Take My Advice: Four Tech-Fueled Efficiency Tips I Wish I'd Known Four Years Earlier

If you'd like a tech-fueled inefficiency tip, this image should serve. 

I have always been technologically curious, but as one grows and changes, perhaps it is inevitable that one realizes what they didn't previously know or appreciate; so too have I realized that there were lots of technological possibilities that I was slow to take up. There seems to be an undertone of skepticism among folks in academic humanities circles about using technology, systems, or techniques for efficiency and an even greater fear of admitting one has engaged in such behavior, and so I perhaps unnecessarily developed an aversion to using it to support my research; though I was keen on incorporating tech into teaching, my process of doing so was admittedly prone to making my preparations more time-intensive rather than less (implied, I think, by my observation in this 2018 reflection on preparing my Fiction and the Historical Imagination course). Part of this, I think, was a symptom of a peculiarly humanistic tendency (or so it seems to me) to feel that to save time is to be cheating in some way; that if our work is valuable it is valuable because we agonized over it at great length, and can be said to have depended upon no one but ourselves and our incredible intellects. Ultimately, however, both students and the work, not to mention my own well-being, have been better served by embracing ways to make life a little easier and a little more collaborative. As a result, in this post, I'm reflecting on four things I came to appreciate in the last two years or so that I really, really wish I'd been doing the whole dang time.

Use OCR

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is much better than it used to be, and it doesn't have to be perfect to be helpful. I think I became hesitant to try again with OCR after an ill-fated attempt at digitizing a single issue of Cosmopolitan magazine so I could "perform Digital Humanities" on it as an undergraduate. However, toward the end of my dissertation writing process and into my current work I've seen how improved the technology is and how much I now take it for granted. If you have archival photos or scans, try using Adobe Acrobat or a free OCR tool to recognize the text. This will not only make it more accessible if you are distributing it to students, but also make it easier for you to search for terms within it (which would have come in very handy had I figured this out earlier in my dissertation research process, as I worked almost entirely from archive photos and scans while writing).

Use Excel

You know you can use Excel for whatever you want? You don't even have to be a card-carrying "quantitative researcher." Here's one thing I now use all the time and which would have worked well in conjunction with the idea of OCRing things: the UNIQUE function, which can take a list of items and strip out all the repeats, leaving only one iteration of each name, number, list item, etcetera. Imagine how much more easily I could have answered questions about how many disabled children were represented in an issue of a periodical if I'd known this.

Use the Internet

You don't have to do everything yourself. Some subjects have existing resources, whether entry-level memorization and practice activities on tools like Quizlet or Kahoot or mid- to higher-level activities created by other instructors and distributed on educational resource sites like MERLOT or the Zinn Education Project or through affinity groups like the Reacting Faculty Lounge or via personal blogs (hi!). Some activities pitched to high school learners can be employed usefully in a higher education setting with a few tweaks. Some materials can also be created by students as part of their learning process; instead of making a Quizlet for students to practice with, ask groups to create their own Quizlets of the top five or ten topics / terms / concepts and compare their results. 

In short, I wish that I had appreciated earlier how many other things existed that I could use rather than reinventing the wheel every time. Sometimes it seemed like it would have been harder to find and enact an idea elsewhere than creating it myself, but looking a little harder could have paid off-- not only would this have saved me time, but it would have been useful to me to see how other people were approaching teaching various topics to inspire the activities and assessments that I created.

Use a Repetition-Mitigator

Relatedly: If you do have to do something yourself (making an activity, grading), you don't have to create everything from scratch every time. It's great to make something new! As I've mentioned in a previous post on career preparation, if you are an early career teacher, it's in fact essential to make some new things if you'd like to be able to fruitfully reflect on those experiences in later job interviews or teaching statements. However, if you save time on some of the more rote requirements and/or incorporate already existing resources, you'll have more time for creating novel activities and giving meaningful feedback. 

Efficiency in grading is one example of this. Rubrics and comment libraries (either technological ones, like within LMS systems, or low-tech numbered lists you can show to students in conjuction with papers marked with corresponding numbers) can allow you to skip writing "Needs to use at least three sources" in paper comments seventeen times, leaving additional time to write more specific and useful comments like "Your paper's argument might benefit from a closer read of Source A" or "If your goals are X, you should focus on Y aspect of the homework for next week." I only started appreciating what a time-saver this could be late in the game, and I wish I'd used it more thoughtfully and more often.

What tips, strategies, or tools do you wish you'd appreciated and used earlier? Feel free to let me know in the comments-- I just may have to start adopting them myself.

Related Links: 

One of my favorite activities supported by an existing resource: after being asked to deliver a short lesson to a group of epidemiology students on the fly during my time at the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth, I followed a brief lecture on the history of polio with asking students to play the Smithsonian National Museum of American History's Got Ramps? Architectural Barriers Game and compare notes on which endings they achieved. 

If you're interested in the NMAH's work on polio, or thoughts on incorporating museum resources and exhibits into teaching, you may be interested in revisiting this 2017 post on the curator's interview with David Serlin.

