Office of Digital Learning and Inquiry

Love it or hate it, we all have to use Zoom right now. Why not learn how to make it better?

DLINQ invites you to the Zoom Against the Machine cryptoparty. Participants can choose to attend two of four 20-minute sessions related to the following topics:

Acquire Skills: Still not sure how Zoom works? Attend a basic skills workshop to learn about all of the platform’s functionalities.
Build Fluency: Learn about Zoombombing and how to prevent it.
Create Community: Discuss how to set group norms, ice breakers, and strategies to improve the zoom experience for everybody.

Join us for the launch of the Middlebury Teaching & Learning Knowledge Base, an online repository of teaching ideas contributed by Middlebury faculty, for Middlebury faculty. With the Knowledge Base, faculty can: share a teaching activity, strategy, or approach that works in your classes; find teaching ideas submitted by colleagues; and grow existing teaching ideas by adding your own experiences and resources.

Click here to register for this event.

Please join us to explore the uses of virtual and augmented reality at Middlebury. At the Expo you will be able to interact with simulations, including blends of physical and digital technology, observe a motion-capture performance, and talk with others about their experiences. Some of the projects included will be the Sea Level Rise Explorer, the Sandbox, and Representations of the Apocalypse. The Expo will conclude with a discussion about the possibilities of XR technologies for Middlebury. All interest levels are welcome.

Location: online (Zoom)

At this point in the semester you are getting to know the interpersonal dynamics of your class, and the students’ reactions to course content and assignments. It’s also a point when challenges are sometimes surfaced and students are settled enough in the class to give you some feedback on their experiences thus far. In this session we’ll address ways to collect feedback and make adjustments to course sites, digital projects and general pedagogical process and methods based on that feedback.

Visit the event URL to register.

In this interactive session for faculty offered by DLINQ, we will examine different methods for utilizing Canvas in ways that amplify the student experience and support student-centered learning. We will explore ways of minimizing the cognitive load that students face through thoughtful Canvas course site design, and learn about Canvas tools and teaching techniques that incorporate student voice. Join us to see how thoughtful course design can aid your pedagogical goals

Want to help improve our digital information environments? Want to help combat misinformation on the web?

Join the Newspapers-on-Wikipedia Edit-a-thon on October 26, 3pm – 7pm in the Wilson Media Lab.

We will be researching and writing Wikipedia articles about historic (older than 30 years) local (VT) newspapers. By adding Wikipedia pages about these newspapers, we will be helping people to find reliable information about the news sources they see on the web. This work is part of Middlebury’s Information Environmentalism initiative.

In this conversation, we’ll come together to explore radical listening as a mindfulness strategy for increasing inclusion and reducing bias in digital spaces. Radical listening is about listening to yourself (mindfulness), and listening to each other, with the intention of building understanding and moving toward empathy. We’ll ask the question, is radical listening in digital spaces possible, in the context of current public discourse? How might we benefit from taking a radical listening approach to our engagement with our online interactions?

Design is everywhere - and how an object comes to be shapes and constrains the possibilities for its use. We invite students, faculty, and staff to critically engage with the design history of everyday objects from the perspective of inclusive design. Interact with a series of analog and digital objects, read or listen to information about the object’s design history, reflect and offer your thoughts on a set of critical questions.

Every day we encounter mis/disinformation on social media, news sites, and other digital information spaces. Misinformation on the web is polarizing us, it’s radicalizing us, and we should be paying attention. In this faculty workshop, you will learn Four Moves and a Habit—a set of strategies to help you detect and debunk misinformation on the web. These strategies will help you to become a more deft web citizen and can be tied into classroom-based activities you can use to teach students how to be better citizens on the web.

Patrick Wallace (Digital Projects & Archives Librarian) will introduce a selection of current techniques used to harvest web and social media content for preservation and research. Rather than a user tutorial or deep dive into technical arcana, the discussion will draw on examples from Special Collections’ digital projects to illustrate how popular websites and mobile applications—such as Twitter and Facebook—confound historical memory through legal and technical means.