W. Gardner Campbell
New Media and the Learning Revolution
A national leader in using emerging technology to support and enrich meaningful learning in the humanities, and a legendary presence in the classroom, Dr. Campbell will share the fruits of his celebrated work with faculty and students to rethink their teaching and learning in the context of New Media.

Special Note: To get the most out of the session, attendees are asked to read in advance “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework” by Douglas Engelbart, available at: http://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html.

Attendees will be invited to participate in an interactive “happening” during the course of the presentation.

The Boston Library Consortium (BLC), Northeast Regional Computing Program (NERCOMP), and National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education (NITLE) have entered a partnership to enable joint exploration of strategic issues in higher education. The partnership will allow the organizations to pool resources and work cooperatively to develop a two-year series of symposia focused on the integration of information resources and technology in support of higher education. Joint work is scheduled to begin immediately.

The symposia will cover such issues as the disruption and transformation of the academic library, pedagogy in the age of digital media, and other broad themes related to digital scholarship, research, and pedagogy as interpreted by key thought leaders. The sessions will be held in the Northeastern United States.