Pedagogical Possibilities: Quick Accessibility Tips for Text

Fact: It is one million percent easier to make something accessible from the outset than it is to make it retroactively accessible. Yet a lot of university instructors don't receive any training on how to make our course materials accessible; instead, we assume that no one in our classes will need "anything special" (which, if a course never enrolls any students with disabilities, that speaks of a concerning broader failure of access and opportunity). If anyone does need accommodations, this mindset goes, we'll worry about it when it comes up, and ideally it will be "someone else's job" to figure all this out. Your institution may have access to services to help with this, but they can often be difficult to access themselves, with long waits for materials and the need to prove the necessity of providing the material. There are also always things that instructors create and deliver themselves, often in the midst of the course, with no time to have someone else remediate them.  

Fortunately, there are many things instructors can do to make their teaching more accessible from the outset, and in ways that will save both you and your students a lot of logistical headaches down the line. In this post, I'll lay out three quick ways you can begin creating or remediating accessible course content, all of which include not only resources for instructors to create course materials but also strategies for involving students in the creation of accessible materials. This post focuses on text, but in future posts I'll take up other kinds of content. This is by no means a list of everything that needs to be done to make everything accessible to everyone. However, if you're unsure of where to start in thinking about accessible course materials, here are a few ideas.

Ensure that your foreground and background colors contrast.

Anyone else get a little too enthusiastic with the Powerpoint colors and then wonder if anyone will actually be able to read your slides? I use this Colour Contrast Analyzer a lot-- its super easy to download and use its eyedropper tool to compare the color of the text and background in any program to make sure there's enough contrast to fit WCAG guidelines. The ease of this program means that you can also encourage students to download the program and check materials they create.

For digital readings, confirm that your texts are actually full of text. 

As this image (from Monotype) suggests, if your text is an image, it's not accessible. 

Your lovingly created and curated readings are simply not going to inform anyone who cannot read them. How can you tell? Try highlighting the text in your pdf using the text selection tool as if you were going to copy and paste it somewhere. If you can't do it, your reading is just a series of images, meaning that screen readers cannot tell what it says; this state of affairs also makes it challenging for students to digitally highlight sections of the piece while reading for later reference. You can remedy this situation in several ways:

• Getting new scans of the text with Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Your library may be able to help with this. 
• OCRing your existing scans in Adobe Acrobat (if the quality is good enough). 
• Branching out to new material. Is there something that you can use in place of the older text that already has accessibility features, like a journal article instead of a scanned book chapter? Or, could you offer students the option of the reading or a podcast on the same topic?

If you still have scanned book pages with no text content in your course, make a goal to replace them (even if one at a time!) with texts that all students can access.

Use the "Check Accessibility" feature. 

There's a handy button in most Microsoft Office software which collects potential issues with access in documents like Powerpoint slide decks and Word files. Although these are far from perfect at catching issues, it can be particularly useful for things like confirming that parts of a slide will be read in the order that makes the most sense, or that sections have unique headings which will help users navigate the document.

If all of this seems like a lot, it's okay to do this a step at a time! As with most things in life, it's better to make incremental steps towards a goal than to never try to attain it at all.

Related links: 

I learned a lot of these great ideas from these courses: The Accessibility MOOC: Inclusive Online Course Design and An Introduction to Accessiblity and Inclusive Design. 

If you aren't familiar with the context of disability rights, the different models of thinking about disability, and how each of these inform education, the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching's Creating Accessible Learning Environments frames these in a useful, informative way, as well as offering a host of links to other tools and strategies for accessible courses. 

The presentation standards at Society for Disability Studies offer useful guidelines for presentations, but many of them are helpful for other formats of conveying content to an audience as well.

Pedagogical Possibilities: Teachers and Learners and MOOCs, Oh My

MOOCs: Massive! Open! Online! Course! Image from Renewables Liberia. 

It's incredibly important for people who teach to be open to learning. The pandemic has presented an extreme version of this. Transitioning conventional in-person classes to online, blended, or socially-distanced versions of themselves requires more than an investment of time or effort; for most, it requires a willingness to think about something in a new way. However, even when we are teaching entirely within our wheelhouse, in a format we are comfortable with, having an identity as a learner as well as a teacher provides critical perspective. This doesn't mean that one should overwork themselves learning everything under the sun, but it does mean that one can't effectively appreciate how hard learning is--and thus be cognizant of their students' experiences-- if they haven't been willing to be a vulnerable, new learner at something in a while.

Because of that, it can be really helpful to take a chance on learning something in a way that may not be familiar. There are a lot of ways to embrace being a learner, even without a lot of time on your hands. My go-to this fall: MOOCs. (If you're not sure what a MOOC is, take a quick look at the Beginners Guide to Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) at Class Central, which provides a short intro.)  I have long been a fan of MOOCs (even as, yes, there are limitations to them, and they cannot replace all other types of courses). In this post, I'm not analyzing trends, predicting the future, or discussing how to make a MOOC or whether one should make a MOOC; rather, I want to talk about how I've found them useful in my attempts to improve my teaching through being a consistent learner. 

