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

Omeka

-Dr. Jessica DeSpain [note:  the more ridiculous parts of this post are of my own invention to help others, as well as myself, relate some of the more tech-heavy parts of Omeka into an easy to understand context]

“Omeka” (pronounced oh-MEH-ka): Swahili word meaning to “display or lay out wares”

-Created at George Mason University

Is Omeka the right choice?

-Have set of things to display on wed

-Best when you have complete info about each object

-Not great for a simple website (consider WordPress instead)

-Not great is want control over how things look

-Not great is you want sophisticated dynamic queries of database

-Not great if you want to create complex paths through collection (Consider Scalar instead)

Which version?

yoursite.omeka.net

-free on Omeka.net servers

-fewer functionalities than full installaion/Omeka.net susbscription

-Example of Omeka hosted page: eaststlouisculture.org/omeka/

This page costs $20 a month for Omeka to host.

Omeka Vocab:

Item:   things added to site (like images, scanned pages)

Item Type: type of thing added to site (videos, photo, etc.)

Collection: grouping of items on site (e.g. digital book)

Exhibit: items displayed together on site

Metadata: specific groupings amongst items on the site (think Subject)

e.g. Wide, Wide World, Geography, or History of Tacos

Tags: generic pieces of information (more general searchable terms)

e.g. cats, tears, or Chuck Norris

Theme: look of site

Plugin: programs that can be added to a site

Simple Pages: type of plug-in to easily create web pages, basic, not detailed

Geoserver: server for multiple layers of maps, needed to run Neatline (Neatline not necessarily recommended for mapping, but no other option for Omeka without embedding new code into Omeka)

Building Omeka Pages

• Create a Plan: Organizing content- determine how site will be structured, requires you know beforehand what sections + subpages of exhibit will be. E.g. a flowchart can help you understand hierarchy of items, collections, +exhibit pages in Omeka Tricky Aspect of Item Description- are you describing item or photo?
• Prepare Items for the Web: important concepts for optimizing image for web use- file size, image size, + image resolution always do a “save as” when working with images + keep a folder for originals and one for edits
• Add Core Fields: Dublin Core + Controlled Vocab, subject=topic of resource, description= account of resource, relation=establishes one item’s relation to another item, format= file format/physical medium/dimensions of resource, language= language of resource
• Build an Exhibit: install exhibit builder plug-in, enter exhibit metadata: title, slug, description, credits, + themes.

            Ex: widewideworlddigitaledition.siue.edu

Warning: adding items monotonous business, important to keep intellectual goals in mind.

Importance of Controlled Vocab: to help unify searches and keep relationships amongst items easy to locate, agree ahead to use specific terms so that items that should be related to one another pop up within same search. Ex: if one image shows George Washington on a unicorn and another image shows George Washington punching a T-Rex on a nose, but the unicorn picture is tagged only as General Washington and the T-Rex picture is tagged only as President Washington, the two will not appear within the same search.

Possible use for Omeka: Student run blog/magazine?

Places to host: Bluehost (good IT) + Amazon Web Services (free terabyte of storage)