This summer John Dolan, Director of Digital Media and Pedagogy, and I are heading up a summer digital research project in the College of the Liberal Arts.
For a description of the project, check out John’s post on our Digital Research in the Liberal Arts blog about the iPad Summer Research Project.
The iPad project is part of a larger initiative designed to put technologies in the hands of faculty to empower them to do scholarly research. What excites me most about this project specifically and the Digital Research Initiative more generally, is that it is driven by the idea that if we put technologies in the hands of faculty to pursue scholarly research, they will not only produce excellent new scholarship, but also they will learn the affordances and limitations of the technologies as they think about how to integrate them into their teaching.
By inviting faculty to use the technology for research they are already doing and asking them to reflect a bit in writing on a public blog, we hope to cultivate a community of digitally literate scholars who are doing excellent academic work. The measure of success from my perspective as a scholar and an Associate Dean will not be the number of posts we write or the various aspects of the technologies we uncover, but the quality of the research we do, the articles and book chapters written, submitted and published, the manuscript and dissertation reviews we write, and the conference papers we submit.
With that in mind, I have posted a short reflection on using the iPad to review a manuscript without requiring a single piece of paper.
I hope you all will follow the Digital Research in the Liberal Arts blog and contribute when you are so moved.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-it-phenomenology/
http://www.garyhall.info/about/