First, an aside: where am I getting all this stuff? Illinois folks: I only learned this year that we have access to two resources for picking up new skills online for free: LinkedIn Learning (formerly Lynda) and Coursera for Illinois. (Of course, many things on Coursera are available for free, and you can in fact access a good portion of the material in Coursera for Illinois courses even if you aren't affiliated; Illinois affiliated folks, however, can earn the certificate for these courses for free.) 

Both platforms have a variety of online courses on various topics. From Coursera for Illinois, I've worked my way through several courses on instructional design, one on leadership, and one on accessibility and inclusive design, but there are also offerings in poetry, computer science, sustainability, finance, and race and cultural diversity, among others. From LinkedIn Learning, I've been slowly poking through an HTML course as well as a few learning and design-related offerings, but there are lots of topics like figure drawing, effective listening, social media management, just about every programming language you might imagine, and using specific software like OneNote, Powerpoint, Adobe Captivate, etcetera. Other popular options for free or low-cost online learning are Khan Academy, EdX, and Udacity, though I haven't explored any of these very much. 

MOOCs offer a great deal of flexibility (only have five minutes at a time? No problem!) combined with a structure that makes it easier for me to mentally organize information and find it again later on (unlike, say, reading multiple articles or watching a few YouTube videos on a topic). Many of these also have phone apps, so I've been able to spend a few minutes here and there that I might have spent doomscrolling on learning something new instead. There are so many things I want to learn that I didn’t take formal classes on that can be picked up through these resources. 

Not everything can be effectively learned or taught this way, of course; however, it is also true that this method of learning makes some content-- important content-- that I might never have the opportunity to learn in a formal class available to me. Making online content accessible, for example, is something that I'm constantly trying to do better in the work I do as a scholar, a presenter, an educational developer, and an online writer; yet it is seldom taught (or indeed practiced) in courses that I have taken in person. I have been pleasantly surprised by the online courses available which focus on this or incorporate an awareness of it into their content. (For example: the first MOOC I ever took, The Accessibility MOOC: Inclusive Online Course Design, which sadly seems to be defunct; Coursera for Illinois's An Introduction to Accessibility and Inclusive Design; and the HTML Essential Training course on LinkedIn Learning, in which designer and developer advocate Jen Simmons clearly explains why thoughtful, accurate markup is so critical for disabled web users.)

Learning new skills is nice, of course, but there's another plus to taking a look at these kinds of courses: they offer the opportunity for you to see what works best for your own learning, and imagine how you might be able to use some of these strategies for your own teaching. 

For example, you may notice that you retain information more easily when you're able to read along with a transcript as the lecture video plays than by either reading or watching alone (this was true for me, and quite a revelation, though I suppose I shouldn't have been so surprised). If you have an auto-generated transcript available from your video lecture, you might consider cleaning up the errors and making it available to the class, or you might be inspired to create an outline for students to focus on as they watch.

Or, you may realize that one platform's style suits you over the other for your own goals-- LinkedIn Learning tends to use a series of extremely brief videos divided into micro topics and arranged into subsections with multiple-choice quizzes; Coursera at Illinois courses tend toward fewer, longer videos with a wider variety of assessments. (So, if you have minuscule amounts of time to fill with knowledge, LinkedIn Learning might be a good bet for you). This may then lead you to think about the amount of time you want your students to spend on various activities, and edit videos or assign activities accordingly. 

Or, if you're feeling critical of the course you're taking, you might ask yourself why, and find an answer that allows you to avoid similar pitfalls. Do the instructions for a skill or assignment not make sense to you, or do they make sense but you disagree with their relevance? Does a multiple choice question seem unduly picky, or offer multiple answers that seem correct? This kind of reflection can help you pinpoint what kinds of questions will actually help you to assess student learning in your courses, and which will get in the way of that process.  

Again, this post is not designed to suggest that you spend ten hours a week learning a passel of new skills, nor is it even an exhortation to go take a MOOC! But if you want to remember how it feels to be a learner, spending a little time trying to understand something new might give you a few ideas. 

Related Links:

Class Central is a search engine that can help you find MOOCs on subjects or specific topics you're interested in (though a lot of these cost money). 

If you're interested in learning more about HTML, CSS, or Twine for free, one sort of "mini-course" I found really helpful when I got started with Twine was Adam Hammond's A Total Beginner's Guide to HTML and CSS and  A Total Beginners Guide to Twine, which includes some simple, fun code that you can play around with to actually practice the ideas presented. 

Although there's lots of free info on the internet, a lot of online courses are paid, which can be prohibitive. Feel free to send along any widely available free courses you're familiar with! 

Enough About Me: Using Interactive Fiction Tools for Source Analysis, Part II

    

The time has come: It's part II. In my last post, I introduced an activity made in Twine which can be adapted for various sources, allowing students to undertake a source analysis. In this post, I'll show how how it came together. 

How Did You Make This?

Good question! I'll break it down. 

First, I popped open my Twine application, which looks like this: 

Screenshot of my Twine archive. 

