Digital East St. Louis Project

-Dr. Jess DeSpain

East St. Louis

-Population decreased 82,3666 in 1950 to 27,066 in 2010.

-Source of Project Funding: National Science Foundation ITEST

Purpose of Digital East St. Louis Project is to attract East St. Louis natives, who largely constitute under-represented groups, into STEM

Project Overview:

-Develop + test an urban place-based learning model

-Cohort of grade 6-9 participants progress through 4-week summer camps and Saturday sessions during the school year over a three-year period

-5-6 Instructors help develop + deliver content in the hopes they will take what they learn into their classrooms

Urban Place-based Education

Participants ask questions, solve real-world problems, and use field work to gather information in a local urban setting

Impacting Local Communities

1. Pairing “IRL” experiences with digital methods
2. Begin projects with a goal of listening + learning from participant experiences
3. Gauging participant technology use + needs
4. Forms of reciprocity when facing a lack of basic human needs

Middle School: age where STEM based interests often fade away, also age where web-building commonly involves playing around with text in ways that might hurt the eyes of an adult, but for the student, it is the coolest thing ever. They play with WordPress sites before working on main project.

If could start it over, prefer to work with smaller cohorts (15 at a time beginning in the summer)

Project should last 4 Years- ideally each student will be transferred into upward bound (upward bound=college readiness program for high schoolers), 3^rd year = more options, e.g. graphic novels/game design, Intrinsic based: extrinsic learning does not equal long term learning.

Biggest tension: how much control over website is given to students vs. providing a usable database

Best way to encourage extrinsic motivation: choice + presence of friends

Problems with Project: because basic human needs are not always met in East St. Louis, it has been hard to get people involved

Better luck getting people to show up by texting students instead of parents

Lead by Dr. Jessica DeSpain, The Wide Wide World Project, featuring students Ben Ostermeier, Elizabeth Korinke, and Gabby Borders

The Wide, Wide World Digital Edition is a long-running project devoted to cataloging the 174 editions of a nineteenth century bestselling novel: The Wide, Wide World. Students will discuss their involvement with the project, what they have learned and gained, and what goals they have.

This session must be scheduled on Sunday.

The Interdisciplinary Research and Informatics Scholarship (IRIS) Center (siueiris.com/) is a facility designed to support individual and collaborative scholarship at faculty and student levels that applies digital content as a primary methodology. IRIS facilitates cross-disciplinary and collaborative projects that involve applications, enhancements, or re-conceptualizations of technology in the humanities and social sciences.

The IRIS Center is home to a number of exciting faculty-student research projects, and IRIS-affiliated faculty have even launched a brand new interdisciplinary minor in digital humanities and social sciences.

The co-directors of the IRIS Center (Jessica DeSpain and Kristine Hildebrandt) would like to offer a tour of the Center, including some illustrations of current and past projects, conversations with IRIS faculty and student researchers, and a discussion of the minor.

We are planning two tours: one on Saturday June 11 @ 1.45pm and one on Sunday June 12 @ 10.10am. We will meet in the MUC Hickory-Hackberry Room and walk together to Peck Hall, where the IRIS Center is housed.

Bring your laptops! I’ll walk you through the basic steps to setting up an Omeka site for digital archiving, anthologizing, and exhibiting, and we’ll discuss possible pedagogical uses and best practices.

Handouts:

exhibitassignment

Using Omeka

Slides available on SlideShare: