Digital Pedagogy in Small Bites

We’ve got a new thing cooking in the lab - a bite-sized project from Rachel Retica, Seanna Viechweg, and myself. Here’s the description we’ve shared around for what we are calling the “ByteSizedPedagogy” series.

It’s important to maintain a balanced teaching diet! This free and open-to-the-public zoom series on digital pedagogy features paired lightning talks introducing teaching topics, interesting approaches to the classroom, pedagogical concepts, and more. All in a bite-sized form that should still give you plenty to chew on. In the spirit of the #DHMakes Methodz talks, each session will be built around paired 5 minute presentations followed by facilitated discussion for the remainder of the time.

Interested in showing off a pedagogical bite? Please fill out this form to indicate your interest in participating in the future! The presentations can cover a wide variety of topics: a tool that is new to you, a teaching tip, pedagogical concept, assignment, your syllabus for a DH course, etc. We’re interested in showcasing anything you have found that moves you or your students in the classroom, that has worked well or failed utterly. And we are very interested in perspectives from folks in all different kinds of positions and institutional contexts—higher ed, K-12, administrators, cultural heritage workers, and more. After the session, each speaker will submit a short one-page (max) version of their five-minute presentation to Knowledge Commons. We’ll collect references to all the contributions into a crowdsourced, citable web publication of bite-sized DH pedagogical goodness.

We already had one session with two bite-sized talks from Megan Brett and Emily McGinn on different ways to approach teaching with data. Emily gave a breezy introduction to teaching computational thinking with an activity called “Asking Questions of Data: How to Think Like a Computer” and Megan shared a minimal exercise for helping students to construct data from primary documents called “Thinking About Historic Data.” I’m enjoying the talks and also pleased that we hit upon a workflow for giving the presentations afterlives: after the event folks are updating their presentations to Knowledge Commons and sharing back citations for us to collect in one place. Future-proofed, professionally legible pedagogy.

The next ByteSizedpedagogy is titled “On Making” and will feature Jajwalya Karajgikar and Amanda Licastro on Friday, April 4th 2025 from 1:00-2:00PM EST. More information about their planned contributions:

• Jajwalya Karajgikar, Applied Data Science Librarian, University of Pennsylvania Library
  • Blurb: When we consider library services and patrons in higher education, we typically think of resources, databases, and other mechanisms for the transfer of knowledge. More difficult to encapsulate is the sense of community building that occurs in the library as an impartial space for technology, information literacy, and campus well-being. This is the function of many research data, digital scholarship, and maker-space centers within the library. This short talk elaborates on collaborative projects that facilitate the development of deep relationships with people on campus through Slow Process Making and Embodied Critical Making.
• Amanda Licastro, Head of Digital Scholarship Strategies and Visiting Associate Professor in English at Swarthmore College
  • Blurb: Interested in introducing your students to the world of #DHMakes? This presentation will review a series of scaffolded workshops aimed at making space for humanists in the Makerspace. With a focus on building critical collaborations across campus, audience members will gain practical tips on how to design hands-on, creative assignments with public-facing products. The culminating example will be an exhibit created by students in my undergraduate English course inspired by sci-fi literature, surveillance theory, and archival objects from Special Collections.

Register to join us for the second ByteSizedPedagogy event on zoom. And please get in touch using our form if you would like to share your own work at a future session. I’m excited to see where this series goes!

More bytes soon.