To start a new story, I clicked the green button on the right. Then, a blank canvas awaited! I added the first passage. 

The first passage of Source Analysis I, in Twine. 
(Note: the story format I used for this project is called Chapbook.
More on this, and why it's important, below.) 

Each passage represents a different page of text. As you may have noticed, there are a few parts to this passage. The title at the top, which is not seen by the player. The tag section, which I'll ignore for now because I rarely use it. And the text section, which is where you put the words you want students/players to see. 

You may have also noticed a couple of codey-looking things here in the text section. First, the double asterisks (**) surrounding some phrases, which makes them bold. Secondly, the double brackets; these are the most important things you need to make a Twine. Every double bracket makes a link somewhere else, usually to another passage. If you put a double bracket around some text, it creates a link to another passage and titles it with that text. Twine then puts an arrow connecting the first passage to the new passage. (You may also notice the external link above-- more on that later.) After completing Source Analysis I, I had a structure that looked like this: 

The entire structure of Source Analysis I, in Twine. 

You also may have noticed that the two different paths available in Source Analysis I have the same questions, but one allows text inputs and one doesn't. Here's the passage for the first set of questions without text input: 

"there were many that corrupted the service of the Lord" passage, in Twine.

The only code here is {back link}, which provides a link back to the previous passage labelled "Back."

For comparison, here is the corresponding passage from the other track of the activity with the text inputs: 

"service2" passage with text input code, in Twine. 

All that was needed for me to put in the text input boxes was to pop in a bracket ([), tell Twine I wanted a text box (text input for:), specify a variable ('serviceA'), and close with a bracket. I also opted to make them optional (required: false), so that students could move back and forth between pages as much as they wanted. Each of the text input boxes throughout the activity has a different variable attached to the information that the student puts in that box.

I also chose to relabel the "Back" links on these pages, to reassure players that this responses would be saved if they went back (label: 'Save and go back to excerpt').

The last critical piece of this activity is the final page, which returns all of the variables I set on the other pages and lets students know how to turn in their answers:

"Submission Instructions" passage with variables, in Twine. 

When I completed this activity (putting in some truly solid answers if I do say so myself), skipping some questions and answering others, this was what my final page looked like, with the answers I gave replacing the variables on the page above and the unanswered questions simply printing the name of that variable. 

Screenshot of final passage with example answers, in itch.io.

Finally, I published the game to an HTML file by going to the name of the game at the bottom left, clicking on it to bring up a menu, then clicking the last option:

Source Analysis I structure with menu open, in Twine. 

Limitations...

In the last post, I focused on goals and benefits of using this activity or something like it. Now I want to highlight a few limitations and things to consider if you want to use something like this for yourself. 

...of this activity

• You may notice that if you choose Passage I, the option in which you type nothing, or if you don't put text in a box, the final page shows the variable for the empty boxes instead of just being blank. There are ways in which to make this display differently, but I wanted to keep this example relatively simple. If you're curious, feel free to reach out. 
• I noticed that Print To PDF for the end page did not work well on itch.io, but it did all right when I tried a version of the game posted within an LMS. So, your mileage may vary on being able to capture the last page in a PDF versus other methods like screenshots or copying and pasting the text. 

...of Twine

• Twine remembers things in the browser. As the beginning screen of this activity notes, that means that someone who wants to do this activity needs to use the same browser all the time. They should not use incognito mode if they want to save their progress (and depending on the game, it may not work in incognito at all). This also means that anyone opening the same browser on that computer will open the activity to the same point and with the same information still saved in the input boxes, so remember this if you have anyone sharing devices. 
• Depending on how you host your Twine, it may not show up on mobile, or display awkwardly. (You used to be able to use philome.la and it was so easy--- but alas, it is no more. Here's hoping someone picks up this torch). To ameliorate this issue, there are a couple of things you can do; I'll offer what I think are the two easiest.
• You can upload Twine files to an LMS and play right within the LMS page-- different systems all handle this slightly differently. I tried with this game on an old Compass page and it seemed to work well in both the Blackboard Instructor app and in a mobile browser. 
• You can also upload your game/activity/interactive whatnot to itch.io. After you create an account, you can upload games and activities' HTML files (which is what Twine gives you when you publish your activity). This is where, as you may have noticed, this activity is hosted. Itch.io offers a lot of options-- you can fiddle with the size of the display (Source Analysis I is 650x900), check a box to enable mobile-friendliness, etc. Lots of Twine games are hosted there.
• Lastly, Twine can incorporate photos and audio, but the image and audio files themselves can't live within the game file, which can get a bit tricky. I would rate incorporating those things as a bit more advanced than you may want to experiment with on your first go-round, but it is doable. 

I want to experiment with Twine! 

Hooray! Just visit https://twinery.org/ to get started. You can use the tool in your browser, which will save your work to the browser, or you can use the downloaded version (I prefer this). 

Please note: Like player progress, Twine also saves your projects in progress themselves in your browser (whether you use the desktop version or not), meaning that deleting your history, cookies, etc can wipe away your games too. To avoid disaster, archive often: From the story list, click the "Archive" button on the right, then save the resulting file to a location you can find later. This will bring your entire library back if you lose it!

