Finding the professional or academic conversations can be hard enough, but once you are keyed in, how do keep track of them and stay engaged?  On Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+, lots of people are talking, but how to do you listen?  I can show you what’s worked for me, but I would also like to know what works for you. Come ready to play around and share.

Prerequisites:  Helpful to have some accounts already set up on some of the following – Facebook and/or Twitter, Hootesuite or Tweetdeck or Bufferapp.com.  If you played with IFTTT.com then bring that account information with you too!

Difficulty level of session:  Introductory, but also dependent on the experience of folks who come to play.

I gave up keeping up with ALL the new apps and digital tools long ago. Still, there are some that I know I could not manage without. Do you have any like that? Feel like sharing?

How about a little “show and tell” session to share our favorite working tools? They don’t need to be the latest, greatest thing, just something you actually use everyday for keeping yourself on task, foster creativity, managing projects, teaching, learning, or research.

The rise of social media has allowed scholars and students to connect and discuss texts, events, and issues in ways that were previously unimaginable. Synchronous and asynchronous discussions can spark at any moment and connect learners across time zones and disciplines. But each new tool comes with its own set of challenges.

Rates of popular participation in discussions of society, culture, media, and social justice online are astounding, but many of the tools used to foster those discussions seem to encourage sound bite replication instead of dialogue. Those with unpopular views are sometimes silenced through network attacks or even violent threats, and users are likely to only follow and participate in groups of those with whom they already agree. How do we foster meaningful dialogues and promote critical thinking skills for students in the middle of a tl;dr culture?

So my 15-year-old son and his friends attended a science camp this past summer. Their running joke was that they’d decided they could get away with nearly anything if they cried “For Science!” as they did the deed. I’m going to try it with one of my guilty pleasures–the digital knit and crochet community Ravelry.

Proposing a Ravelry session–for THATCamp!

I love this site. I refer to it every time that I think about beginning another knitting project. I look for patterns, yarn suggestions, and photos of other knitter’s projects. The site’s founders have done a brilliant job of identifying the different points during a project where one might want to consult a community of users. How might this site be used as a model for digital humanities projects or digital humanities support? What does the success of this site suggest about how we might construct digital support structures for our own communities? What other websites out there might we use as models for our work? Share your guilty pleasure, and let’s see if we can find some models for our DH work.

And, heck, bring your knitting or crochet projects along. You know you want to.