Very much looking forward to this discussion.

For example, as an undergrad English major, I had a vague idea of how the web worked, but when I made it to grad school, I found myself with an account on a web server and I played around enough that I gained enough skill to freelance web design for a bit. Now I’m in a tenure track position in an English department where my assigned area is “New Media.” My point is that all of the New Media-centered skill and knowledge I have now I gained through trial and error, cut-and-paste, and a few good O’Reilly books.

Now, when I teach a new media focused class (say, on Electronic Literature), I offer instruction in programming, HTML, etc. as needed for the projects I want them to work on. This is an interesting process for me because I never had any formal training of my own. I don’t have a prior model to base my own pedagogy on.

What I’m thinking is that my own learning process was definitely problem-based. That is, I learned what I needed to to solve problems I had — like how do you develop a uniform templating and publishing platform for an online journal on a server that doesn’t let you use PHP? (Answer: Use conditional statements in SSI to build a hierarchical nest of callbacks).

So anyway, the question I’m interested in pursuing with regard to this broader, self-teaching topic is the what, why, and how of bringing that knowledge to my classes?

The “what” of this question is part of what Amanda is getting at, and the “how” is addressed pretty neatly I think in this line from ewg118: “I think it’s best to stay away from actual technical training because then you are limiting your students to learning only what you are teaching.” Maybe this is an accepted truism for most of the folks here, but for me, this is a really nicely-stated teaching philosophy that resonates with what I’ve been learning as a new teacher.

Anyway, sorry for the long rambling comment. I look forward to rambling in person this weekend!

Some concrete ideas I’m having are:

As Erin suggested, perhaps we could use this session to come up with some sort of “wish list” of skills/training that would be useful for people in our position.

I’d also like it if we could all be thinking of some of the specific techniques/resources/hacks that have proved especially useful. In other words, I’d much rather have someone share a really useful hack than simply talk about how learning php is really quite helpful. Does that make sense?

On top of that, general discussions on this new and exciting position, our relationships with our institutions, salaries, etc. should definitely take place.

How does that sound? Any ideas are more than welcome.

For a long time I really felt left behind because I am never, ever able to stay on the bleeding edge of the digital humanities (and sometimes I still feel like that, which leads to what could be another interesting thing to discuss: how do we amateur practitioners keep up in the developments of the field?).

But I think it’s really okay that not everybody can be in the same place: each of us has a unique combination of knowledge and day-to-day practice that gives us our own view on this “thing” that is/are digital humanities. THATCamp is one opportunity among many for us to share our views, which enriches the whole field.

www.bls.gov/oco/oco1002.htm#comp

This kind of information could be useful as a reference point against which a list of skills for a digital history or history webmaster could be compared.

I think you will find that web design and graphic design, which might so far be the fields most closely associated with the digital humanities, are among the lowest paid positions in computer and Internet industries.

Another point that I would bring up is how digital humanities positions often have lower salaries than their equivalent ‘straight’ IT jobs, even when they have very similar duties and backgrounds required. I’d love to see more parity with IT salary bands.

I’d be interested in this session both as the default Web 2.0 person in my current job and as a former humanities grad student who often acted as an informal tech support hotline for my friends.

Sounds like there are a lot of us out there who have become de facto “tech gurus” at our places of employment, despite a lack of any formal training. I had some minimal training in web publishing during grad school (really just basic HTML/CSS), but 90+% of what Ive done has been accomplished through trial and error, web searches, forums, copy-pasting, tweaking, and most importantly, brainstorming and troubleshooting sessions with other “amateurs” (such as yourself). This seems to have worked well for both of us, and is probably a pretty common approach for others getting started in the field.

It might be interesting to try to construct an information seeking/needs profile for those individuals and see if that leads anywhere.

(for non-librarians, a lazy and insufficient intro: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_seeking and en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_needs).