I want to make something like this or edit this to make my own thing!

Hooray! Feel free to use this framework in your classes,  and change it however works for you. (If you publicly post any versions, a linkback here would be nice, and I'd love to hear about your project!) All the text in the project can be found here (so if the screenshots above are difficult to read, you can find all the text they display here as well).

Please note: There are multiple story formats (that is, highly specific programming languages) for Twine, meaning that depending on which one your Twine is set to,  some commands or features are done differently. This activity uses the Chapbook story format, which is relatively new and easier to learn than older formats. If you'd like to use Chapbook, set that as your format by clicking the title of your game while you're editing it, then clicking "Change Story Format" and selecting Chapbook. If you want to learn more about what you can do in Chapbook, see the Chapbook Story Format Guide.

However, all story formats will let you use double brackets to let you link between passages; for example, [[Passage I]]. If that's all you want to do, you don't need to worry about story formats.

Questions? Ideas for using Twine in other ways? Let me know! 

Enough About Me: Using Interactive Fiction Tools for Source Analysis, Part I

 

Scrolling text gif courtesy of Screedbot.

I've recently been rediscovering my love of interactive fiction, a formative medium for me when I was growing up. 

A Brief Intro to Interactive Fiction

Interactive fiction (IF) includes several different classifications of thing, but usually the term refers to text-based (though not necessarily exclusively text) software games or stories which allow players to have some amount of control over how and/or when the story unfolds. There are two main styles of IF: choose your own adventure (CYOA) style, which offers a limited number of options that you can click on (similar to the old Choose Your Own Adventure books, which had you make decisions by flipping to a particular page), and parser IF, which allows you to type in the actions you want to take within the narrative. Some interactive fictions are more focused on telling a story,  while others are more focused on creating a game experience (solving puzzles, winning). 

Screenshot from CYOA style game Birdland, by Brendan Patrick Hennessy. Surprisingly, unrelated to my Fiction and the Historical Imagination course. 

Screenshot from parser IF game Counterfeit Monkey, by Emily Short.
Image: Media Archaeology Lab. 

Before recently, I had never really tried to make my own games, content to play others (almost entirely parser IF); however, more recently I've been working on a few personal projects in the CYOA style. In this post, I want to talk about a couple of ways to use a tool often used for creating CYOA-style interactive fiction in the classroom: Twine.  

Make Your Own Adventure

When I sat down to write this post, I thought that I'd talked before here about using Twine for history courses, but it turns out that I've only briefly mentioned the beginning of the Western unit. So, I'll preface this by saying that I've used Twine before in the classroom, assigning students to make their own takes on the Western genre which incorporated gamified or choice elements. Twine is a great tool for this sort of thing because it is very easy to learn enough to get started making a narrative. My Fiction and the Historical Imagination students used Twine for a "hackathon," spending the whole of a 50-minute class period putting together their games in small groups, and did a fantastic job embracing, challenging, and pushing the limits of the Western genre. 

So, Twine can pretty easily be used as a student assignment tool. However, there are also ways in which instructors can make something in Twine to assign to students. Here's one example that works well for history: source analysis, especially close readings of shorter texts. So, being curious about how this might look, I knocked out a potential example, which you can experiment with either in the embedded version below or directly on itch.io.

"Source Analysis I" (a creative title right up there with my childhood stuffed animals "Lamby" and "Mr. Bear") took me about an hour and a half, not counting all of the other distractions I got up to along the way like changing the wording around, taking screenshots for this post, and testing it on a variety of devices and browsers. The goal is for students to click on the parts of the text that are linked to questions related to that phrase or idea, and answer the corresponding questions. As you may notice, this version of the activity offers students the option to collect their answers in their own document and turn that in, or type their answers directly into text boxes under each question; the answers are then returned to them all together at the end in a single page that can be emailed, printed, or submitted to an LMS. One could also assign only one or the other format; I wanted to include both in this activity to illustrate that there are multiple options for doing this sort of activity (and you can offer all, some, or only one to your students directly), and that one takes almost no "coding" and the other only minimal coding.

How much coding, you ask? In part II, I'll walk through the process of creating the activity, and talk more about the limitations of this particular version and of Twine overall. For now, though, I'll leave you with some of the...

Benefits of this activity

One of the things that can often be difficult about reading for college courses is figuring out how, exactly, you are supposed to read something. In history courses, we often want students to skim the textbook and pay close attention to the details of a primary source, but it can be difficult to explain and emphasize this distinction in a way that feels natural.  I like that rendering a passage in Twine this way, with particular segments linked to related questions, makes the act of close reading feel more intentional, and the source as a whole a bit less daunting. Selecting a particular phrase and digging deeply into it becomes a more finite undertaking; it is no longer a long sheet of questions but rather a series of small tasks directly embedded into the text itself. 

This version is a bit handholdy, suitable for an introduction to this sort of close reading. One could climb a bit higher on Bloom's Taxonomy by asking one or more follow-up questions; I like the idea of asking a student what segment of the text they would highlight and questions they would add if they were going to edit the game themselves. 

