Curating Your Digital Vita

Socrates, Alcibiades and Agathon

Originally uploaded by cplong11

WACO, Texas — During my visit to Baylor this week, I guest taught Anne Schultz’s class on Plato’s Symposium and joined the Academy for Teaching and Learning to speak about how I use digital media in my teaching, research and administrative work.

The title of my talk is Curating Your Vita: Cultivating Communities of Teaching, Research and Administration in a Digital Age.

The presentation is divided into three parts: Teaching, Research and Service. It takes each activity in turn as an opportunity to cultivate community around one’s scholarly interests. I tried to rely on concrete examples of what has worked, and failed to work, for me as I put social media into practice in ways that, I hope, invite dialogue and discussion.

Teaching
My Philosophy 200 course, Ancient Greek Philosophy, was the focus of the section on teaching. Here are resources related to how I used a co-authored course blog to create a community of education in that course:

Here is a Prezi that outlines the structure of and pedagogical theory behind the course.
The blogging rubric I discussed is available at http://tinyurl.com/LongRubric.

Research
I talked about the way I use the Digital Dialogue to invite scholars and colleagues to talk about their work and to develop my own work on Socratic politics.

The Digital Dialogue Project.
Anne Schultz on episode 32 of the Digital Dialogue.
My discussion of how I use Mendeley, Zotero, the iPhone and iPad to do digital research.
Teaching Philosophy article on Cultivating Communities of Learning with Digital Media.
Article on Plato’s Protagoras.

Administration
I talked about how we use blogging, podcasting and video in the Liberal Arts Undergraduate Studies office in the College of the Liberal Arts to empower students to give voice to their undergraduate experience in the liberal arts.

The Dialogue on Drinking blog.
The Liberal Arts Voices, a bi-weekly podcast on which we invite students to talk about their UG experiences.

In putting the presentation together, I was struck by something that had not occurred to me in concrete terms about how and why I share my activities on the internet. Although this sharing, which for some, I know, is over sharing, began as a natural desire to reach out to others about my work and invite them to share theirs, I realize that one of the most powerful things about sharing on the internet is the unanticipated possibilities that open when people put words to their experiences in public. In the presentation, I put it this way:

Sharing opens the possibility of serendipity.

Here are some videos that show some of the serendipitous possibilities that opened as I shared my teaching, research and administrative activities: