For the first time, a THATCamp was held at the AHA attracting a big group of interested DHers who had not yet been able to make it to this popular unconference. During the introduction, Dan Cohen asked for a show of hands of those who had never been to a THATCamp before and a full 70% of the crowd raised their hands. It was nice seeing so many people interested in matters at the intersection of technology and history.

After a session on crowdsourcing,  we discussed the problem of how to rescue old sites from oblivion (in which the concept of the Internet Paramedics was coined), followed by a very fruitful session in which Jeff McClurken shared with us his experience teaching both digital history courses and digitally-inflected courses. Check out his amazing link of resources.

Listening to Jeff and reading his syllabi and the amazing work his students produce makes me itchy to try some of that in my own classes. Monday I begin a course on medieval Spain that will be digitally-inflected. Students will be required use extensively the wiki platform in which I designed the course website. One of the assignments is an essay based on the Poem of the Cid but instead of simply writing a paper and handing it in to me, I want them to create a page on a wiki project on El Cid. We may end up with about 50 pages on various aspects of El Cid, which we will then organize in a thematic table of contents. The second stage of this project will be to write a critique of a recent book on El Cid using resources from the El Cid wiki.

Another way the students will use the wiki is by writing notes on the lectures. Each week a team of students will be required to write a short summary of the main points of the lecture, highlighting three passages from the readings and explaining how it connects to the lecture as well as listing a few key terms and giving definitions. The rest of the class is expected to post comments on the readings to the page.  Can’t wait to see what they come up with!