I'll be back with part II soon, with a detailed walkthrough of how to make a similar activity. If there are any particular questions or features you'd like me to address, feel free to drop them in comments! 

Related links:

 

If you want to try playing interactive fiction yourself, the Interactive Fiction Database (IFDB) is a great place to start. (You might find this friendly beginner list or this other friendly beginner list useful.

 

The Interactive Fiction Archive might be of interest to digital humanists/technology historians.

Current Project: What You Need to Know Workshops

Hi all! This month, I've been busy putting together two of the workshops for CITL's What You Need to Know workshop series. In lieu of a regular post this month, I hope you'll check out this recap post I wrote about Session 3, What Can We Assess Online? You can also watch recordings of this and earlier sessions, view slides and prework from each session, or just read the posts for links, tools, and ideas. I also hope you'll think about joining us for a future session-- upcoming topics include how to conduct online assessments, activities and engagement online, syllabus design, and my own workshop on Active Learning at Social Distance in Session 7.

(P.S. The image above comes from this handy virtual presentation on Online Assessment Strategies and Options.)

Flashback Roundup: The Birthday of Bourne

There's been a lot of talk about the Spanish Flu recently for obvious reasons. While many people have varying associations with that particular epidemic, it always makes me think of radical antiwar bohemian and disabled writer Randolph Bourne, who died of it at age 32 in 1918. In honor of Randolph Bourne's birthday (May 30), I'm revisiting two posts on Bourne's lesser-discussed life and work. In addition to the sources linked below, you can read some of his writings at the Internet Archive, or listen to some of his essays at LibriVox. 

Randolph Bourne, Student Radical (originally published November 6, 2017)

I love it when my research allows me to indulge some personal curiosity I have about something. This was the case on my trip to Northampton, where I peeked in at the Helen Gurley Brown papers. Primarily, I sought information on Brown's sister Mary, a polio survivor, but also enjoyed peeking at the papers I had so longed to look at three years before, when I was finishing up my master's thesis on Brown's revitalized version of Cosmopolitan.

Visiting the Randolph Bourne papers at Columbia provided a different sort of satisfaction: getting a closer look at a character from the first Reacting to the Past game I ever encountered, Greenwich Village, 1913 (habitually shortened to GV). I looked at Bourne's papers in the hopes of finding some personal reflections on or similar to his work in "The Handicapped-- By One of Them" to use in my dissertation research about children with disabilities in the early twentieth century. However, in addition to learning a bit more about this piece and its reception (which I'll discuss more in a future post), I also found resources from Bourne's college days which shed light on some of the conflicts within the Greenwich Village game and the historical moment with which it engages. 

In GV, two factions, suffrage and labor, vie for the affections of the bohemians living in the neighborhood. The bohemians can be an unruly bunch-- loftily principled, if you think kindly on them; unrealistically flighty, if you're less charitable. One of the most focused bohemian roles is Randolph Bourne. The game describes him primarily as a young intellectual with firm beliefs in the vital power of youth to bring about social and political change. His piece "Youth" informs his speeches and writings within the game and those of other characters who wish to emphasize the value of vitality, novelty, and energy. Those who play him often pick up his voice fairly well in this respect, continually advocating for youthful energy and voices to play strong roles in the plans of the suffrage and labor factions.

One of the great additions I came across in Bourne's papers for future GV sessions was a series of replies to an editorial Bourne wrote for Columbia's Spectator while a student at the university. In the editorial, Bourne criticized university administrators for their exploitation of the women and children who labored at cleaning, book-delivery, and other "drudgery and primitive methods" he thought inappropriate for a university setting. Though I have not been able to find the full text of his editorial, it is referenced in this New York Times blurb from Feburary 26, 1913: 

Bourne's piece itself is a fantastic argument for his alliance with labor, as it showcases his interest in equitable working conditions and willingness to challenge systems of institutional authority. It could also be used to persuade him toward suffrage, as he seems particularly appalled by the degradation of women and children promoted by the university's practices and claims he and other students "blush with shame when they pass a poor, gaunt scrubwoman on her knees…or have a book delivered to them by an undersized, starving child."

The replies offer the opportunity to bring the discussion to another level. Most of them are strongly negative, taking Bourne to task for his exaggeration of the laborer's working conditions and his distrust of the university administration to know what is best. The writers of these replies found Bourne's ideology extreme and distasteful. Much of the Greenwich Village game is tightly wrapped in the insular community of Greenwich Village. In the Village, social cachet comes with doing something--anything-- that is daring, new, intellectual, fun-loving, or expressive. Radical ideas are the order of the day and for the most part all are trying to out-radical one another. There are some insertions of more conservative perspectives in the course of the game, particularly in opposition to woman suffrage which comes from outside the Village. These letters offer an intriguing look at everyday "college men's" opposition to ideas about labor rights in a context which affects him daily.  

