A MITH Digital Dialogue

Tuesday, September 5, 12:30-1:45

MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

Welcome back to MITH’s Digital Dialogues! We’re pleased to kick off the fall semester with a presentation from two of our recent Graduate Travel Grant recipients, Kimberlee Staking and Nikki Stewart, both doctoral candidates in Women’s Studies:

Staking and Stewart will offer critical reflections on a successful workshop they facilitated at the National Women’s Studies Association Conference in June 2006. The workshop, “Visualizing Women’s Studies: Facilitating Visual Learning in the Feminist Classroom,” was designed to assist feminist instructors to better integrate visual concepts and visual technologies into their women’s studies curricula. Like many interdisciplinary social-justice-oriented humanities fields, one of central aims of women’s studies teaching is assisting students to “see” the world differently. And yet many feminist instructors–instructors who are deeply invested in teaching students how to resist sexism in the visual landscape–struggle with teaching visual literacy. Many also feel intimidated by the prospect of using technology in the classroom. At this Digital Dialogue, Staking and Stewart will share how they successfully worked with a somewhat technology-a-phobic population of instructors to inspire them to take more risks to integrate digital technologies into their humanities teaching. See The Visual Literacy Toolbox.

We have an exciting line up of Digital Dialogues scheduled for the remainder of the semester, *every Tuesday* at 12:30. Highlights of upcoming speakers include Kevin Bertram (CEO, Distributive Networks), who will present “You Can Take It With You: The Nascent Role for Mobile in the Digital Humanities,” as well as visits from Daniel Pitti of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia, Jason Nelson (digital artist and poet) from Griffith University in Australia, and Stuart Moulthrop and Nancy Kaplan from the Information Arts program at the University of Baltimore. Look for our full schedule very soon.

Contact: Neil Fraistat, Director, MITH (www.mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 5-5896).