Keynote Speech

Teaching and Learning with Student-Generated, Online, Creative and Public New Media

Presented by Jeff McClurken

The notion of New Media is no longer that new, yet it’s a term that we’ve still only begun to apply to teaching in higher education in a systematic and meaningful way.  This talk will explore ways that teaching and learning with blogs, wikis, and an array of other New Media tools can change undergraduate learning by cultivating 21st-Century literacies (information, digital, and visual) through a focus on students as creators in intentionally public, online spaces.

Jeffrey W. McClurken is Associate Professor and Chair of History and American Studies at the University of Mary Washington. His research areas include the history of veterans, families, gender, the Pinkertons, mental institutions, the 19th-Century American South, and the digital humanities. [These are fields that overlap more than you might think.] He teaches classes on a wide array of US History topics, including American technology and culture, digital history, women’s history, history & film, and TED.com. His book, Take Care of the Living: Reconstructing the Confederate Veteran Family in Virginia, was released by UVA Press in 2009. His interest in the digital humanities began while programming his Commodore 64 using a cassette tape drive in the 1980s, but really took off when he entered census data and hand coded HTML for the Valley of the Shadow project in the mid-1990s. He has been involved in digital pedagogy since making his students hand code HTML in the early years of the 2000s. He blogs at Techist, tweets from @jmcclurken, and is a contributing author for the ProfHacker group blog at the Chronicle of Higher Education. Links to his classes and presentations can be found at http://mcclurken.org/.