Although people given the role of Bourne in GV are informed of Bourne's disability, it rarely comes up in game sessions or papers. I'm still struggling to come up with ways to promote discussion of this attribute of Bourne's life within the Greenwich Village game. I'll discuss Bourne's contributions to disability history, theory, and identity in another post. 

Related Links: 

Bourne is frequently lauded for his commentary on World War I, including his famous assertion that "War is the Health of the State."

The memory of Bourne's opposition to war has inspired continuing antiwar organizations, including the Randolph Bourne Institute.

John Dos Passos' piece about Bourne, written about a decade after his death, is often quoted (including in disability activist magazine The Ragged Edge's version of  "The Handicapped" linked above).

The Embodiment of Bourne (originally published July 18, 2018)

Randolph Bourne at typewriter.

I brought two books on my trip to Princeton to work as a teaching assistant for the Center for Talented Youth. One of these was the script for Body of Bourne, a play that deals with the life of Randolph Bourne, an antiwar thinker and bohemian. One morning I found myself sitting at breakfast in a dining hall on Princeton's campus, reading the scene in which Bourne has been accepted to Princeton but is unable to go, lacking the financial support his uncle offered only to Bourne's abled sister. Bourne never made it to Princeton; instead, he worked six years in an low-paying job and eventually raised enough money to attend Columbia University.

As you might remember, Bourne is one of the bohemian roles in the Greenwich Village, 1913 Reacting to the Past game. His role in the game is to promote bohemian ideals, particularly those of multiculturalism and the influence of youth on social change. But how did he come to care about these things? I've previously written about his college days at Columbia and the commitment to women's rights and labor issues espoused by his editorial in the Spectator. In this post, I want to explore another of his pieces, one critical to understanding the formation of his ideals and the experience of embodiment in the early 20th century US: "The Handicapped-- By One of Them."

Initially much of the scholarly work on Bourne suffered from a misleading mind/body dualism. Bourne has long been regarded for his mind, and his ideas continue to hold weight among liberal and radical thinkers-- he was even the subject of an article on current politics in the New Yorker in August 2017. His antiwar stance and embrace of multiculturalism as a boon to American life have made his ideas feel fresh to multiple generations. His body, however, has often been portrayed as either a mere footnote to conversations about his intellect or a tragic obstacle he overcame-- in other words, he is a notable thinker in spite of disability. The back cover of Bruce Clayton's Forgotten Prophet: The Life of Randolph Bourne, for example, suggests surprise that the "disfigured and hunchbacked" Bourne "reacted to his disability not with bitterness or self-pity, but rather with exuberant love for beauty and a compassion for humanity"-- in other words, it is a pleasant surprise that Bourne was able to resist bitterness and develop a compassionate view of the world. 

This viewpoint on Bourne is all too common; the great disability scholar Paul Longmore criticized these trends in scholars' work on Bourne in his review of Forgotten Prophet by saying "The problem with it, as with all Bourne biographies, is its fundamental misunderstanding of his experience and identity as a disabled man in a society that intensively stigmatized him." Longmore was so interested in this side of Bourne that he took up the topic twenty years later in an article with Paul Steven Miller, arguing that Bourne's experience of disability (or "philosophy of handicap," a phrase Bourne used to title "The Handicapped" when it was reprinted) was the foundation of his radicalism. (In many ways, Body of Bourne and the Longmore/Miller article are companion pieces, making harmonizing arguments through contrasting means about the role of body in Bourne's political thought.)

Bourne saw handicap as a critical part of his experience and his ideology. The category of handicap, as Longmore and Miller explain, is less about bodily function or impairment and more about social expectation. Bourne's "The Handicapped" opens by claiming that in many ways, it is easier to be "helpless" and happy with any little diversion you can get than it is to "move about freely," but with a "crooked back and unsightly face" and have to strive and work for opportunities frequently denied you. Employment, friendship, and day-to-day tasks are all hampered, as he goes on to describe, not by physical impairments but by the low expectations of others. Most successes must not only be clawed for through perseverance (akin to the can-do attitude promoted by rehabilitationists of the era) but also at some point permitted through the explicit cooperation of an abled person.

As this need for cooperation might suggest, the difficulties Bourne related were socially informed-- they did not hinge on the body's function but on others' perception and treatment of that body. Bourne could have stopped his essay and his ideology there-- i.e, "my experience has taught me that peoples' perceptions of my body affect me negatively"-- but instead, he explained that this had contributed to a broader understanding of the ways in which people's status and success were influenced by social factors outside their control.

It makes me wince to hear a man spoken of as a failure, or to have it said of one that he "doesn't amount to much." Instantly I want to know why he has not succeeded, and what have been the forces that have been working against him.

Bourne extended the idea that people had underestimated him to a consideration of the roles of others within his society-- i.e., "if I am being underestimated and blocked from success, others must be suffering the same treatment." He prized this aspect of himself, noting that the knowledge was worth anything he'd endured to gain it: "If it is solely to my physical misfortunes that I owe its existence, the price has not been a heavy one to pay." 

