Tuesday, April 9, 2013

Weaver

I've been thinking about the DCA conference, and the incredible closing keynote by Geoff Rockwell.  Classics is a "fundamentally interdisciplinary" subject.  Justin touched on this yesterday in his post.  

Part of the inspiration behind Operation Lapis and the work that I'm involved in was the idea that Classics is not the separate subjects of Language, History, Culture, and Texts and Artifacts, but a truly combined mix of the four.  To study the Classics, you can't just focus on one piece of the Classics puzzle!  And Classics continues into Science, Art, History, Music, etc....

Classics is connected.  Why is it always taught as a disconnected jumble of random pieces?  To understand Cicero, you need to understand what was happening at the time!  

Good teachers are weavers. Those who work in Digital Humanities are weavers.  Weavers pull disconnected threads together to make something connected and beautiful (or deliberately not!).  We work to bring life to the disconnected should-be connections and we build incredible projects to make this happen. 

And we must go from being weavers, to teaching weaving.  If we model how to make connections between subjects and people and places, students will begin to follow it.  Ask questions, find opinions, find "answers."  

How can we become weavers?  And how can we go from weaving for students to teaching them to weave?

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