In 2018, Humanities Commons honored one of the most time-honored traditions of the season: summer camp. We hosted a virtual summer camp for users old and new. It helped participants to update, build, and achieve an outstanding digital presence through HC. Please check out the discussions from Summer 2018 to see the fantastic work and thought-provoking conversations that our participants took part in last year.

In 2019, we hosted two Humanities Commons Summer Refresh Workshops. These events encouraged you to set aside time to update your digital presence on HC. The group is a space to ask questions, connect with other users, and see the various exciting ways that other scholars use HC to build their presence online.

You can use these materials as you update your presence on the Commons.

Please visit our site for more information and updates: https://hcsummercamp.hcommons.org

Challenge #6: Reflect and Plan (8/6-8/19)

4 replies, 5 voices Last updated by Lisa L. Tyler 4 years, 7 months ago
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    • #15456

      Caitlin Duffy
      Participant
      @caitlinduffy49

      Hello, campers!

      It’s the time we all knew would come eventually: the end of summer camp. I can’t believe it myself, but we’ve arrived at the final challenge, which is centered around reflecting and planning. I hope that you use this time to make sure that you don’t loose track of all of the wonderful work you’ve done over the summer.

      To complete the final challenge, answer (all or some of) the questions below in this discussion thread. Alternatively, if you’d feel more comfortable sharing (all or some of) your thoughts privately, send them to me either through a direct message here or through my email, CDuffy@mla.org. I’ve listed the questions below and on the most recent blog post, which also includes some more thoughts and ideas for the coming year.

      Final Reflection Questions:

      1. What are you most proud/happy/excited about learning/creating during the HC Summer Camp?
      2. Are there any questions you still have regarding anything that we’ve learned this summer?
      3. How do you plan to continue maintaining and building your digital presence? Which platforms will you update and how often? How will you remember to update them? Make sure that the goals you set are realistic and compatible with your other responsibilities.
      4. Do you have any feedback for myself and the HC team regarding either the HC Summer Camp or HC in general? Is there any way that we can improve? If we were to host another summer camp next year, what would be helpful topics to cover? Is there anything about the HC Summer Camp that you would change or improve? Is there anything that you would like to keep the same?
      5. Is there anything else you’d like to share?

      Please also feel free to respond to others’ posts in this discussion thread!

      Thank you again for participating in the challenges this summer. I hope that the summer camp experience was as helpful for you as it was for me!

    • #15541

      Charlie Gleek
      Participant
      @cgleek

      Hi folks. First off, thank you to <span class=”handle-sign”>@</span>caitlinduffy49 for facilitating HCSummer Camp as well as to everyone else who’s ideas and work I had the chance to read and think about over the past few weeks. Secondly, and in a combined response to both Challenge #5 and #6, I’ve updated my HumCom site and written a bit about my thinking and plans for a digital presence in the coming academic year. Best of luck to everyone in the Fall semester.

      /Charlie

    • #15542

      Kate Koppy
      Participant
      @kkoppy
      1. I’m happy to have discovered some more groups to join and people to follow. Although I didn’t create a HC site in challenge 4, the focus on widgets has me thinking about porting my existing WP site into HC.
      2. No specific questions.
      3. I’d like to keep working on networking with other researchers. HC sends me a daily digest of activity in the groups I belong to, and I skim through those when they appear. I’m going to continue my goal of tweeting at least one thing about my research/writing and one thing about my teaching each week.
      4. If I were to do this again, I’d like to see more challenges about reaching out and talking to other people, or maybe challenges that include a list of individual tasks. This is the part of academic networking I struggle with most.

      Thanks so much for setting this up! The pace was great, and I learned a lot.

    • #15552

      Sara Santos
      Participant
      @sarastarbucksantos

      Hello everyone! Like Charlie, I took this challenge as an opportunity to write a little bit about my experience doing this summer camp and my plans for my website/overall digital presence going forward. I tried to answer all of the questions in the challenge, albeit in a slightly different order. You can read it here.

      Thanks again to Caitlin for guiding us through the process and to HC for coming up with such a fun project!

    • #15682

      Lisa L. Tyler
      Participant
      @ltyler

      Thank you for this summer camp experience.

      I’m most excited about finding a home for Virtual Hemingway, which now lists more than 400 Hemingway-related sites! I am also pleased to have a site about my academic accomplishments. I plan to add the URL to my email signature to show off all this work!

      Austen scholar Devoney Looser just published an article about the importance of this kind of work in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

      https://www.chronicle.com/article/Writing-a-Book-or-Article-/243911

      Her article validated the time I was spending on creating my site. (You might want to consider using it in future summer camps.)

      One question I have is whether there’s a maximum size limit for what we create on Humanities Commons. Another question I have is whether Virtual Hemingway will turn up in search engine results–would students have to search Humanities Commons in order to find it?

      I hope to maintain the site–in fact, I hope to grow Virtual Hemingway to more than 500 links, which seems pretty doable. I plan to update at least quarterly, which seems more reasonable to me than trying for weekly or monthly, given my heavy teaching load.

      I think the pace of this course was just right. The explanations of how to do various tasks were very clear and did not assume much technical knowledge, so that was a huge plus. I think it might be helpful to be clearer that the plug-ins and widgets seem to pertain only to blogs.

      I wish more people had stuck with the summer camp–the attrition rate seems to have been awfully high. But I don’t know what you could have done to improve that.

      MLA needs to publicize the Humanities Commons more effectively and demonstrate what faculty can do with it. I’m a longtime member and didn’t really understand what was available to me for free!

      Thank you for all your work, Caitlin. My experience was positive, and I would recommend this camp to others.

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