At first, "The Handicapped" was printed anonymously (hence "By One of Them"), which Ned Stuckey French posits may have been due to embarrassment of his disability; I suspect concerns about having his other published thoughts disregarded, and thus his livelihood and reputation affected, was the key motivator. The worry of being flippantly disregarded is key to this piece; he even cites it as one of the worst things he experiences socially: "What one does get sensitive to is rather the inevitable way that people, acquaintances and strangers alike, have of discounting in advance what one does or says." Publishing this piece represented risk for Bourne, who likely did not wish to jeopardize the success of his other political writing.

Reactions to Bourne's "The Handicapped-- By One of Them" suggest that themes Bourne raised resonated with disabled readers of the Atlantic Monthly. Some readers wrote to thank him for his words. Bourne's correspondence, held by his alma mater, Columbia University, include two letters from different women who signed their communications "Another of Them," in reference to the title of his piece. Both thank Bourne for his writing, saying that it had encouraged them. They offer brief details of their own about their lives in support of his points: one notes that she is writing both for herself, an "old woman who is learning to bless her handicaps for the insight they are bringing into the possibilities of life," and for her brother, still struggling in the "darkness, the weight of his handicaps heavy upon him." His greatest problem? The "lack of intimate friends," which Bourne highlighted in his piece; which several sources suggest was critical to both the greatest joys and sorrows of his life; and which frequently, especially at a time when socializing was much more circumscribed by place and social circles, necessitated the need of cooperation by abled friends and family.


Related Links:
An early review of Body of Bourne in Variety. It's a great intro to the man and his life, so read or see it if you can: I got the script through Interlibrary Loan, and there's an upcoming production at Oberlin College next year. You can also see an interesting image of the original performance at Getty Images.
Bourne's "The Handicapped" appears in a variety of places across the internet, including the Disability History Museum, the disability rights publication Ragged Edge Online, and The Anarchist Library. The second form of the piece can be found in Youth and Life.
Randolph Bourne at the Disability Social History Project. 
More of Bourne's writing available at fairuse.org. 
Weird connections: the New Yorker article mentioned above was written by Jeremy McCarter, author of two books: Young Radicals, about many of the Greenwich Village bohemians including Bourne, Jack Reed, and Max Eastman; and Hamilton: The Revolution.

Archival Citations:
Another of Them to Randolph Bourne, September 1911; Randolph Bourne Papers; Box 1; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library. 
Another of Them to Randolph Bourne, September 14, 1911; Randolph Bourne Papers; Box 1; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library.  

Current Project: April is the CITL-est Month

A computer keyboard. By Sergi Cabrera via Unsplash. 

This month has been a cavalcade of new experiences; with the challenges of new remote pedagogies have come new opportunities to engage with pedagogy. My work for the Center for Innovation in Teaching & Learning on the UIUC has been particularly eventful and eclectic, and so I thought it might be useful to readers to talk a bit about what doing this work has looked like for me-- particularly if you're interested in doing this kind of work yourself! This isn't everything I've done-- there's some behind-the-scenes research elements as well-- but it does give a few of the highlights. 

I began the month observing virtual lessons on Zoom. I regularly visited the classrooms of graduate instructors before the pandemic, sitting through a lesson and debriefing with them afterward on their teaching goals and approaches. These observations and participants' written reflections on them are a critical part of their applications for several different CITL teaching certificates. With the deadline for this year's crop of applications fast approaching, many applicants still needed an observation on the books, and opted to have real or mock sections observed via Zoom. It was great to see these teachers adapt, using the technologies available in ways that gave me great examples of how to make active learning and community building in a class more possible in these odd times. Mid-month, observations dried up as the deadline for certificate application approached. I then had the surprisingly enjoyable task of reviewing some of these applications, ensuring all requirements had been completed and commenting on the essays and teaching statements that graduate instructors had submitted as part of their applications. 

I also led the last IFLEX TA Gathering for the year, a meeting designed for graduate students interested in active learning and active learning classrooms to have a place to share ideas, build connections, and learn about helpful resources. April's meeting was our first virtual event, and although there were no snacks like we usually have, we still managed to tackle the shift to remote teaching and add a few more slides to our IFLEX TA resource deck. We have been gathering the ideas and resources discussed each month so that they can be available to those who are unable to attend every meeting as well as revisitable by those who were there. 

Finally, I had the pleasure of contributing a mini-book review (with great and helpful edits by Ava Wolf) to the CITL newsletter, on Teaching for Learning: 101 Intentionally Designed Educational Activities to Put Students on the Path to Success. (Incidentally, if you're part of the UIUC community and have any interest in doing a similar sort of review for a book or article on pedagogy, drop me a line and I'll get you in touch). 

I would be remiss not to note the more challenging parts of the month, but doing this work has made the chaos of it all seem a bit more bearable.

How is your digital research, teaching, working, and socializing going? Let me know if you'd like! 

NB: I hope you are all doing well in this stressful time. If any of you self-quarantining find yourself with more time at home than usual on your hands, want to share any of your struggles and triumphs of pivoting to remote education, or have questions or topics you'd like me to address, I'd love to feature your guest posts and/or answer your questions.